There are at least 100,000 tracks on your iTunes library and trying to find anything is becoming impossible. How do you manage? Here are some tips and tricks to help you manage and maintain a huge iTunes music collection.
Whether you paid for your iTunes music or you were savvy enough to get yourself a free iTunes music voucherthe secret to organizing your playlist is to divide your music in broad chunks first and only then start to break down the finer details.
Make big changes and improvements, then fix the small problems later. Example: search for ‘Led Zeppelin’ and change the genre for all tracks to ‘Classic Rock’ (or whatever!). Depending on your library, you may have fixed the genre for a couple of hundred tracks… do this with ten of your biggest artists and you’ve made some progress!
use maintenance smart playlists to catch untagged stuff. Set up an Unrated (0 Star) Smart Playlist, and SPLs for tracks with no genre, no artist name, or no year. Now create a smart playlist for all songs tagged with 19, which would be most because it was the 1900′s for a long time. Do this for 200 and catch the next century too. This type of trick won’t catch everything but it will save you so much time.
A good rule of thumb is to organize your iTunes music based on the tags you’ve given it. Do not use manual playlists. The only manual playlists should be your own personal compilations. Use smart playlists (SPLs) as they are updated as your music collection changes.
When it comes to fixing the tags on your music, think broad again and instead of fixing the tag for each album, fix the type of tag for say genre instead and organise a few thousand tracks in the process.
Try a few different approaches to how you organize and categorize your iTunes music so that you can actually get to the songs you like and listen to. Try creating a smart playlist of all songs that have either never been played or not played recently and then rate these songs lower so they do not come up in the playlists randomly, for example.
Use the features provided by Apple iTunes to help organise and categorise your music. A great one is called Skip count, so try creating a playlist and set the rules to include songs that have a higher rating and also a higher skip count, say over 3. Bump the ratings on these songs down a few notches so you stop hearing them in the first place. Easy – and you just fixed a few hundred, possibly even a few thousand songs in one go.
You can also try to emply the help of automated tools and services to organize your iTunes music library but most of these come at a price. If you really have a huge iTunes music collection and you don’t want to organize it yourself then these tools can definitely help.
Got an iPod? Need more iTunes hints and tips, or just want to downloadfree iTunes music? Follow the link to see the latest offers on free iTunes Gift Cards, vouchers and merchandise. It’s only free if you know where to look.
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