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How do YOU organize your iTunes?

S

SirStrumalot

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 28, 2011
391
4
Minneapolis, MN
Just wondering. I have a ton of music I ripped from CDs, but never really got around to organizing. Any software you guys use that can find album covers/album etc.. and update stuff?

Just wondering... Tips and suggestions welcome!
 
SirStrumalot said:
Just wondering. I have a ton of music I ripped from CDs, but never really got around to organizing. Any software you guys use that can find album covers/album etc.. and update stuff?

Just wondering... Tips and suggestions welcome!
Click to expand...
iTunes does this now. Go to the Advanced menu and there is Get Album Art and Get Track Names. On the rare occasion iTunes doesn't have an album cover I just use Google Images.
 
In most cases iTunes finds the cover art. If it isn't found by iTunes, I scan the cover at a reasonable resolution. From time to time I look for it online, I use iTunes since many years and not all covers have been imported along with the songs.
 
What about album names? Is there any way to get these updated?

Also, thanks for the tip about iTunes... I didn't know it could find the artwork.
 
The CD and tracknames are also searched for online by iTunes, you have to be connected to the internet when you import a CD. That used to be a problem in the early days when internet wasn't on all the time.
To download cover art you'll need an account in the iTunes store, to find tracknames your computer just needs an internet connection.
 
After getting increasingly annoyed with low bit-rates, crappy track titling and flakey album art, have come around to the conclusion that it's best to do this properly... and just the once because I'm not going to do this ever again in my life.

Currently working through about 1300 titles, this may take a year or two, which goes as follows:

• Properly rip the CD in XLD to AIFF and Flac according to private tracker standards, fixing track titles and other info pulled from CDDB, double-checking against Discogs

• Reimport to iTunes, then using a selection of Doug's AppleScripts to clean up track titles

• Convert to Apple Lossless within iTunes

• Re-edit playcounts (because some playlists need it) using another of Doug's AppleScripts

• Scan cover and clean up in Photoshop using a combo of manual and batch editing, save master at 2400x2400px. Titles that have missing or damaged artwork are pulled from mega-search.net, with the best highest-resolution results usually coming from allcdcovers.com and coverparadise.to

• Add cleaned up artwork to each track at 1200 x 1200px

• Tag each processed album as 'Archived' in Comments

• Store Flacs and scanned artwork to archive folders to eventually get burned onto archival media, which hopefully will be Blu-Rays at some point in the next couple of years.

Everything done so far sounds and looks great. This is about as future-proofing as much as anything. Also helps to have a two terabyte drive. :)
 
Have any of you guy used anything other than iTunes lately? Other competitors caught up and iTunes looks and feels last gen.

The reason why I'm brining this up is because organizing music in iTunes is a hassle :/
 
polkunus said:
Have any of you guy used anything other than iTunes lately? Other competitors caught up and iTunes looks and feels last gen.

The reason why I'm brining this up is because organizing music in iTunes is a hassle :/
Click to expand...

I was thinking of doing that but all these years I've been using iTunes (both on Windows and now OS X) and it took a long time to organize 3974 songs and I don't plan on doing that again with another program. Regardless if it "feels" last gen, iTunes does what I need it to do, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But I'm interested in other people trying and seeing if they're getting good results.
 
polkunus said:
Have any of you guy used anything other than iTunes lately? Other competitors caught up and iTunes looks and feels last gen.

The reason why I'm brining this up is because organizing music in iTunes is a hassle :/
Click to expand...

Sometimes itunes pisses me off but I've spent a lot of time organizing tracks, rating songs, etc in itunes so its just not worth it to switch. Plus it would just be a pain to sync to my iPad, phone, and pod with anything else.
 
I have a 37GB library and iTunes only found less than 10% of the artwork.

Ive never got round to downloading the imaes from google. Maybe one day.

I keep my library on a different drive to OSX. If you play around with moving/organising its worth making a clone of the drive. iTunes is easy to use but even easier to mess up.
 
Sorry for hi jacking your thread.

I thought iTunes users may help me out. I am trying to organize my library. There are information (genres, track #, year, etc) that i want to delete. It will take a year if i do it one by one. Is there any way i can do it all at once? I've been searching for hours and the closest thing i found is this website (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts09.php?page=4)

iTunes is very difficult to use. When i click more Get info in iTunes; it will show up the info but when i navigate to the actual file and click Get info; it doesn't show as much as info in iTunes. When i was using PC... i can see all information from clicking the actual file.
 
gngan said:
Sorry for hi jacking your thread.

I thought iTunes users may help me out. I am trying to organize my library. There are information (genres, track #, year, etc) that i want to delete. It will take a year if i do it one by one. Is there any way i can do it all at once? I've been searching for hours and the closest thing i found is this website (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts09.php?page=4)

iTunes is very difficult to use. When i click more Get info in iTunes; it will show up the info but when i navigate to the actual file and click Get info; it doesn't show as much as info in iTunes. When i was using PC... i can see all information from clicking the actual file.
Click to expand...

To get rid of the same info i.e. year, genre etc, just go to edit, select all, right click over the page and select 'get info' then delete the info from the fields you don't want.

You could just go to view options and untick the bits you don't want to see in the itunes window.

Not logged into my mac at the mo, but both should work.
 
gngan said:
Sorry for hi jacking your thread.

I thought iTunes users may help me out. I am trying to organize my library. There are information (genres, track #, year, etc) that i want to delete. It will take a year if i do it one by one. Is there any way i can do it all at once? I've been searching for hours and the closest thing i found is this website (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/scripts09.php?page=4)

iTunes is very difficult to use. When i click more Get info in iTunes; it will show up the info but when i navigate to the actual file and click Get info; it doesn't show as much as info in iTunes. When i was using PC... i can see all information from clicking the actual file.
Click to expand...

I've heard good things about Tagalicious. It will find all the metadata automatically, and I've read it is very good at finding accurate information as well. It's in the Mac App Store.
 
I prefer manually adding artwork from sites like Album Art Exchange. They have higher quality artwork than iTunes will download. I also don't let iTunes manage my files. I prefer my own folder/file structure to iTunes' method.
 
I've never been very happy with how iTunes (via Gracenote) identifies genres. Most of what I like gets flagged as "alternative and punk" even though that is usually not the case. I almost always end up relabeling the genres based on my own knowledge, and if I'm not sure I use resources like last.fm and look at the tags to see what makes better sense.
 
Has anybody actually tried Tagalicious? Any comments on it? Can't find any video reviews, and I don't want to spend $20 on it without any idea of how well it does what it claims to do.
 
iBrody said:
To get rid of the same info i.e. year, genre etc, just go to edit, select all, right click over the page and select 'get info' then delete the info from the fields you don't want.

You could just go to view options and untick the bits you don't want to see in the itunes window.

Not logged into my mac at the mo, but both should work.
Click to expand...

THANK YOU! It works! I was thinking i may need to do it one by one!
 
SirStrumalot said:
Just wondering. I have a ton of music I ripped from CDs, but never really got around to organizing. Any software you guys use that can find album covers/album etc.. and update stuff?

Just wondering... Tips and suggestions welcome!
Click to expand...

iTunes finds it automatically! And you can have it organize by song, artist, album.. or genre.
 
SirStrumalot said:
Has anybody actually tried Tagalicious? Any comments on it? Can't find any video reviews, and I don't want to spend $20 on it without any idea of how well it does what it claims to do.
Click to expand...

There's a trial version available allowing you to tag up to 50 songs (I think) for free
 
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