good times, man, good times

nostrich:

cleversimon:

I have 45 GB of music in my iTunes library. You may consider that massive or miniscule, but you have to agree it poses a bit of an organizational problem.

I don’t really use the Genre tag; maybe the solution lies there. Maybe I should spend a weekend constructing playlists (but what kind of playlists?). Or maybe you have a better idea.

How do you keep your music library organized?

My advice regarding library organization is always unpopular and always ignored, but hear me out here: delete most of your music.

This works for me, because I have a specific way of listening to music, and may not work so well for other people, but at least give it a chance. If you’re like me, you don’t listen to most of your music very regularly. In fact, you tend to have ~5-8 albums on constant rotation, switching one in and another out every week or so. Thus, if you’re like me, you don’t need that much music in your iTunes library. Anything that isn’t a regular listen? Delete it. Don’t back it up, don’t archive it somewhere, don’t give it any funny smart playlist-referenced tags, just fucking delete it.

iTunes isn’t suited to huge libraries of music. After a certain point, depending on your computer’s specifications, it will start taking longer and longer to launch, you’ll see more of that “Loading iTunes library” bar, and iTunes will become hell to use.

I agree with “just fucking delete it” to a certain extent.  And, actually,iTunes can be very helpful with this objective with ratings and smart lists. I have have a few “not played since…” lists and a “least played but high rated” list and I use those to re-evaluate and cull tracks.

As for the iTunes performance thing - my library is almost 7000 items and about 33GB. It’s running on a 4 year old iMac G5 and it goes great guns. None of that loading library stuff that Nostrich mentioned.