organize iTunes

Have reached the half-way mark with all tracks completely organized and meta-tagged correctly. All tracks are double checked against the iTunes Music Store and Allmusic.com for genre and sub-genre hierarchy. Allmusic.com is specially useful because they have sub-genre headings with pages which explain features and major artists of each genre. For better organization on ipods and iphone genres are organized genre:sub-genre, that way its easy to find specific genres and create specific playlists. As for album art most of it is high resolution from the iTMS and Albumartexchange.com, although there are a few which are from Amazon.com or found on Google Images. Lyrics are imported automatically through GimmeSomeTune, a great little Mac OS X application which also posts to Last.fm Throughout this process its also been an opportunity to rate and purge tracks that are obviously in high rotation or have never been played in the six years of an all digital music library. While some sliming has happened, I’ve also decided to complete some albums and started importing music videos, so its about even. Although this is mostly done by hand the details are just right, unlike previous attempts from iEatBrainz, Corripio and other taggers meant to be a one stop shop for organizing iTunes libraries.

I’ve been using iTunes for about eight months now. I have put every CD in my collection into it – more than 12,000 songs – and my iPod goes everywhere with me. I also use it to listen to my favorite radio shows, recorded as podcasts. So far, I have rated more than 10,000 songs in my library.

The key I’ve found to organizing iTunes, though, is to limit working on it for about five minutes a day, every day. I loaded my CDs, five at a time, over the course of several months.

• Use the “recently added” Smart Playlist to make sure the song data is correct and to your liking (I tend to the genres from what the server sends over).
• Create Smart Playlists based on genres, like “new rock,” to play songs that haven’t been played or rated yet
• Use this star rating system:
  1 = problem (incompete, data tags in error, etc.)
  2 = song I don’t like
  3 = song is okay
  4 = song I like
  5 = song I love
• When listening on your iPod, try to rate just the 1-, 4-, and 5-star songs.
• If you hear a song you don’t like, skip it.
• Create a Smart Playlist called “trouble” to pull just the 1-rated songs and fix and rerate those songs. Try to keep this list cleared.
• Create a Smart Playlist called “suspect” and use the “Skip Count” criteria to rate all the songs you passed over without a full listen as 2 stars.
• Create a Smart Playlist called “needs rating” that collects all the played-yet-unrated songs and rate them all as 3 stars.

Why do this? Well, there are songs in my library that I don’t ever want to hear in shuffle mode. There are songs that I want to go to for different moods. Having good data with your music just helps you enjoy your music more. You can use the data to come up with your own top songs, albums, and artist lists. Then you can start giving out some awards.