Organize Your iTunes Library

Whether you're an audiophile or a casual music consumer, you have music cluttering your iTunes (or any music player you prefer to use). For a completist who has to have every album, EP, singles, and bootlegs of their favorite artists, organization is key for easy access to the song they want to listen to or transfer to their music devices. But even if you only rip a few albums that you've purchased here and there, your digital library can get as easily cluttered without much help and organization is as necessary to enjoy the music you purchase and amass.

It's happened to me. After years of amassing songs, it was cumbersome to look through my iTunes to find a song to play. I've also seen the iTunes collection of some of my friends and some are difficult to navigate. After I've decided to organize—which is quite the task—I am now enjoying my music faster because they are easier to find. Here are the steps to organize your digital music library:

By putting all your music in one folder and organizing these folders, it makes finding a song/artist/album easier in case you need to transfer your music around.

With iTunes this is easy. Click Edit > Preferences > Advanced. Make sure you check 'Keep iTunes Media folder organized'. This means that everytime you put in a song in your iTunes—that is, you are keeping a copy of the song in your hard drive—it immediately files it in your iTunes music folder according to artist and album.

Now, clutter begins with multiple artists in one song. It makes your Artist list artificially bigger that it should be. We don't want that. We want our Artist list to only show artists. To remedy this make sure that when you tag your artist—if you are doing it manually—tag them correctly.

Though you can automatically tag your music, learning the basics of tagging will definely help in organizing your digital music library (especially because sometimes the automatic tagging of iTunes makes my library messier). Here are tips, as I understand parts of the tagging process:

A) The name of the song. I also include here artist/s featured in the song with but that's just personal preference. You can also put it on the next section.

B) This is the artist/s of the song, not the album. As you can see on the picture, Barbra Streisand & Céline Dion, because it is a duet. Otherwise it would just be the artist that performs the song. If it features another artist as a guest, add in (feat. artist name).

C) This is the artist of the album. Easy, but it gets complicated with compilations such as those Christmas compilations, 'Now #', or 'Best of X Decade'. For those, I usually just put Various Artists.

D) This is the name of the album, single, EP.

E) This I use for grouping certain artists or albums to make them easier to find. Let's say you also listen to Japanese music, have live albums, and/or have singles and EP's, this is where you specify them. This way, instead of using the search of your iTunes (which can be slow if you have Cover Flow or Column Browser on) you can easily click click click away to listen to that song you wanted to hear or put in your iPod, that is if you are using the iTunes Browser, which I will discuss soon.

F) The name of the composer of the song. After I took an intro course to Classical music, I amassed a small library of Classical music and this is where I put the composer name: Bach, Mozart, Bartók, etc. (And in terms of Classical music, the Orchestra, soloist, and conductor ends up in the Artist box.)

G) I don't really use this, but any comment you want to put in here you could.

H) The genre of the song/album. I try to simplify my genre as much as possible, but however you do your genre works. Remember, this organization is to make it easier for you to access your beloved collection of music.

I) The year of the album, single, EP.

J) The track number of the song and total number of song in the album, single, EP.

K) The disc number the song is found in out of the total disc numbers of the whole album. This is for multiple disc formats, usually found in compilation albums.

L) When you have this checked, you are telling iTunes that the song is part of a compilation. This means two things: that instead of iTunes making a folder of the artist and album in your music folder, it will pool every song in one folder called Compilations, sorting them by album there and—if you use the column browser and enable 'Group Compilations'—it will show on the browser an 'Artist' named Compilation and there you will find your album.

I don't particularly use Compilation on my Column Browser because it shows up as the first thing in your artist list and that bothers me. I just type in Compilation in the Grouping box and use the Grouping list. But of course, this depends on your preference.

Now that you know the basics of tagging. Go and tag away! And remember to do it according to your needs: what is essential for you, what is easiest, etc. If you have time, or a fairly small library, you can easily tag by right-clicking on a song > Get Info then tag Name, Artist, the first box of Track Number, then click the Next button. After you've tagged every song in an album, select all the songs of the album by the handy ctrl + A or click on the first song of the album and press shift + down/up key to highlight all the songs in that album then right click. This allows you to edit information for multiple items. Now fill in Album, Album Artist, Year, Genre, and everything else that's left.

or

You could do it automatically. iTunes allows for automatic tagging after you rip a CD; right click on a song and click Get Track Names. From experience thought, it makes everything messier. I personally use MusicBrainz Picard, which is a program that links to their user (mostly music lovers) edited database; it's like a Wikipedia of sorts. You just open your music folder in that program and let it do the work. You have to still make sure it's tagging correctly though (it may be tagging with an international version of the album), but it makes everything more uniform and easier. You can Google the program and they have a quick tutorial on their site.

Nothing is more important to organization than organizing the way you want it to look. If you organize by your own specifications, it makes it easier to live with and maintain. A few looks that you can do with iTunes include Song List, Album List, Grid, and Cover Flow. With Song and Album List, you can enable the 'Browser' by clicking on View > Column Browser > Show Column Browser. Here's a quick look on these options:

Tip: If you do use the Column Browser, make sure your songs are sorted appropriately.

'Sort' tells iTunes how to show songs in your Browser. This means if you have The Beatles in your library and Sort Artist is entered as The Beatles, instead of being accordingly placed in the artists that start with the letter B, it will be put with artist whose name begins with the letter T. You want to put Beatles in this box. This goes the same for Album Name and Composer. How ever you want Artist name or Album title to be sorted on your iTunes Browser, you can edit through this.

This mostly means that whenever you rip an album, make sure you tag them appropriately right away. This makes it less likely that your music library will be scattered with 'strays' or be filled with incorrectly tagged songs—this makes navigating difficult. It's similar to house cleaning; if you do small things often, you're less likely to need a major cleaning that will take a big lump of your time.

Hopefully this was an informative look at how to properly organize your iTunes. It may take a while trying to rein in your music library but getting rid of clutter makes it worth while when navigating through your favorite tunes becomes easy and fun again. Good luck!

Oh, and in case you are wondering how I keep my iTunes: