You started out with a few hundred songs and that was a few years ago now. It's getting to a point now that your collection of iTunes music is just insane, and trying to find what you want is almost impossible. Here are some tips to managing and maintaining a large iTunes library.
Whether you paid for your iTunes music or you were savvy enough to get yourself a free iTunes music voucherthe secret in keeping a large music collection in check lies in the way you go about dividing and managing the music. The trick is to start broad and then progressively get more refined.
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!
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.
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.
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 automatic tools like MPFreaker to do batches of tagging for you, which can save time when your iTunes library is too big.
About the Author:
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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