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.
Nice tip, but it’s good to remember that too many active smart playlists can slow down iTunes dramatically.
I keep seeing posts on here with silly little errors. i.e. “ammounts” in the first sentence. Spell check, yo.
One solution to replace ‘B.’ that I found last night is to enter the name of the artist without the featuring in the ‘Album Artist’ field. Album View now shows the album name with the main artist correctly and still allows you to keep individual tracks with any additional artist details. Hope this helps!
@alec, 4k of music, that’s insane. i cant image using any jukebox that does not support versatile smart playlist.
how do i get my library to organize by album name and not try to sort it its own way. I would like my movie soundtracks to all stay in the same cell.
everytime i put certian songs on my ITUNES MUSIC folder, it reorganizes it and puts it in seperate folders. How do I make Itunes stop automatically do that? I want my music in certain folders and I want it to be kept in there for a reason.
Pretty comprehensive overview of basics here: http://leopardtips.blogspot.com/2007/11/itunes-organization-part-i.html
After spending a day trying to figure out how to get my soundtrack cds to display all artists on album view I finally figured it out.
Preferences> General> click “Group Compilation when browsing”
Then right click on the song > Get Info.
Make sure under the info tab all the info is the same besides the Artist.
Then proceed to the Sorting tab
Get Info> Sorting
Under “Sort Artist” make sure you type “Various Artists”
Then proceed to the Options tab
Get Info> Options
Make sure you check “Part of Gapless Album” for all songs.
Repeat these steps for all the songs that you want on the same CD
Enjoy!
WHO CARES IF THERES SPELLING MISTAKES!
Good job dude! Thanks!
Hi,
I have created my own music folders in computers.
For example: 3 of my folders are:
Fav_Songs_08, Fav_Songs_89, Fav_Songs_90
These folders contains my favorite songs for year 08, 89 and 90 respectively.
Now when I import these songs into ipod classic through itunes, I can’t see my 3 folders: rather it sorts music by artist, genre, and so on….
But I would like to see exactly same folder on my ipod classic. for example, if I want to play my favorite songs from 08, I should be able to go to folder Fav_songs_08 in my ipod and play the songs. I am not able to do it so far. I have tried a lot and spent lot of time on it.
is there is any way or workaround?
Thanks a lot for all your help!
Take care!
4000 songs.. Pah…
Mine tops out at just over 24,000!!
[...] Resultatet var at jeg brukte ca en måned på å digitalisere hele platesamlingen min med to maskiner gående nesten døgnet rundt med parallelripping. Omlag 150 GB senere var alt på plass og det var bare å begynne å synkronisere. Mye tid ble brukt på å rense opp i artisnavn (å, skulle man gå for “featuring” i sam…. [...]
Thanks, but.. I’m still like.
. My itunes library is perfectly sorted..kind of, b/c i have ti set that irunes organizes it nicely, i don’t even know how i did that. But, for some reason an artist like The Maine for example, some is going under T and some is going under M. But b/c they organize and all that stuff i can’t drag the stupid thing into its place. How do i jsut do that? how do i make it possible for me to drag a song into the spot that i want it to be in?
AND it is annoying. Things from a certain c.d will sort itself into three different albums. Even if i have the album name artist and stuff written the exact same. Sorry if i sound like stupid, I suck when it comes to technology…Oh and sorry for spelling mistakes in my other post^^