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Tip of the Week: Tidy Tunes
Written by Hannah
Oh my goodness it has been a long time since we’ve been helpful, we promise to give you more tips.
I thought I would blog about this now to help others address a problem that people often ignore until it gets nasty: iTunes. I was thinking about it today, and the strategies required, hence blog.
Right, so, important things about KEEPING YOUR ITUNES TIDY:
Actually wait first I want to explain WHY it is important to keep your iTunes tidy. iTunes is (now) where, for the most part, music comes from. In this new digital age, one might have albums and cassettes and vinyls and other lovely collections, but they’ll put it one their iTunes too, normally anyway (people are still doing that horrible chore of getting all of your 198,754 CDs and laboriously importing the songs to their iTunes/iPod – in the case of my Dad, he employed me to do it). This means that, as the primary source of music that we universally use, it is important to people who listen to music a lot. I’m guessing that is you, and I am happy for you, music is nice! (What a horrible word, really it’s lots of things, but that’s a whole new blog). So really, just as you keep your sock drawer tidy, keep your iTunes tidy.
With a tidy library, one can then take pride in the different artists you have stored on your laptop or iPod; when you want to play something to someone, you know how you labelled your songs, so it is easy to find, it is your system that you have designed on your iTunes to make it look neat and pretty (this is also regarding album artwork..) AND it’s practical. There is nothing more annoying when you have one artist listed lots of times on your iPod because you’ve spelt it a variety of ways. That is amateur iTunes usage, and you don’t to be OCD to solve this problem…
Step One:
Decide about capitalisation! This is normally automatic if you are paying for music (please do – the industry depends on it!), and not downloading illegally (which is when it is never label correctly, there is an incentive to pay for you) – but through the iTunes store this is done for you. If you are importing songs from a burnt CD though, for example, this is where you need to label correctly. For example, are you going to put in the accent for Beyoncé? Include a surname? If you are inconsistent they’ll be listed as separate artists! If you decide yourself you will be consistent in the future..
Step Two:
Is there someone featured in the song? Do you put that as an artist, for example ‘Sleepyhead – Passion Pit feat. Ellie Goulding’, BUT THIS IS BETTER ‘Sleepyhead feat. Ellie Goulding – Passion Pit’. THEN your artist will be listed as one and you can find it easily, but you know Ellie Goulding is featuring in the song, because it is in the song title. Also, just to be neat, be consistent with how you abbreviate “featuring”. I personally go for “feat.” (so not Ft., ft., featuring, FEAT. etc)
Step Three:
Album Artwork! Now this is a pain, some songs have pictures, some don’t, it’s not good. A good thing to do is click ‘Advanced’ in the nav bar and scroll to ‘Get Album Artwork’ if you haven’t done that already – then songs are sent to Apple and the pictures are found for you, but not every song has it! That’s because sometimes you don’t buy things from iTunes or take songs from the CD firsthand, if you share music, it often doesn’t have the correct information, as I am sure you know, really this blog is for people who get irritated by that. Missing Album Artwork is one of the more petty peeves. You can add them yourself too – my friend Dom gave me a memory stick of all his favourite music for me to have and he’d added a picture of a music note to every song he couldn’t find a picture for .. that’s weird. I don’t suggest you do that. But if you’d like to add the cover of the album because iTunes failed to find it for you, then right click on the track in your library and go “Get Info”, the under that you can go to “Artwork” and add the picture. Simples.
Step Four:
Playlists! It gets really annoying after a few years of making playlists when you have a hundreds of playlists that all pretty much have the same music. Once you’ve made a playlist, stick with it, if you keep updating it and copying huge blocks of songs into it then it becomes a bad playlist and it filters into a massive one. I keep taking all my “recently added” and just shoving them all into each playlist: BAD IDEA, now all of them are really similar and don’t count as ‘Feel Good’, ‘Sleep’ or ‘Study’ anymore because I haven’t handpicked each song. Make good ones, then make new ones, don’t change the ones you already have! No harm also in making a Sleep Nov 2010 then a Sleep Feb 2011, because we all know what it’s like listening to music that you feel has been over played, then you can go back to it after a while and you’ll have that ‘aaah’ feeling of old music you’ve forgotten. Now i have to spend a good rainy bank holiday remaking lots of playlists, this can be fun, especially if you do it with someone else, or it can just be irritating, so start early!
If you do have OCD…
Then you can do the same thing, ‘Get Info’ and the go crazy, even add lyrics – bizarre but so useful really, problem is when you have 10503 songs like I have…
If you have 10503 songs like I have..
Then perhaps try TuneUp – it does this all for you! But I think doing it yourself along the way is safer.