organize my ipod

Maybe. Listening to all the songs has been the most work. I mean, it’s been fun, but a lot of work, too.

I’ve probably gotten rid of over a thousand songs that either had skips, or were duplicates, or were just plain bad. The “why did I ever put that on my ‘pod” type bad. But, it will be totally worth it when I’m finally finished. I have a lot of fun playlists now, and most of the music left are songs I either like, or will keep for other reasons. I still can’t wait to be done.

Whew, finally! Now I’m working on the part that will take the longest – actually listening to everything on my pod. Some of the stuff hasn’t been listened to since 2005.

I have actually deleted about 300 songs so far, and added about the same number. I am now working my way through the “H”’s. I have a lot of junk, but a lot of forgotten gems as well.

The worst thing about doing this is that I keep thinking up new playlists. Then I found out you could make playlist files, and put songs into subgenres within a playlist. Which is great, but I am not finishing this project very quickly! I can tell when I finish it will be well worth the time I spent, and I am planning to keep it up to date when I add new music.

This is both more difficult, and more fun than I thought it would be. As I am adding to my playlists, and giving each song the preliminary star rading, my husband keeps commenting on my music. “I didn’t know you had THAT on your iPod. What in the WORLD is that?”

I also decided to go through all my music and listen to each song again. I did this about 3 years ago,and in addition to the stinky songs, got rid of all of them with skips.

Now it’s just organizing everything. I am about 1/4 though the C’s by song title. I’m also deleting music that seemed like a good idea at the time (Rough Guide to the Shukar Collective, as an example) but ends up being something I can’t listen to for more than about 30 seconds in real life. I want to be fond of all the songs on my pod. No bad songs. Well, except those guilty pleasures that are bad in a good way. Hah.

Of course, for every 3 songs I get rid of I seem to add 10 – but that’s okay.

I finished the B’s!

I never promised this would be fast, but the B’s had some major cleanup. Not only did I have to get all the Ben Folds names into one form, but I had to do the same for Ben Harper, miscapitalization of blink-182 and switched around a bunch of “feat.” to go after song titles instead of artist names. I also had The Beatles to contend with…that was a lot of correcting of albums to original release years and making sure that I had the right artwork.

Yeah, this will take a while…

I also deleted some things that were straggler songs I wasn’t interested in at all.

Here’s to some progress!

It would be much easier if I didn’t keep adding music to it, haha.

I have some old music that doesn’t have track information, and I need to go through that and find out what is on there. Plus some of the songs are from Demo albums from people who aren’t on iTunes, so there is no information about who they are.

I would like to come up with more playlists, too.

One of my favorite playlists is the unplayed list, so I can go through and make sure I actually like each song, and want to keep it. No lame songs on the Pod, that is my goal. Well, except in a few cases.

I just wish there was a place to put stuff, like the Christmas music, where it wouldn’t come on during shuffle. Like a “shuffle everything except this genre” code.

And I’m just doing it in a logical manner – alphabetical by artist, grabbing whole soundtracks as they pop up. I’ve gotten the numbered artists and A’s done!

It may not seem like a lot, but I did get a few soundtracks out of the way and I found out I had two of the same compilation album with slightly different titles, so I as able to delete one entirely. I also found a bunch of missing album covers.

I also started switching over any songs where it’s “featuring so-and-so” so that part’s with the song title instead of the artist so the main artist doesn’t have 34 listings just because they did a bunch of duets and whatnots. Same goes for remixes.

This is going to take a while. :)

My iPod is a disorganized mess – over 6,000 songs and maybe 4 playlists. My latest car came with an iPod docking station and it would be nice to be able to go to some better playlists, but first, I need to do a lot of general stuff. Off the top of my head:

- Go through and find duplicate songs and get rid of them.
- Get rid of songs I have for no good reason (I tend to grab really bad live versions that have horrible sound quality and some really bad remixes that sound like a 3rd grader put them together)

- Go through the “orphan” works and decide if I want to get whole albums or not (hey, some reward is good!)
- Clean up the artist names – they get spelled differently from album to album which makes the play all difficult
- Clean up other horrible spelling problems

- Find missing album covers

- Start making decent playlists. Stuff to sing to alone in the car sounds like a good start, no? :)

1840 songs to 1531 songs (;