2. digital
  3. 1230475284

How do YOU organize your iTunes library?

My buddy just outgrew his iMac's hard drive so he bought a really nice Lacie external drive and asked me to come over and migrate iTunes, etc.

I literally laughed when I started poking around his music. He wasn't using a single playlist for about 100GB of music. I just always taken it as a given that people with large libraries(and especially "album listeners" like I'm sure most of us are) create a playlist that is the name of the artist and album i.e. Television-Marquee Moon.

He says he just uses cover-flow to navigate through everything. Watching him take like 45 seconds to find a specific album using that method I just had to show him the light.

After a little tutorial he told me that this was like a revelation and he never even thought about doing this where as I never thought about doing it any other way. He freaked out at first because we started making a few hundred playlists but I think I have him on the right track. I mean...pick an album from the playlists listed and listen...right?

Does this make sense? Do ya'll not do this? What do YOU do?
synthfreek
kthomas
911 posts
 
Onhwy61 - the desire for more dedicated fields for organizing is the #1 reason I use J River. You can add as many fields as you like to their already large standard offering, and the fields can be complex (calculated, for example). All fields, standard or user, can be used to create indices, and the UI for when you choose an index, and then narrowing within that index, is extremely intuitive. All of the indices are stored separately such that searching and sorting are quick even with very large collections.

I've never understood why the other media players don't allow for this as well.
flg2001's avatar
flg2001
543 posts
 
I have around 500 CDs of WAV encoded music and trasfer 4 and 5 stars pre-ranked titles to my iPOD. (I use a Wadia 170i as a transport).

Besides the standard search capabilities of iTunes, the star ranking serves me as a fllter to just transfer the tittles I like (usually 20% or less of all of our library is listened according to HFRN-UK) - so it makes the library management easier.

It takes time, but makes things easier to maintin and update thru genius your archives.
jamesw20
269 posts
 
I have organized them by playlist on a NAS connceted to a Sonos system. Worked great until I tried to put the music on my Ipod. For some reason which no one could explain, the ipod couldn't recognize the nas. Out of frustration I am now uploading all of my music directly to a new Imac's drive which works great for both. Would still like to know what happened.
rbstehno
916 posts
 
a nas device is just a storage system attached to all of your computers. you would still have your computer running itunes but your itunes library can be placed on the nas. the nas is a good idea if you have multiple computers sharing the same disk. instead of attaching a bunch of disks to a computer and have all your other computers attach to this computer to get to the disk, each computer goes directly to the disk thru the lan.
More to discover