Free tips and tricks to Managing a Large iTunes Music Library
May 12, 2011There 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.
Do a search for say ‘Queen’ for example, and change the genre for all tracks to ‘Classic Rock’ You may have fixed the genre for a few hundred songs with that one action. Do this with ten of your biggest artists and you have made massive progress in organizing your oversized music collection.
Here’s another way of fixing big batches of tracks: 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. Here’s a good way to add year tags quickly: create an SPL for tags with no year, then type19 in the search box. Chances are that most of the results will contain 19 because they have the year of issue in the album name or comments field. You can select and change the year quickly. Repeat with ’200 to get all the 21st century tracks. This type of trick won’t catch everything but it will save you a heap of time.
A general principle: organise your music based on the tags you’ve given it, instead of building a manual structure of Dumb Playlists. The only manual playlists you set up should be compilations… try to do everything with Smart Playlists – they are updated as your library 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.
Think of other ways that you can get to the music that you actually like and listen to. Try a smart playlist of tracks not played recently or never played at all and then rate these lower so that they do not come up as often in future.
iTunes now gives you access to a field called ‘Skip Count,’ so try a Smart Playlist with these Rules: Skip Count is greater than 3 and Rating is greater than 3. Select everything this Playlist finds and bump the rating down to 2 so you don’t see it as often.
You can also try automatic tools like MPFreaker to do batches of tagging for you, which can save time when your iTunes library is too big.
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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