Do you love music, but hate to wait because you can’t ever find what you want in your music collection? If you aren’t careful, digital music collections can get even more out of hand than physical CD collections. Fortunately, iTunes makes it a breeze to organize those tunes and get the most out of your vast collection of great tunes.
An Organized Music Collection Lets You Listen How You Like
What’s the key to enjoying a nice shuffle mix of smooth blues tunes on Sunday morning, or some jumping party beats after work on Friday evening? That requires shuffling, which demands that songs be correctly categorized to be properly included in any given shuffle. The metadata of the songs and albums are what determine your shuffle. Metadata is the information stored about the song, such as the artist, album, year, and genre. You can change the metadata in iTunes to reflect your preferences by right clicking on Get Info and choosing the information tab. For example, “reggae” is often listed as “world” and “punk rock” is sometimes categorized as “alternative”. You can change that here for a better shuffle mix.
An Organized Music Collection Lets You Find and Eliminate Duplicates
Once your music collection reaches a certain size, it’s almost certain that you’ve got duplicates. The problem with this is that it takes up a lot of unnecessary storage space and it makes it harder to scroll through all you’ve got to find whatever you happen to be looking for at the time. iTunes makes it a cinch to find and eliminate duplicate songs. In iTunes, go to View, and choose Show Duplicate Items. You can also filter by different requirements, such as by bit rate, so that you can get rid of the duplicate with the lowest bit rate.
An Organized Music Collection Lets You Store More Music With Less Scrolling
Another thing that takes up lots of space unnecessarily is compilations. Many times, you’ll have artists in your music collection that you only have one or two of their songs. You can right click on the album and select Get Info. Choose the Options tab and select Yes to Part of a Compilations. Now, your list is less cluttered with artists you only have one or two songs by.
iTunes Will Also Help You Find Missing Album Art
Does it bug you when there is no album art to go with your music? iTunes can help you out with this, too. Right click on the album that’s missing artwork. Select Get Album Artwork. iTunes is pretty savvy about finding art for the albums, but occasionally it can’t. You can still do it yourself by nabbing the album art off of a free online image source, such as Google Images
Open the image next to iTunes and click on the album. Choose Get Info, and then drag the Google image you saved (or your favorite free image collection) into the blank box where the album artwork is supposed to go. If it won’t (for whatever reason), save the image to your desktop. Then double click on the box where the album art is supposed to go and select the image within your local files.
Once your music is all organized in iTunes, you’ll probably begin enjoying songs that you haven’t heard in a long time, all because a disorganized collection was hiding them.
Check out the Genius Tool in iTunes to get ahead of the curve.
