[ceej]

{quote}polymnia said:

"You do, of course, have to manually add the 'full-album' comment to each song on the record."{quote}

Perhaps you know this already, but if you select multiple items in the iTunes list, then select Get Info (right click-> Get Info -or- File: Get Info) you can edit multiple items simultaneously. This is the easiest way to add comments to multiple items. You will only be presented with fields that make sense to edit this way.
Message was edited by: ceej: Hey, how come the "quoting" markup doesn't show up on comments on the first page with the article?

[ceej]

As illustrated by all the comments here, Smart Playlists are a great way to manage your music, whatever the purpose. Smart Playlists are incredibly powerful and flexible. They deserve an article all their own.

[mdawson]

As the posts here clearly demonstrate, what I have stated on these boards time and time again is very true: iTunes is as powerful as the user is organized. Many of iTunes organizational features will fall flat for most iTunes users simply due to laziness. A library that is not properly and consistently tagged is not going to respond properly to things such as smart playlist criteria.

I do not bother with song ratings because I either listen to songs or I do not. I rip my CDs in their entirety and those songs that I do not listen to are not checked and are not in playlists. Thus, of the 13,500 songs in my iTunes library, currently only about 3000 to 3500 are actually ever played, let alone synced to my iPod.

My iPod Shiffle only ever has house and club music synced to it, as that iPod was purchased specifically for the gym. My main iPod is synced to all of my playlists. Once I finished ripping all of my CDs last year, I found that I had overestimated the required capacity, otherwise I would have gone for a higher bit rate for my music; I rip my music as 160 Kbps AAC. Of course, I still have 1200 records to digitize and a wish list of over 1000 songs that comes to around 500 CDs given groups of songs from the same album.

I planned my very meticulous playlist tree before I ripped the first CD onto my Mac. That tree has grown since the original planning, but the underlying structure made those additions a breeze. Whiole iTunes is not perfect, many of the complaints that I have seen about iTunes as far as organization are concerned lie squarely on the user haphazardly leaving their library in disarray.

[Commenter]

iPhone Users - anyone try Simplify? Seems to allow access to one's complete library.

[polymnia]

Regarding Simplify: Yes it does allow access to the whole Library. The downside is the fact that it is a 3rd party App and as such as soon as you check an email, send a text or your phone rings it loses its connection and you need to restart again to get at your tunes. It also seems to take forever to initialize a large library. Unfortunately, a large library is exactly WHY YOU NEED THIS APP! It becomes less useful the more you need it.

[adamkorycki]

All my music library (150 GB) is in AIFF format - I keep it uncompressed.
I switch on a Manually managed music & video function for my iPhone 16 GB. Then I convert (duplicate) entire music to AAC 128 kbps format and import it to iPhone. Then I delete all AAC music file from my library to avoid duplicated entries for Front Row.
After that I right down (in the name of iTunes folder) date of the newest song imported to iPhone. Next time I sync, I just convert and import to iPhone only song newer than above date. It is a bit of work, but at least I have all my music with me.
Dear Apple, what I miss in syncing to iPhone is the function unique to iPod Shuffle syncing - option to automatically convert music to MP3 128 kbps while syncing.

[polymnia]

It's true that your library is what you make of it. Me and my girlfriend's libraries consist of pretty much the same tunes since we share everything except her brittany spears & paris hilton christmas songs, but I digress... My iTunes is extensively starred and I do my best to keep the genres in order, apply recording dates and manage smart playlists using all this tagging. She has made a few old-fashioned playlists. I call them stupid playlists (though certainly not to her face!) in contrast to the smart ones. Bottom line, she has a 32GB Touch that's full of music and I have a 16GB iPhone full as well. You'd think we'd listen to her Touch when we are together, but we always listen to my phone. It's much better organised.

[context]

iTunes permits on-the-fly down-conversion of files moved from iTunes to the Shuffle. I use Apple Lossless for all the music in my iTunes collection, and life would be much easier if Apple permitted the same automatic conversion for files moved to iPods other than the Shuffle.

[mdawson]

Quote

polymnia wrote:

...we share everything except her brittany spears & paris hilton christmas songs...

:^0 :^0 :^0 :^0 :^0 :^0 :^0

Quote

polymnia wrote:

My iTunes is extensively starred and I do my best to keep the genres in order, apply recording dates and manage smart playlists using all this tagging.

I generally avoid ratings as I indicated in my previous post, but I did attempt to use the rating for selection prioritization in iTunes DJ (nee Party Shuffle). I use playlists near exclusively for organizational purposes, but always playback music using iTunes DJ. The issue is that the contents of my selection makes some of the random selection less than desirable.

For instance, my Urban Radio smart playlist, which I listen to most of the time, is made up a four other smart playlists?e.g., Urban Radio (1970s), Urban Radio (1980s), etc.?each of which is made up from various distinct playlists?R&B (1970), R&B (1971), ?; Rap (1979-1981), Rap (1982), ?; etc. Unlike actual radio play, which I am trying to achieve all of my tracks are given equal priority so I noticed that just as many slow jams were being selected as up tempo songs; if I wanted to hear that many slow jams in a sitting I would specifically select one of those playlists.

So what I did was use the ratings to prioritize music in the R&B, Dance and Pop playlists, giving secondary priority to Rap and low priority (no stars) to slow jams. The selection is now better with prioritizing what gets selected, but I have noticed that having ?Select higher rated songs more often? enabled causes issues with randomization constraints. One blatant issue is that more often than not a song will be selected twice within a few songs if not consecutively. While that is feasible in truly random selection, it should not happen in iTunes from a playlist containing 2700+ songs.

It would be nice if iTunes had priorities to smart playlists built from other playlists. In that way when as feature such as iTunes DJ is used, the priority of the sub-playlist is factored into song selection. In that way, my Urban Radio playlist would behave more like daytime urban radio over the past four decades with R&B being dominant, followed by rap?although rap now dominates urban airplay?with the occasional slow jam thrown in from time-to-time.

[Natasha12]

"Perhaps you know this
already, but if you select multiple items in the iTunes list, then
select Get Info (right click-> Get Info -or- File: Get Info) you can
edit multiple items simultaneously. This is the easiest way to add
comments to multiple items. You will only be presented with fields that
make sense to edit this way."





Thank you so much Ceej . This tip is a big help for me. I am a new user and I hope this will help me a lot be more organized.

[dzanre]

I actually like "Doug's Scripts" a lot for managing iTunes. He has one that allows you to mark multiple items, and choose a field to append to rather than replace. This allows me to keep whatever I have in the comments field already and just "add" something to either the beginning or the end. If you aren't familiar with these scripts, his site is at http://dougscripts.com/itunes/

D

[polymnia]

Perhaps you are leaving the playlist paradigm totally behind. Your Radio Station metaphor might be a more appropriate name for a new playback/shuffle tool for iTunes. A Radio station could be drawn from any set of playlists, percetages could be applied to favor one over another (20%Rap 5%Slow Jams & 75%R&B) with perhaps settings that would allow for DJ-type segues & tangents (string a few songs together in the same genre or from the same era, etc.). iTunes Radio stations would control more HOW the shuffle function of iTunes works than WHAT the shuffle function picks from. Genius is an interesting step in that direction, but it is just a black box—we don't get any control of the criteria used to get a Genius list. This hits on the intent I've had since starting to use iTunes to organize my music 6 or 7 years ago. I want to recreate an authentic DJ radio experience using my tunes.

[PDost]

It's nice to see that there are others as meticulous (some might say anal) about their metadata as I am. I have a series of smart playlists that I use to automatically present me with the music that I am likely to want to listen to (See http://www.stickygrass.com/iTimes). My library has about 30K songs and anything I don't like, I delete. I rate songs two stars if I don't like it and one star if it has a technical problem. One star songs eventually get replaced, but two star songs die an electronic death in the trash can.
I do also use the checked songs option to keep seasonal stuff like Christmas songs off my iPod except at Christmas time. It's easy with a smart playlist of Christmas music (I put the word Christmas in the comments field of any such songs). I make extensive use of the comments field to indicate things like Live, Instrumental, Christian, etc. This helps the smart playlists tick smoothly.

[mdawson]

Agreed. I would guess that the feature is not supported due to how long syncing would take with the larger capacity iPods as opposed to the iPod Shuffle. I would personally prefer to have the music in my library stored either as uncompressed AIFF?particularly given that large capacity hard drives are rather inexpensive these days?or Apple Lossless. That way, there is no loss of quality when I play my music at home through higher-end equipment, but can have AAC files synced to my iPods.