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The key to keeping a clean and organized iTunes library lies in the way you use Tags. Here are some practical tips to getting the most out of tags and staying on top of your huge iTunes music collection.

A general principle is to organize 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.

Here’s some more tips around tagging and why it is the key to managing and maintaining those ridiculously large itunes libraries of yours, because regardless of whether you paid for your iTunes music or you were savvy enough to get yourself a free iTunes gift cards to get songs for your iPod – there is nothing worse than an unorganized music library.

Use downtime to tag and rate old stuff that gets lost. For example, rate music on your iPod. Also, get Quicksilver or Butler and set up shortcut keys for assigning ratings to your music while it’s playing. You can do this without interrupting the current app you’re using, and it’s a good way of rating stuff fairly transparently.

You can also spend 10 minutes doing some tagging in downtime, this can really help bring your music into line.

Make sure your music does not creep up on you by tagging everything as it arrives. The best way to do this is to use Smart Playlists (again a great way to help you stay organised) and call it ‘recently added’ and set it to include anything well, recently added. Set the playlist to only include unrated songs and once you rate and tag them they will no longer be on that playlist.

Take those genres that sound and looks very similar and cull those which you don’t use. There is no point having twelve different types of rap and hip hop genres if you do not even listen to that style of music. This just clutters your organizing abilities.

Basically, regardless of whether you choose to use tags, playlists, genres, or a mix of all three to organize your huge iTunes library the important element is that you impose a system on your iTunes library and you stay consistent and trust that system.

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