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How do YOU organize your iTunes library?

My buddy just outgrew his iMac's hard drive so he bought a really nice Lacie external drive and asked me to come over and migrate iTunes, etc.

I literally laughed when I started poking around his music. He wasn't using a single playlist for about 100GB of music. I just always taken it as a given that people with large libraries(and especially "album listeners" like I'm sure most of us are) create a playlist that is the name of the artist and album i.e. Television-Marquee Moon.

He says he just uses cover-flow to navigate through everything. Watching him take like 45 seconds to find a specific album using that method I just had to show him the light.

After a little tutorial he told me that this was like a revelation and he never even thought about doing this where as I never thought about doing it any other way. He freaked out at first because we started making a few hundred playlists but I think I have him on the right track. I mean...pick an album from the playlists listed and listen...right?

Does this make sense? Do ya'll not do this? What do YOU do?
128x128synthfreek
thomasedison
34 posts
 
Synthfreek,

I have been playing around with your suggested playlist method of organizing iTunes. I now see some of your logic.

I didn't know about the macro to make a playlist from a selected artist or album and that is very cool.

I appreciate that selecting a playlist of an album is the only way to show that album's artwork by itself on full screen without showing other albums around it (standard cover view).

However, I haven't figured out how you can be taken to a specific playlist by typing in the search bar. With my huge library, that is essential for me to get to what I want quickly.
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
5,273 posts
 
Within reason there's no right or wrong way to organize playlists. Whatever works or doesn't work for someone really doesn't have any bearing on what works for someone else.

I wish there were more dedicated fields for organizing. For instance, having separate producer, engineer, record label, mastered by, and musician fields would make it much easier to generate smart playlists.
synthfreek's avatar
synthfreek OP
627 posts
 
Thomasedison you don't use the search field just click on the very first playlist(or any playlist) and just start typing.
thomasedison
34 posts
 
Wow. It works. That is a hidden function. Thanks.
kthomas
911 posts
 
Onhwy61 - the desire for more dedicated fields for organizing is the #1 reason I use J River. You can add as many fields as you like to their already large standard offering, and the fields can be complex (calculated, for example). All fields, standard or user, can be used to create indices, and the UI for when you choose an index, and then narrowing within that index, is extremely intuitive. All of the indices are stored separately such that searching and sorting are quick even with very large collections.

I've never understood why the other media players don't allow for this as well.
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