How To: Organize Your iTunes Library

Apple’s renowned music application is used universally today. However, with massive amounts of music, iTunes can become a messy and hectic place. Today I’m going to show you how to clean up and organize your iTunes.

I have about 4000 songs. That’s a lot to go though every day, yet alone look at when iTunes pops up. I have about five artists that I listen to regularly, but I have to go through my library or search for them when I want to listen to their songs. iTunes doesn’t allow the user to just add favourite artists to a specified list, so we’ll just use the playlist area instead.

1. Create a new folder. iTunes folders are great for storing different types of playlists. To do this, go to the File menu, and then hit New Folder. This will bring up a new folder in the playlists area. Rename it to Artists or something similar. We’re going to store all of our favourite artists here.

2. Once you’ve renamed the folder, go to the File menu again and this time hit New Smart Playlist. In the window that pops up, make sure “Artist contains” is selected. In the empty box, type the artist’s name. Then hit OK, and drag your newly created playlist into the “Artists” folder. You’ve just made a playlist for one of your favourite artists. Repeat this step until all of the artists you want are in the folder.

3. Now we’re going to repeat step one, but instead of calling the folder “Artists”, we’re going to call it “Genres”.

4. Go to the File menu, and hit New Smart Playlist. Change “Artist” to “Genre” and “contains” to “is”. Then type the genre name into the blank box. Hit OK, and drag your newly created playlist to the “Genre” folder. Repeat until all your favourite genres are in the folder.

5. Create a new folder called “Apple” or something similar. We’re going to drag the Apple created smart playlists into this folder.

6. You should now have three folders with a bunch of playlists in them. But there’s one more thing to do. In each of your artist’s playlists, switch the view from List View to Album View. To do this, go to the View menu and click Album View. This will allow you to see all of the artist’s albums seperated into songs and corresponding album, including album art. This will also allow you to easily browse through your individual artist’s music.

You’ve now organized the playlist area, but what about the actual library? Here are some tips to cleaning the main library.

A. Keep basic genres. If something is Alternative Punk, just call it Alternative. It will give you less genres to sort through and will clean up the genre section of your playlist area, as well as the genre list in the browse mode.

B. No “Featuring” in the Artist metadata. If an album has songs that feature other artists, make sure to add that information in the song name metadata, not the artist metadata. That way your album will only have a single artist name, the artist metadata list will look cleaner, and it will be easier to manage your albums.

C. Fix songs without (proper) metadata. All songs should be easy to find and identify. Adding correct metadata will help you find songs quicker and easier.

Enjoy your newly organized iTunes.