How to manage a huge iTunes Library
August 29th, 2007So you have 100,000 tracks in your library and now you can’t find anything? Here are some principles and practical ideas on how to approach a huge iTunes library…
divide & conquer
make big changes and improvements, then fix the small problems later. Example: search for ‘Led Zeppelin’ and change the genre for all tracks to ‘Classic Rock’ (or whatever!). Depending on your library, you may have fixed the genre for a couple of hundred tracks… do this with ten of your biggest artists and you’ve made some progress!
Here’s another way of fixing big batches of tracks: use maintenance smart playlists to catch untagged stuff. Set up an Unrated (0 Star) Smart Playlist, and SPLs for tracks with no genre, no artist name, or no year. Here’s a good way to add year tags quickly: create an SPL for tags with no year, then type ‘19′ (no quotes) in the search box. Chances are that most of the results will contain ‘19′ because they have the year of issue in the album name or comments field. You can select and change the year quickly. Repeat with ‘200′ to get all the 21st century tracks. This type of trick won’t catch everything but it will save you googling release dates for some of your albums.
A general principle: organise your music based on the tags you’ve given it, instead of building a manual structure of Dumb Playlists. The only manual playlists you set up should be compilations… try to do everything with Smart Playlists - they are updated as your library changes.
Instead of fixing all the tags for each album in turn, focus on fixing a type of tag for lots of tracks in batches, which is much more efficient.
Develop different approaches for getting at the good stuff, or stuff you need to be reminded about. Try an SPL of 5 star tracks not played recently, or never played. Or 5 star tracks played lots, but not recently.
Try automatic tools like MPFreaker to do batches of tagging for you.
tag everything well
Here’s some more tips around tagging:
Use downtime to tag and rate old stuff that gets lost. For example, rate music on your iPod. Also, get quicksilver or butler and set up shortcut keys for assigning ratings to your music while it’s playing. You can do this without interrupting the current app you’re using, and it’s a good way of rating stuff fairly transparently. You can also spend 10 minutes doing some tagging in downtime, this can really help bring your music into line.
Tag everything as it arrives. Set up a Smart Playlist called Recently Added - Date Added is in the last 7 days and My Rating is 0. Once you rate your new stuff it will drop out of the list.
Prune duplicate or too-similar genres so that the genre is a usable criterion in a smart playlist. I find that although I dislike categorising by genre, it is a really useful way of finding music you want… because my 5 star steel pole bathtub tracks from the early 1990s are quite different to my 5 star Aphex Twin from the same era and genre works well for telling them apart. If you’re into electronic music you might have dozens of genres. This is really a matter of taste but I like the idea of inclusive genres, so soul includes stuff that purists would argue is doo-wop, for example.
The end result of all this is that you impose a system on your music, then trust that system.
find ways to make it easier to manage in the long term
Do it with smart playlists as much as possible. The trick is that SPLs need well-tagged tracks in order to be effective.
Automate where possible. Have a look around Doug’s Applescripts for iTunes, and use applescripts to save time editing tags etc.
Here’s a collection of iTunes template smart playlists I’d recommend as a start…
October 7th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Thank you for sharing!
February 8th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Hi
These are all good comments,but I would love to have itunes be usable with a huge playlist. For me it really isn’t- it takes between 20seconds and a minute to bring the dialog box up after choosing “Get info” on a file….
/Peter
February 9th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
How big is your iTunes library? It sounds like it might be too big to fit in memory. If OSX has to page the library to disk, it will slow down. Here’s a few things you could try:
-Get some more RAM
-Make sure there’s a couple of gig free disk space on the drive where OSX is installed
-Make sure the maintenance jobs get run, see http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/11/21/maintenance.html
Even a G4 should deal with a big iTunes Library ok if it has enough RAM, although one exception is when you have non-western characters in song titles etc. My old G4 used to slow right down when scrolling down a playlist with lots of Kanji titles. I haven’t had the same issue on my Intel iMac, which has more RAM.
Anyway, good luck!
August 24th, 2008 at 11:47 am
Also for Windows try Dupe Eliminator for iTunes at http://www.markelsoft.com
If you’re like most iTunes users, you probably have dozens (if not hundreds) of duplicate songs cluttering your playlists, taking up valuable space on your hard drive, and generally causing you grief.
Dupe Eliminator is an intuitive tool for Windows Vista and XP that removes all those duplicate files quickly and easily, including songs, movies, TV shows, podcasts and audiobooks.
With Dupe Eliminator, you’ll never again have to manually slog through thousands of files looking for the tracks that play over and over again, or that maddening dead link to your favorite song that never works. Dupe Eliminator makes it simple to distinguish between a duplicate file and the original.
Anyone who has amassed an extensive music collection knows how difficult it is to organize all those files by hand. Who has the patience to painstakingly go through their iTunes library and remove one by one every duplicate and dead file?
Key Features of Dupe Eliminator
* Smart Search: Smart searching allows you to precisely specify criteria for duplicates so that you never end up deleting something you wanted to save.
* AutoClean Mode: Automatically clean your iTunes library without lifting so much as a finger.
* Scheduled Search: Define a schedule for Dupe Eliminator to check your iTunes library when your at work, sleeping… whenever you want.
* Audiobook Support: Eliminate your audiobook dupes.
* Dead Tracks Eliminator: Get rid of those pesky tracks that never seem to play, as well as the “phantom” tracks that show up in your library but don’t actually exist on your hard drive.
* Determine what you want to keep: Like having more than one track of a certain song? You can keep whatever you like, and you can specify which file stays as the original and which one is marked as the duplicate.
* UnDelete: If you make a mistake, then use UnDelete to restore the removed track(s) back to iTunes.
Who Needs Dupe Eliminator for iTunes?
You do if you’ve ever:
* Been frustrated by dead or duplicate tracks in your iTunes library.
* Wanted a quick and efficient way to organize your music files.
* Needed an option to organize your songs, videos, audiobooks, or podcasts.