Serendipitwaddle - Tania Katherine

If you are anything like me, your digital music collection is a mess. What doesn’t help is that there are all these new fields that most people don’t pay attention to: file type, bitrate, year, etc. But organizing a digital music library doesn’t need to be an ordeal. A few simple steps can keep things in line without driving you out of your mind.

1. Get Itunes: I know, I know: a lot of people have problems and complaints with Itunes. Whether it be that they’re too corporate or a problem with the program itself (especially with PC’s, newer Itunes versions can run slowly). However, if you want to get serious about digital music organization, Itunes is your quickest tool.

2. Add All Your Music To Itunes: This step is important. When all of your music is added to you Itunes library, go to File>Library>Consolidate and click okay. Choosing this option allows Itunes to put ALL your music files into the Itunes folder. You can delete music from elsewhere on your computer once this is done. For many, this may solve a good deal of the digital mess.

3. Use Itunes Tools: Itunes can autopopulate the album cover field for you—saving you a great amount of effort. Click Advanced>Get Album Artwork and let Itunes do the work for you.

3. Use Programs: Programs like Tune Up can help whip your library into top shape by autopopulating fields for you.

4. Grunt Work: So Tune Up couldn’t find an album for you and your left with all these empty fields. Now is the time to get your elbows dirty. What I find helpful is making Smart Playlists of the album or songs that I need to handle. Smart Playlists in Itunes will automatically cluster songs that have the same variables. For example, if I want to work on all the songs with no Year, I can set a filter for that. I find it easiest to work by one filter at a time (i.e. working on all the songs with no year, then all the songs with no genre, etc.) instead of a song at a time.