Tutorials

I want to show you how I managed to effectively organise my iTunes library, keeping it simple while not sacrificing detail, and without spending days doing it. I reduced the Genres List by 75%  and ended up with really great ways of rediscovering my own library. I currently have some 8500+ songs in my library, from widely different styles ranging from Irish Traditional to Classical Hindustani to Argentine Ska and, believe it or not, I can now find everything I want to listen to right away. Keep reading if I got you  interested.

The problem

Our music collections are growing. The price per gigabyte of storage keeps going down, and there’s more music out there that we can possibly imagine. And of course, we want it all. Given time, a healthy musical curiosity and a fast Internet connection, your iTunes Library will go crazy. Unknown albums, Unknown Artists, unhelpful Genres (Traditional Turkmenistani, anyone?), and not a thing can help, not even the once-useful iTunes Search, because there is simply no proper metadata to search by.

The solution

A short post at Lifehacker suggested a solution. By tagging your music instead of filing it (using the little-known Grouping attribute instead of Genre), you could then use Smart Playlists to filter your collection in any way you saw fit. Go read that post, I’ll wait.

While tagging certainly is more flexible than filing, after thorough testing I found this method to be a bit too flexible. In other words, you soon ended up with another mess inside the Grouping attribute, and the bloated, ugly Genre list was still there looking at you.

After some more testing I improved this already great original idea by adding to it the concept of taxonomies. If you’re not familiar with the term, a taxonomy is a way of grouping items (e.g. Color=Red). Since we’re talking about music here, two useful taxonomies come to mind: Country and Language, which we’ll use to identify where an artist is from, and in which language they sing. You could also add Instruments, but hey, let’s keep it simple.

Finally, one of iTunes 9’s less known new features is the revamped Column Browser, which now makes it possible to filter by our friend the Grouping attribute, which is excellent for our task at hand. Oh and by the way Apple, you spelled “Groupings” in the Column Browser, but “Grouping” in the Get Info window. Thought nobody would spot that, hmm?

First thing first: trim your genres!

Before diving into this taxonomy thingy, though, start by trimming your genre list. Go into Grid Mode (cmd+alt+4 Macs) and select the Genres tab. Pick one of the more obscure ones, edit (right mouse click, Get Info) and make all its items look more mainstream. Repeat until your Genre List looks as boring as Tower Record’s aisles. Yes, genres in your library should match aisles in a record store, and not sections in record bays. Use the broadest genres you can think of. Trust me, you’ll see why later.

• Good examples: World, Latin, Rock & Pop, Soundtrack, Children, Electronic, Classical.
• Bad examples: Celtic, Latin-Colombia, Choral, French chanson, Americana, Throat Singing, Instrumental.

When in doubt, go for those genres iTunes has icons for, because if nothing else, they’re sexy. Don’t be afraid of using big ‘catch-all’ genres such as Rock, Pop or Soundtrack, because you’ll be slicing your library using Smart Playlists anyway, ninja-style. My Library has barely 25 genres now, and my “Rock & Pop” genre has 196 albums and 1930 songs, in case you were wondering.

There is one exception, though. If you’re a true connoisseur of a particular genre, and you absolutely need to add a few extra subgenres to show off your amazing filing skills at let’s say, Qawwali, by all means do so (Qawaali Fusion and Qawalli Remix are good subgenres for that, by the way). It’s your library after all, and any system should work for you, not the other way around.

Finally, if you’re like me you’d like to tag songs individually by genre, regardless of the album’s main genre, such as a Spoken Word interlude between songs from a Soundtrack album. Resist this impulse, unless it makes perfect sense to you. Make all songs inside an album have the same genre.

Adding taxonomies

Now it’s time to start adding tags and taxonomies to the Grouping attribute. For example, let’s say you’ve selected all the songs from ABBA’s excellent compilation Gold. I would tag them like this (and as a matter of fact, I have):

What this means is that all 19 songs will be tagged as being from the planet Sweden, and sung in English. I separate tags and taxonomies with simple commas, but anything will do really. I’m used to commas.

From here on, you can add more tags and/or taxonomies as you see fit. Examples could be “dance”, “80’s sparty”, “Bands with creepy haircuts” or “When mainstream music didn’t suck”. As they say, the sky’s the limit, but the more anal you get with the tagging, the easier it’ll be to find your music later. Basically lather, rinse, repeat until your obsessive-compulsive inner self is happy.

Enter Really Smart Playlists

So, you’ve tagged all you music. Congratulations! Now the fun begins. Let’s create a Smart Playlist (cmd+alt+N if you’re on a Mac) to match Swedish music, as follows:

Simple, huh? This will grab all the ABBA music in your library (admit it, you have some!), as well as Yngwie Malmsteen, Roxette, Ace of Base and The Cardigans (and maybe now would be a good time to  meditate on your musical tastes, don’t you think?). Now switch to Grid View, and you might see something like this:

See the selected Smart Playlist on the left? You can create as many as you want, as I have, and even combine multiple Grouping filters. So next time you need your fix of Japanese videogame orchestral soundtrack music, you’ll only have to create the following Smart Playlist:

Yes, the mind boggles. And by the way, you can see an example of a subgenre right there with Soundtrack (Videogames). Maybe one day I’ll merge them all in a Soundtrack genre, and create more tags to split them apart, but for the time being, I have three different types of soundtracks, and all is well.

Some example cases

• U2’s music is Rock & Pop (genre) and Country=Ireland, Language=English (grouping). Instrumentals such as The Unforgettable Fire’s “4th of July” lack the Language=English taxonomy, since there are no lyrics, but sport the Instrumental tag.
• Music by Iranian pop star Andy Madadian is World (genre) and Country=Iran (grouping). He sings in many different languages, so Language=Farsi is not always the case.
• Madness is Rock & Pop (genre), and Country=UK, Language=English, Ska (grouping). I don’t use a Ska genre for the reasons outlined above. Keep the genres always as simple as possible, unless, well, you happen to be a Ska nut.
• The genre for the soundtrack to Guy Ritchie’s movie Snatch is Soundtrack (Films), and the Grouping attribute changes from song to song. You have Soul, Spoken Word, 80s Pop, Ska, Electronica, Jewish traditional instrumentals, Brit Pop, and Motown. And you can feed them all into the Grouping attribute. This is a good example where this taxonomy+tags method really shines, because there’s simply no other organization method that can handle this level of diversity within a single album.
• Señor Coconut’s album El Baile Alemán – Latin versions of Kraftwerk gets the Latin genre, and something like Country=Germany, Country=Chile, Covers as Grouping.

Conclusion

This method solved all the problems that came from having a large and varied iTunes music collection. Sure, you have some tagging work to be done, and depending on how precise you want to be, it could take a looooong time, but hey, nothing worth doing is easy.

So finally, you might ask why using Genres after all? It is a good question, and we could technically do away with genres completely, but iTunes has them hardwired in several places by default, so I think it’s best to let them be… just don’t get too picky with them. They’re aisles in a music store anyway, remember? And you don’t complain with that, do you?

I hope this tutorial was useful, and if you spot any errors or typos or there’s anything you’d like to say, use the comment form!

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