International Cinema Festival of India

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 to organizing your playlist is to divide your music in broad sections so that each action effects a larger section of the songs.

An example of how starting broad is so effective would be to do a search for say ‘Queen’ and change the genre for all tracks to ‘Classic Rock’ Depending on how big your library is you may have fixed the genre for a few hundred songs. Do this with ten of your biggest artists and you have made massive progress in organizing your iTunes library.

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.

A general principle: organise your music based on the tags you’ve given it, instead of building a manual structure of Dumb Playlists. The only manual playlists you set up should be compilations… try to do everything with Smart Playlists – they are updated as your library changes.

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.

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 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.

Want to get free iTunes vouchers for your iPod or iPod touch? Check out the home of Free iTunes music and see the latest offers on all iTunes Gift Certificates, iPhones, iPads and more!