{"id":218,"date":"2006-05-10T13:06:03","date_gmt":"2006-05-10T18:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/devinreams.com\/2006\/05\/10\/music-management-tips\/"},"modified":"2006-05-10T13:06:03","modified_gmt":"2006-05-10T18:06:03","slug":"music-management-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/?p=218","title":{"rendered":"Music Management Tips"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With over 10,000 songs in my iTunes Library (all legally acquired, I swear) I constantly find myself &#8216;discovering&#8217; music. But, I&#8217;ve also realized there are a ton of albums I never listen to and would never want to in the future. Thus, the following are some of my methods to organizing the madness:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Get the tags right:<\/strong> First, I downloaded an automatic tagging program that correctly identified about 90% of my songs. Unfortunately some live albumns (bootlegs) weren&#8217;t found so those had to be manually mass-edited. I also found a bunch of poorly named artists. For example, blink-182 vs Blink-182 vs blink182, etc. Then there&#8217;s the pleasure of finding &#8216;The Ying Yang Twins&#8217;, &#8216;Ying Yang Twins&#8217;, &#8216;Ying Yang Twins Feat. ______&#8217; etc.  In any case, let the software get the majority of the stuff cleaned up. There are a bunch of programs out there; some free, some not.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Find the dupes: <\/strong>From here I realized that I had literally hundreds of duplicates. Unfortunately iTunes has no way to easily remove them and I haven&#8217;t found any software that I can trust. So, when I feel ambitious I go through and Ctrl-Select a bunch that I know are simply duplicates. To this day I still have 1738 songs (thats over 4 days of music) that can be removed. Be careful, &#8216;Zak and Sara&#8217; on &#8216;Rockin&#8217; the Suburbs&#8217; is not the same as the one on &#8216;Ben Folds Live&#8217;. Thus, I don&#8217;t trust the software to do this part.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Smart people use smart playlists:<\/strong> Dragging and dropping stuff into playlists is time consuming. Sure, its fun for making party mixes, but I&#8217;m usually looking for certain types of music (depening on the mood). Thus, make smart playlists like &#8220;&#8216;Genre is &#8216;Rap&#8217; or Artist is &#8216;Ying Yang Twins&#8217; or Artist is &#8230; and Rating is greater than 3.&#8221; This is great becuase it&#8217;ll automatically add new music when I add it to my Library. I also have &#8216;My Top Rated&#8217; (greater than 3), &#8216;Four Stars&#8217;, &#8216;Five Stars&#8217;, and my favorite: &#8216;New Hotness&#8217;. All 4 and 5 star songs that haven&#8217;t been listened to 6 times is in this list. I still have over 300 songs that I&#8217;ve only listened to a few times (but are freaking awesome). Smart Playlists are extremely powerful.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Shuffle your library and start rating: <\/strong>In order to understand how much of my music should be deleted I simply play my Library on Shuffle and rate every song that plays. It helps having a second monitor becuase I can always have iTunes focused. After some time has passed I go back to the albums containing the 1 or 2 star songs and see if there&#8217;s anything in that album worth keeping. If not, purge away!<\/li>\n<li><strong>Rate songs as soon as you add them:<\/strong> I&#8217;m in the habit of listening to every song as soon as I add it to my Library (to prevent future build-up). This way I know (based on ratings) whether or not the music should even stick around for more than a few days. Plus, rating it as soon as I add it automatically pushes it to &#8220;New Hotness&#8221;, my playlist of choice.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Is there anything out there that you guys have done that works especially well? I&#8217;m all about trying new &#8220;systems&#8221; and I definitely need to get this monster collection under control.<\/p>\n<p>[tags]music, mp3, collection, itunes, organization[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With over 10,000 songs in my iTunes Library (all legally acquired, I swear) I constantly find myself &#8216;discovering&#8217; music. But, I&#8217;ve also realized there are a ton of albums I never listen to and would never want to in the future. Thus, the following are some of my methods to organizing the madness: Get the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[64,71],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","tag-music","tag-organization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.reams.me\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}