So you have 100,000 tracks in your library and now you can’t find anything? Here are some principles and practical ideas on how to manage and maintain a huge iTunes library…
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 sections so that each action effects a larger section of the songs.
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.
It is not advisable to create manual playlists when organizing your iTunes music collection. Manual playlists are for your own personal compilations only and you should be using Smart Playlists (SPLs) for your tasks of managing your large iTunes library. SPLs are updated automatically as new music is added to iTunes – which is why it is essential to use these when organizing your collection.
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.
There is a great feature in iTunes called ‘Skip Count’ which tells the system how many times you have skipped past that song when it was on the playlist. Try creating 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 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.
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