So I have spent some time recently making sense of my little collection of songs.
4214 songs. 11.3 days. All paid and accounted for 🙂 … and always listening to the same 2 or 3 static playlists. Something had to change.
I picked up some great advices from Smart Playlists.com and came up with the following tips to help organize better my library of songs. You can find more tips about iTunes on the Apple support site for windows, including an iTunes Tip of the Week and a list of Keyboard shortcuts.
I am slowly migrating all of my static lists into Smart Playlists so that they will remain up-to-date automatically.
I discovered it is now possible to make playlists of playlists ! This opens the door to complex queries in the iTunes database. And if you are running the windows version of iTunes, you can easily create new Smart PlayLists by using SHIFT when clicking on the ‘New Playlist’ button at the bottom of the window.
Finally, I am ordering my playlists using symbols to group them together:
.. 50’s
.. 60’s
.. 70’s
.. 80’s
.. Concert
.: Unheard music (displayed first to promote ‘unheard’ music)
.: All songs – Unheard
.: Favs – Ancient
.: Favs – Forgotten
.: Favs – Played a lot, not lately
.: Favs – Recycle
.: Purchased – Unheard
.: Recently Added
.: Recently Added – Unheard
.: Unheard – 1 hour
:. Favourite Music (coming next to keep them easily accessible)
:. Favs – Hot
:. My Top Rated
:. Purchased – Favs
:. Recently Played
:. Three Hours of Old, Good Songs
:. Top 25 Most Played
:: Catch all categories
:: All Songs – Heard
:: Purchased (AAC files)
:: Singles (no track number)
::. Utilities (to help with clean up, such as preventing duplicates, or improve classification)
::. Missing Album
::. Missing Genre
::. To Be Rated
::. Clean up spaces – Album
::. Clean up spaces – Artists
::. Clean up spaces – Songs