Advice: Play it again, Sam: 12 ways to organise your music collection.

You’re writing about how to organise you music? On a business blog? Yep – you heard it right. As put so eloquently in the movie ‘The Castle’, it’s just, well, ‘the vibe’ of it, really…

It doesn’t matter whether you’re in small business, big business, working from home, or not working at all: music can help set your mood, sometimes for clarity of thought, sometimes to cause a welcome distraction, and sometimes for anything in between.

The following 12 points show you how to organise your music a little smarter – and so that you can at least claim that the time you spend reorganising your music is somewhat ‘business related’, we’ll call it ‘new media training’.

I’ll assume for the sake of popularity that you’re using iTunes as your music library software on your computer, and an iPod as a portable player – most concepts are easily translatable if you use something different.

1. Update any songs with missing info.

If a track is missing it’s artist or genre (perhaps because you were offline when you imported it) simply select the tracks – shift-click to select multiple – and choose ‘Get CD track names’ from the Advanced menu. iTunes grabs the track names from a central database, based on the *exact* length of a track – and considering that your computer calculates the time to over a millionth of a second, there’s not many tracks it can’t distinguish.

2. Randomise everything.

There’s nothing worse than ‘knowing’ what song will come next – the aim here is to provide an uninterrupted flow of good music to lift your mood, and not have you playing the same 10 songs over and over – in order! In iTunes, see that little crossed pair of arrows in the extreme bottom left? Click that button, or just turn on Shuffle from the Controls menu.

3. Party Shuffle.

The ultimate in random-ness is the Party Shuffle – it’s the top option in the Playlists in your left side panel. Choose from either your whole library, or from what Playlist to take the songs, and check the box ‘play higher rated songs more often’ – we’ll get to that in a minute.

4. Remove duplicate songs.

The only thing worse than knowing what some is going to come next (and singing it before begins playing!) is getting *the exact same song* following the one you just heard – most likely, you’ve got duplicates from either multiple CD imports, or from singles and albums with the same tracks on both. Go View menu, and Show Duplicates – and downgrade, delete or simply UNCHECK whichever version you don’t want. To uncheck a song, click the tick box next to the track name – that will simply prevent it from ever playing, while still keeping your albums intact.

5. Browse by Genre.

In iTunes, go to the View menu, and choose ‘show browser’. You’ll be presented with three boxes up top, letting you choose to vie only certain Genres, Artists or Albums. The most powerful of these is Genre, since you can then get the same musical style across different artists. If you like two of three Genres exclusively for a particular mood, then make a smart playlist, as outlined below

6. Use the star ratings.

iTunes provides you with a convenient, arbitrary way to catalogue your music according to your own level of enjoyment by the ‘stars’ ratings. Click on the stars to change from zero stars, up to five stars. On your iPod, click the centre button when a track is playing to go from volume control, to playhead position control, to star ratings control. Next time you sync, your ratings will be reflected on either platform.

My methodology is to use a zero rating to show that I haven’t rated the music yet; one star for rated, but the track is probably only surviving in my library because it’s part of a decent album; two stars for ‘nice’, but not great, 3 stars for good music, but not ‘inspiring’; 4 stars for my favourites; and 5 stars for the ones that really move me. Less than 10% of my songs are 5 stars – most are 3′s or 4′s.

7. Make custom playlists.

Press the ‘+’ button in the bottom left, or control-N (or Apple-N) for a new playlist. Then drag songs from your library into the playlist to permanently save that set. Drag the songs out, or drag the order within the playlist to suit.

8. Smart playlists #1: Multiple Genres.

Go File menu, New Smart Playlist. Set the first field to Genre, then choose a genre. Click the ‘+’ button to add more genre criteria, and there you go: all the music in your collection that matches those Genres, allowing you to make a master playlist of all ‘your’ favourite genres in one hit. Smart playlists transfer over to your iPod, but don’t change on your iPod after that. Resync to get any improvements to your smart playlist criteria.

9. Smart playlists #2: Star Ratings

I have three main smart playlists that are my mainstay: 3 stars plus, 4 stars plus and 4 stars -2 weeks. For the first two, make a new Smart Playlist with the criteria: Rating / is greater than / then either 2 stars or 3 stars.

10. Smart playlists #3: Not played last X weeks

In addition to the ’4 stars’ smart playlist, make a new playlist exact the same, but add the criteria: Last played / is not in the last / and choose your time span. That’ll keep your music selection fresh!

11. Smart playlists #3: Not Rated Yet

No doubt you’re getting the hang of smart playlists by now, so this one isn’t hard to set up: make one for all ‘zero stars’ ratings, so you can periodically scan back over recently added music, give them a rating of at least 1 star, and let your other smart playlists take up the new music you’ve added.

12. Smart playlists #4: Prolific artists

Some artists are highly prolific – they record with their own band, then sometimes solo, and then sometimes do some collaborations. Unfortunately, iTunes and iPods don’t ‘allow’ for this proliferation, and each new combination of artists working together get called a ‘brand new artist’. I’m sure you’re now able to make a new smart playlist by adding where: Artist / contains / then your artiste in question – so you’ll always have them all in one long playlist, and not scattered across your library.

13. (A freebie!) Smart muting with your bluetooth mobile phone.

Do you have bluetooth on your mobile phone? Spend $20 or so on some shareware and your computer will quickly mute all your music when you get an incoming call. Even better, since bluetooth only works for about 5-10 metres, you can even set proximity settings, to pause and lock your computer when you walk away, and restart your music and wake your computer when you walk into range again. Brilliant.

Whew!

In closing, I really do hope that your productivity goes *up* after this missive, and not *down*… I take no responsibility for the loss of any billable hours this month, nor for the accidental breakage of valuables if you play the air guitar too violently during work hours… Rock on, folks…

AB out