Whip iTunes Back Into Shape
I will gladly admit that I am fairly anal when it comes to my music. I like it to be organized and complete. I switched machines a few times over the years and lost my entire library at least once. After that it was so disorganized I stopped tending to it out of frustration. Upon buying an iPod Touch a few months ago I decided it was time to trim and reorganize my library then restore 100% cover art status. It took some time but now that my Library is complete it looks and feels great.
If you are looking to organize and clean up your Library check out some of these great tools.
GimmieSomeTune
GimmieSomeTune will automagically fetch missing artwork and lyrics while you listen. It’s nice and unobtrusive with lots of preferences. GimmieSomeTune includes a slew of other features including hotkeys, last.fm scrobbling and a mini controller.
I Love Stars
Rating your library looks and feels good (it’s also useful). I Love Stars is a freebie from Potion Factory that shows a song’s star rating in your menu bar. You can rate directly in the menu bar or just use it as a visual reminder. I forget to rate songs without I Love Stars hanging out in my menu bar and the funky little in and out animation is fun.
Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
When it comes to organizing your Library using the script menu can yield some powerful results. Doug’s site is a great place to find AppleScripts for very specific tasks. My favourites are:
Tracks Without Artwork to Playlist
This one saved my life when trying to achieve 100% cover art status. It scours your Library and puts all tracks without coverart into one playlist which you can work through at your leisure.
Gather Up the One-Hits
If you have a single song by a single artist it is rounded up into a playlist.
Set Video Kind of Selected
Organizing video content can be a test in patience. Run this little script to quickly edit the video kind (Movie, TV Show or Music Video) and set the show name, season number and episode number for TV shows. Must have for handbrake users.
Quick Tag
Some people love to organize by tagging. Though it is somewhat non-standard you can wield smart playlists and advanced searches like a meta-ninja master. Quick Tag offers a simple interface with hotkey integration, autocomplete, multiple track tagging and more.
View Duplicates
No special tool needed here just up to the menu bar and click iTunes » view » show duplicates. I was amazed at the number of dupes I had floating around wasting space on my HD and screwing with my iPod syncing. Nothing is more satisfying than freeing up space!
Tah Dah
Well, these are some of the tools I have found helpful at one time or another. Once you get your Library back into shape you might want to show it off a little with the iTunes screensaver or CoverSutra.
Anyone else know of some other handy tools or techniques to make iTunes managing life easier? Let me know in the comments, I’d love to hear what you’re using
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Comments
Another great solution would be Corripio, which will find album art, lyrics, and correct tags for large collections of songs. I, sadly, haven’t had any luck with it. I do know, however, that although there hasn’t been work on it recently, the developers are working on a 1.0 release and suggested that I try this for getting artwork: http://blog.omega-prime.co.uk/2008/03/03/google-images-plugin-for-corripio/. Anyway, keep your eyes on this one, because if it gets fixed, it will be great for quickly and easily maintaining your library.
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Two more I forgot to mention:
Tangerine! also by Potion Factory. One of it’s amazing features is to analyze BPM and place that in the music file, which is great if you wanna play around with it in something like djay. It will also make mixes based on BPM. It’s $24.95
iEatBrainz. This one will “listen” to your tracks and match them up with the MusicBrainz server to offer correct tags. Sometimes it’s incorrect, most often when a work samples another, but it’s free and easily one of my top 5 favorite apps ever.
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One thing I got sick of was my genres. I ended up formatting them as such: {format}: {subformat}: {subformat} etc. This results in genres like “Rock: Indie”, “Rock: Indie: Shoegaze”, “Rock: Indie: Eclectic”, “Rock: Metal: Hardcore: Dissonant”, and so on. From this point, Smart Playlists are your friend, and it’s a great way to be as broad (or as narrow) for picking genres as you want.
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Fixtunes. This software is for those of us, like myself, who have MP3’s all over the place. Different filename formatting, incomplete ID3 tags.. etc.
Fixtunes will help you straighten out your MP3 library quickly. After loading your library into FixTunes it then does a database lookup of your selected songs and will fill in the blanks from any missing data you might want/need. It can also rename/move files as you fix them. Great program.. highly recommended to anyone with a large MP3 collection.
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cawlin reply on July 10, 2008 11:34 pm:
You know, I tried FixTunes and couldn’t get it to work properly. Might be worth trying again though, thanks!
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Brian reply on July 11, 2008 8:36 am:
If FixTunes isn’t your cup of tea I’ve heard of people using MediaMonkey. It’s pretty much an All in one tool for sorting your library out.
And to answer nick’s question, I believe (if i recall correctly) that it actually allows you to attach the album art directly to the MP3 as opposed to having it in the album art dir of itunes.
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cawlin,
It’s nice to see I’m not the only one who’s anal about my iTunes library! I found all of this very interesting and useful. Comments too. Thanks a lot!
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This is great but I was wondering if you could help at all… I’ve got all the artwork on my iTunes library, but somehow, almost all has stopped showing on my iPod, but not all. The artwork is still there if I connect it to my PC but won’t show when it plays. Any idea how this happened so I can prevent it in the future? Or even better, any idea how to get it all back?
mtia
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cawlin reply on July 11, 2008 3:34 pm:
Maybe try this apple doc:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300248
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easier way to whipitunes into shape, uninstall the bastard! can’t stand that mac shitware, also fun fact: look in the end user licence agreement for itunes and search for the text :nuclear
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Cool BLog. I have about a million duplicates. When i show duplicates it automatically shows the duplicates and the original so I cannot delete them all at once. Even when I delete a song it stays on my computers hard drive. How can I get rid of all of these in one easy delete? Any suggestions from an expert would be great. THanks
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cawlin reply on July 13, 2008 12:03 pm:
When you show duplicates hold command and select all the songs you would like to delete. When you hit delete a prompt should show up that looks like this:
make sure you choose “move to trash”. This should permanently delete the song from your library. Let me know if this works for you!
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chris andrews reply on July 17, 2008 2:15 pm:
when i hit the delete key i get a box saying. if you delete these files they will automatically be removed form your itunes folder and any syncing ipod or other device. and then it says are you sure you wish to continue. i don’t get any kind of box like you get
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i will definitely look into some of these applications since I too am obsessed with organizing my library 
another thing you might wanna check out is Songbird which is like firefox… you can add a bunch of add-ons according to what you like to use and can import your entire itunes library which is nice
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Most of these are for Mac so I don’t know what they’re like
but check out iGrabber for Windows.
It does the same as Gimmesometune
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the one thing that I really wished that I could do on itunes is search for broken links and auto-repair them. Is there an easier way than
-move file
-oh shit broken link
-try to play
-point itunes to the song
-resume play
or
-move file
-delete from itunes library immediately
-re-add the file[s]
? Drives me nuts!
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cawlin reply on July 31, 2008 11:58 pm:
I don’t know of an elegant way to solve this problem. I ended up bowing to iTunes and letting it store all my music in one place. It works great for me, though I understand the desire to store music in separate places.
If you are on a mac you could try this applescript:
http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=bringoutyerdead
It will try to find missing files and repair them. Haven’t tried it myself but worth a shot!
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This really helped, thank you!
My only comment really is
if that’s a screen capture of your itunes
you have great taste in music.
haha
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Just wanted to say that I absolutely love your blog and the awesome and extremely useful things you find and create. Thank you very much
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cawlin reply on June 17, 2008 10:50 pm:
Thanks for the kind words!
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