My secret to iTunes Library Organization

Several years ago I switched to using iTunes for managing my music library about the time I got my first iPod. Now that I’ve developed a few good techniques for organizing things efficiently, I can’t imagine doing it any other way. Since then, I’ve added videos, movies, TV shows, and Audiobooks to the media which I keep organized with iTunes.

When I first started, I had a directory tree full of mp3 files with very inconsistent ID3 tags. Many of them were wrong or missing song titles, artists, album names, etc. So, before importing them into the iTunes library I used the Music Brainz Tagger to try to identify songs and clean up my metatags. It works very well and you end up contributing a lot of good information back to the Music Brainz project by using it. Album art came later, but you can use newer iTunes versions to find most of the art and the Yahoo! Widget called “iTunes Companion” to fill in the rest.

Now that you have the meta-data as accurate and complete as possible, I recommend you set your iTunes Music Library directory and import the entire “old” directory of mp3s. Before you do, turn on the options to allow iTunes to keep your music folder organized and to copy the file to the library. You will end up with a consistent directory structure based on artist, album, and song. By copying the files to your library, iTunes will prompt you to also delete the underlying file when deleting a song from the library rather than removing the link and leaving the file. You can clean up the “old” directory later.

Now it’s time to decide how you want to organize your collection. I organize by the types of media I may want to consume at any given time:

• Podcasts
• Music – Clean
• Music – Explicit
• Standup Comedy
• Purchased Music
• Childrens
• Audiobook
• Movies
• TV Shows
• Music Videos
• and so on…

These will be populated to the grouping field and along with the genre, artist, playcount, and a few other fields let me create smart playlists for almost any type of situation.

• Each audiobook gets it’s own playlist – (title contains “iTunes of Dummies”) AND (grouping is “Audiobook”) and (playcount is 0). Also be sure to check “Remember playback position” and “skip when shuffling” for best results.
• All music – (grouping contains “Music”)
• Clean music (grouping is “Music – Clean”)
• Podcasts – (podcast is “true”) and (playcount is 0)
• and so on..

So if grouping is so important, how can you go through your entire library if you have thousands of songs? It takes time, but I developed a simple system for it. First, I set the grouping on all songs to “Music – Check”, reset the playcount to 0, and set the rating to 3 stars. Another smart playlist and I have a way to know which songs haven’t yet been checked.

As I’m listening on my iPod, I can use the rating system to mark how I want to classify a song.

• 1 star – delete altogether
• 2 stars – explicit lyrics
• 3 stars – default
• 4 stars – clean lyrics

The next time I synch my iPod, the ratings will be updated and I can sort by rating to bulk update grouping fields. Eventually your “unchecked” smart playlist will be whittled down to nothing.

I know it’s made my life easier to have my iTunes library organized in a way that I can quickly find what I want based on my current mood. Give it a try!