Tuesday 28 April 2009

Question: how do you organise your iTunes library?

Here's one for the commenters: I would like to know how you organise your iTunes library.

I am specifically trying to find out what your playlist structure is like. I'm not talking smart playlists here - I'm interested in your permanent playlists that you use to segregate your music to make it more manageable.

For example, I have about 25,000 tracks and I have bee 'umm'ing and 'err'ing on how best to organise them and structure them for listening (since I want to at least go through all the tracks and chuck out anything I don't like anymore). See this post to see where I've come from and where I'm trying to get to.

My latest 'idea' involves splitting my library into 3 main categories:

  • Music I bought on CD before the advent of the mp3 revolution
  • Music I have downloaded (and yes, I used Napster back in 2000 and 2001, so please don't judge me)
  • Music that was shared with me

I then have sub-categories under this do break the music down a bit more into nice chunks. Here is a screenshot of all my non-smart (thick?) playlists:

I am hoping that this will be a little less overbearing that a huge list of 25,000 tracks. At work, in the car and on my iPhone I have started listening to all the singles I bought on CD (1995 to 2000) which is quite amusing as I haven't heard all this stuff for years. At home we use the Genius function to give us random playlists based on a song we feel like hearing at the time.

I started listening to my entire library at about the same time I started this blog. Let's see how long it takes to get through it all…

Let me know how you organise your library or if you have a better way altogether.