How to Manage your Music Collection in a Huge iTunes Library

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.

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.

Another trick to fixing larger portions of music at once is to 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 type 19 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. This trick will save you a heap of 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.

Instead of fixing all the tags for each album in turn, focus on fixing a type of tag for lots of tracks in batches, which is much more efficient. For example, spend some time fixing the ‘Genre’ tag for a few thousand tracks, then work on fixing the ‘Year’ tag.

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 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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