Finally decided to buckle down and create some playlists in iTunes. At first, I tried just going through my library and dragging songs to the corresponding genre, for instance. But I realized I was putting some of the same songs in different playlists. So then I tried unchecking all my tracks and just checking the ones I wanted going into a specific playlist. Very tedious, but I guess that’s what I get for waiting so long. ANYWAY, I was just wondering if there is a way to mass select the “checked” tracks instead of selecting them one by and dragging them to the playlist. Also, any other tips or ideas would very much be appreciated. Thanks!
A) while all the songs are loaded into a MAIN playlist in itunes
listen to them
rigth click them
click SONG INFO
and then add info where needed + alter the genre in the bottom field
Ok great you got that down and you edited ALL your tracks
Now look at your COLUMNS in your playlist. You should see one marked GENRE
click it and you just sorted ALL your tracks per genre together.
Now you can drag them to their corresponding genre playlist elsewhere in iTunes
ok there is something else you need to do… im sure of it.
You have download (sorry i mean) You have PURCHASED a ton of songs, and some of them in packs of songs.
Ok so now its a mess of songs in the same place but not all are Trance, not all are House, and so on
not a problem
What i do when i dowload a pack of songs is
i load them all into iTunes
listen to each one from the folder they came from
in the playlist i delete the ones i DONT like
all thats left is what i DO like.
Now select ALL the songs in that left over list
and drag them ALL to a NEW FOLDER in your computer
iTunes will copy them all into there
Now the old folder they came from, well, yuo dont need that anymore so delete the entire folder
Besidse it contains songs you dont want and they are taking space.
I just spent about 10 days listening and scrapping my entire collection, so I’m good in that area. I have about 1,800 tracks I’m working with now. What I’ve been doing is adding music to iTunes/Rekordbox according to the day the tracks were acquired. So, for example, today I will be adding June 2013 into my iTunes/Rekordbox. I’m trying to sort the music month by month, but some months have about 100 tracks and halfway through my organizing I usually get lost in the categorization of it all. Genres I have so far are Disco, Nu Disco, Deep House, Garage, Acid, and Techno. So it’s just hectic trying to get all that sorted. I will tag the tracks though. I just feel by the time I go through that process, I won’t have actually touched my equipment for 2 weeks. Sucks.
Don’t do it all at once then. Just set aside a few of hours a week to do it instead. I went through and tagged my whole library about a year ago in small doses (4-5 hours a week, plus tagging on the fly at gigs if I played out tracks that I hadn’t tagged). Took me a couple of months in total to do it, but it’s well worth it, and from then on I only have to do anything when I add new tracks on a weekly basis, and it takes no time at all!
So let me get this straight. Tagging your mp3s means selecting each track and detailing it? Definitely gonna check out MP3Tag out, but how will that make it any easier? Won’t I still have to “describe” each track individually?
Yes, but you can do bulk editing in MP3Tag, so you can select 20 tracks that you’re going to tag as ‘Disco’ and tag them all the same in 1 go. Much faster than doing each one individually.
How are your tracks organised on your hard drive??
I just have one Music folder on my desktop where all my music is. Every track is grammatically constructed perfectly. They’re just not really organized any other way.
Give us an example of what “grammatically constructed” means. Is that a naming convention?
Because in MP3Tag, you can Convert Filename to Tags. I have the folowing naming convention:
10A - 126 - Dj Patch - Hot Tune Right Here
Key (I store key in the Album Tag)
BPM (I store BPM in the Track# tag)
Artist
Title
You can populate all of the related tags by clicking “Convert Filename to Tag”, and setting the following parameters:
%Album% - %Track% - %Artist% - %Title%
You’ll need to download the software to understand what that all means!
(I bulk add “genre” tags too. Drag in a bunch of Hip-Hop tunes and tag 'em all with “Hip-Hop”).
Tags are kept in the actual mp3 file - so if your iTunes collection goes tits up, you don’t lose any of the info. i don’t add any info to tunes in iTunes. Ever. Keep it with the mp3.
Sorry, I just mean all my tracks are written and capitalized properly. (eg. Vanilla Ice - Ice Ice Baby, as opposed to vanilla ice-ice ice baby). I have an English degree, and tend to obsess over the little things. Really liking what that MP3Tag is all about. Thanks for sharing. Will give it a go tonight.
[quote"DDWA"]…and tend to obsess over the little things[/quote]
Join the gang, mate! I lose my mind when I see Dj instead of DJ, featuring/Feat./feat. instead of ft., or Run-Dmc instead of Run-DMC!!! May I also suggest, then:
Actaully, scratch that - I’ve recently found out that you can do a lot of what an be done in Renamer using actions in MP3Tag. But reamer is pretty intuitive, and easy to pick up…
In addition to genre I always populate BPM and put key words in comments like “banger” “intro” “deep” “vocal” etc. Then I can make an iTunes smart playlist with something like genre=house and bpm < 122 and comment contains “deep” and boom I have a great starting point for my lounge/nu-disco play list. I’ll usually copy this over to a normal playlist and delete the smart one but sometimes the smart playlist has everything I need and I just ignore the false positives. They main point has already been said - add as much meta data (id3 tags) to your music as possible.
I am exactly the same!! Especially feat./Featuring etc. That really gets to me. Your example above wouldn’t pass by your standards then Dj Patch??
Actions in MP3Tag are extremely powerful once you understand the syntax’s. I have mine set up so I can change the rapid evolution keys to camelot keys, remove track numbers from the filename of tags, all sorts of stuff!!
I’m pretty sure MP3Tag is Windows only… Do a search on this form for MP3Tag, I know people have suggested alternatives for MAC before.
) for each Genre in iTunes.
