How do you manage iTunes?

[American]

With a large library, it is nothing but a chore to make playlists or even pick one song to play. I only enjoy about 10% of the bands in my library. Another 10% are OK. The rest are "What was I thinking?" albums that I hate.

The collection is littered with total crap. "Fuzzbubble"? That's the name of a band on the Godzilla soundtrack. Never knew I had it. (No wonder-- they SUCK.)

I try using the Genre and Ratings categories to keep things organized. Yet somehow, "Jack Johnson" still ends up next to "Jackyl". Very annoying.

Apparently there was another reason for old record collections to take up space, besides just the medium... by spreading out, you can find stuff quickly. Sure, everything fits on a computer now, but it takes me much longer to find anything worth listening to. And then it's no longer fun.

Soon, I will begin deleting songs I don't like anymore, even though I paid good money for many of them.

Good-bye "Beck", you tiresome freak.

[kevin]

I delete stuff I really don't want to ever hear again.

I use a LOT of smart playlists:
- last 1000 songs added to library
- all tagged with 'fast' in the comments
- all with 3 or more stars
(to make things extra complicated each of those excludes christmas songs, which is it's own playlist)

But I don't have problems selecting and dragging files to manual play lists either. I've got over 10,000 tracks in my library all stored on a network drive. Syncing with my ipod is slow, but playlist manipulation seems ok.

[kevin]

Oh yeah, songs I don't have a real interest in I tag with 1 star and eliminate those from all smart playlists too.

[Psi Baba]

Just put everything under "Artists Who Totally Copied REO Speedwagon" and you'll be fine.






sorry . . . couldn't resist. :dewink:

[Piscivore]

I wish my iTunes would display the [EXPLICIT] tag the way they do in the Music Store. My kids like to make their own CDs and this would help them avoid some of the stuff I listen to that they don't want their peers to hear.

[Pirate_Lad]

There is a new version of itunes out that lets you browse your music by album art. It's very similar to looking through a record collection.

The only problem so far is that your music collection must be immaculate for it to not be full of duplicate album art, missing art, etc. I used to download a fair amount of music and not pay for it, but honestly, it's such a pain in the ass to apply the art, get the release year, correctly punctuate the album/artist/song, that these days I prefer to just be legal about it all.

I also suggest backing up music that you don't listen to much onto an external hard drive. I tend to listen to faster/aggressive music during spring and summer. When fall comes around, I do a lot of listening to David Gray, Norah Jones, etc.

One more itunes tip for people with large libraries: If you remove a few columns from your library window so that the horizontal scroll bar disappears, your library will scroll much more quickly and lose a lot of the choppiness. I have no idea why.

[HarryKeogh]

Soundtracks are the most annoying because I would buy them for one or two songs and when you put them in your library it adds 10 or 12 new artists to your library and most of them suck. But with the ability to buy tracks a la carte I haven't bought a soundtrack in a long time.

[gfunkusarelius]

is there a way to get itunes to scan your folder to add and remove stuff automatically. something that drives me nuts is i have a tone of cds and dvds with mp3s and if i want to listen to them i have to add them to my library, then i end up with tons of music that is unavailable. also i rotate stuff thru my library pretty often, so i have a lot of stragglers. i would just like sort of a hot scan like other programs have

[American]

Soundtracks are the most annoying because I would buy them for one or two songs and when you put them in your library it adds 10 or 12 new artists to your library and most of them suck.

Right.

Also, soundtracks often contain different genres. Interview with the Vampire has a classical score and one Guns 'n Roses track. But you can't blame iTunes for that, in fact it actually helps sort them better. What I would love is a SUB-genre tag. It would usually be empty, but for particular bands you could label them:

"Rock -> Happy" for Rush

and

"Rock -> Homicidal" for Tool

With a second or third label, you could make playlists a lot faster....


Notice-- this is the same problem we all face with pornography. Should we make just one folder for blondes with two sub-categories:

"Blondes -> models" and "Blondes -> celebs"

Or should we break up the blondes into two seperate folders (under "models" and "celebrities")?

[roger]

iTunes drives me crazy because it doesn't deal well with classical music. Rare is it that the performer is the composer, and generally I think to myself, "I want to hear some Bach", not "I want to hear some Nigel Kennedy". But if you take the songs as ripped from your CD, you'll typically end up with a badly named mismash.

for example, right now my CD player holds a CD of Etudes composed by Gerald Garcia. John Holmquist recorded it. Launch iTunes and the Artist is "Homquist", and individual track title run along the lines of "Garcia: Etudes Esquisses - 2. Pavane Pis-Aller". WTF? I want to search by Garcia, not have Garcia named in the track title, and certainly not that the work's name (Etudes Equisses" repeated in every track name. In classical music you often have one work spread over several tracks. You might respond that the labelling used for this CD is a reasonable compromise, and sure, it is, I suppose; however, every CD seems to do it differently. So it's anybody's guess how things will end up. I've had albums basically disappear because I don't know the correct way to search for them.

And don't get me started on the multidisc sets that I have that use a different scheme for each of the discs in the set. :mad:

So what I do is edit the track info for every CD I import. It's the only way to keep it managable.

ETA: it gets worse when you have a CD of, say, two concertos: the composer for each concerto is different; being a concerto, there is a featured soloist , and of course there is the musical group playing the music (such as the NSO). Good luck guessing who ends up in the Artist column. The NSO? Mozart? Ax? And track titles become ridiciously long.

[T'ai Chi]

A question I have, is how do I take mp3s in my regular Library, and move them over into the Podcast section?

(beacuse I have a lot of language mp3s, but dont want them to come on when regular music should be playing)

[orpheus]

Roger, I'm with you on this. It is a never-ending struggle. And it takes time, and life is short. I suppose we should be grateful that finally with the latest version of iTunes you don't get an automatic bit of silence inserted between tracks - that was beginning to drive me maaaaaaaaddd!! (Yes, of course, one could get around that by "joining CD tracks", but then it all became one big track, and you lost the ability to jump to index numbers within it. Didn't these guys get it that some music is complicated, that some people like it that way, and that it's nice to be able to access various parts of it when you want - but listen to it as a continuity when you want? Books have chapters, don't they? And they don't force you to close your eyes momentarily between those chapters, do they? Grrrrrrr. :mad: But it's all better now. :) )

I try to keep it simple: composer (last name only); main individual artist (conductor, soloist, or chamber ensemble) by last name followed by abbreviation for orchestra (e.g., LSO); and for the title field I abbreviate radically. "Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony no. 9 in D minor, op. 125 "Choral", movement IV" becomes "Sym. 9/iv". It works, and with a large collection it's worth the effort, but it does take time.

One trick that might be useful: if you have a LOT of one composer, but a few works of his/hers you listen to really often and want to be able to find easily, list those under a variant of the composer's name. (e.g., I've got a Rule8-load of Stravinsky, but Agon and Requiem Canticles are a current obsession. So I've listed those under "Stravinsky, Igor". It shows up right after "Stravinsky" in my library, but it gives them a nice niche all their own. (There's probably a really easy way to do this with playlists or something that I'm just too dense to get. But I like my way.)

[kevin]

A question I have, is how do I take mp3s in my regular Library, and move them over into the Podcast section?

(beacuse I have a lot of language mp3s, but dont want them to come on when regular music should be playing)

Some suggestions here:
http://emperor.tidbits.com/webx/TidBITS/Talk/764/18

You probably wouldn't like my solution where I turned on Apache on my Mac and created my own RSS feed that I then subscribed to.

[kevin]

iTunes drives me crazy because it doesn't deal well with classical music.

You might be interested in this:
http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20060130113518368

[Whyatica]

By not using it.