Music On Your Computer: Building Playlists in iTunes and Other Digital Music Jukeboxes
May 01 '06 (Updated May 17 '06)
The Bottom Line This is an organizational system that may work for you.
If you have an iPod, or even if you just use iTunes as your jukebox for your MP3 format music, sooner or later you may want to create an index system of your "mixes", albums, and other groupings of songs, using playlists.
This same method MAY apply to other digital music systems which use playlists, but I know it works with iTunes. At least the iTunes software available in early 2006.
So what's the best way to do this? After considerable tinkering, I have come up with what I think is a pretty good system for creating playlists...if you have collected a LOT of music. I'm talking about several thousand songs which, if you love music, is not that hard to do in a few years. Especially with all the many MP3 downloading venues available on the net and with CDs, podcasts, and all the rest. But we are basically talking about something that a hard-core music lover might do; if you are a casual fan of music this is probably an invitation to overkill.
And this especially applies if you are into a high-volume hard disk for your music library where you may have hundreds of playlists and literally months of music. Even though my 60 GB iPod loaded with pictures and music will play tunes uninterrupted for over a month, some day we may see much larger capacity music systems, especially if server-off-the satellite service ever comes into play. The problem then is how do you keep from going crazy trying to keep up with thousands and thousands of songs?
Here's a FOLDER system at which I have arrived by trial and error. Learning to create folders is simple; just go to the library and open the box top-left and choose the one for "create new folder" and then name the new one. This organizational system may work for you or it may not. It's all up to you. You may feel it's too complicated, overorganized, and nerdy. If so I plead guilty to all the above. It just works for me and maybe it will help someone else.
First of all, you have to determine how many different types or genres of music you want to save. The iTunes record store uses genres like these: alternative, blues, children's music, classical, comedy, country, dance, electronic, folk, hip-hop. inspirational, jazz, R&B/Soul, Rock, reggae, soundtrack. So, using this example, we might set up our playlists by FIRST selecting "Folders", and creating the following list of folders containing playlists:
001_mixes
002_alternative
003_audiobooks
004_blues
005_children's music
006_classical
007_comedy
008_country
009_dance
010_electronic
011_folk
012_hip-hop
013_inspirational
014_jazz
015_R&B/Soul
016_Rock
017_reggae
018_soundtrack
Okay, and then let's say you have some favorite artist or artists and you have several of their albums; you can create more folders at the bottom of the list like this:
019_Jimmy Buffett
020_Sage Francis
021_Willie Nelson
Once you have set up your genre folders, you can start opening up each genre folder and putting your albums or song groupings into them. For example, in "016_Rock", you might do it this way in playlist title creation:
016_01_Beatles/ Abbey Road
016_02_Beatles/ Sergeant Pepper
016_03_Beatles/ Rubber Soul
016_04_Beatles/ The White Album
You get the idea.
Now what about "mixes". You notice that I have made the first folder the "mixes" folder, because a lot of people like to get to their mixes first. Here we follow the same principle:
001_01_Dance Mix #1
001_02_Dance Mix #2
001_03_Romancing Mix #1
001_04_Work-Out Mix #1
You put your playlists into the folders, and then when you are in the mood for a certain kind of music, you can go right to it rather than search at random through thousands of songs.
Here's a tip you may find useful: Try to make no playlist last longer than the length of a recordable CD. I encourage you, once you have all your playlists in your "library", to go invest in a stack of (empty, recordable) CDs and an album and burn every playlist in your library onto those CDs, and label the CDs with the number and the name of the playlist. This is your ultimate insurance policy that your music library never disappears. The benefits are obvious if you think about it.
Here's another tip: If you are into audiobooks, make one playlist per CD from all the individual CDs that came with the audiobook. For example, if you have put "War and Peace" in 16 CDs on your MP3 Player, don't gang all the chapters into one big playlist. That may seem logical at first, but I have found that sometimes the chapters can get all scrambled up that way, out of order, when you go to playback. Better to download the CDs into individual playlists. You avoid scrambling the chapters plus if you ever want to burn a backup CD there you are. Also, check each playlist carefully; for some reasons iTunes likes to automatically reverse the play-order for you (which is, of course, easily correctable by clicking on the direction box at the top of the playlist box), so you might want to check it to be sure.
I also tried some other playlist indexing systems but I was not satisfied with them.
First I just burned the songs all into one big humungous list. No good- ever try searching through 7000 songs for the one you want? Ridiculous. It'll take you all night and your signif. other will get out of the mood.
And unless you have only one genre or two, you may find that putting all 300 albums of your rap music collection in with each album labeled as a playlist may get a little old too.
The ultimate dumbthink method I came up with was to create a playlist for every day of the year, thinking (a) I should play every song on the iPod at least once a year, and (b) that way I would encourage myself to listen to a new batch of music every day. Good intentions, bad reality. This one didn't work out either. So I went to the genre/number system.
When you transfer the music to the MP3 player, it will all be (should be!) in order. It will also be put in by type (genre), so you will know what kind of music area you are in by the numbers. I wish the iPod itself had folders, but unless they are hidden somewhere, I can't find them--- they will show on your computer but not on the iPod itself- where they would be very handy to have.
The only drawback with this system I have found is that when you put the coding numbers before the name, sometimes you run out of space to see the name. The "stock" fonts, at least on the generation 1-4 iPods are too big. You can make an educated guess, but it's sometimes a little hard to tell unless you have an iPod that came with real small fonts, as on the 5th generation video units. Maybe you can reduce the font size on the older iPod with the stock iTunes software, but I haven't found out how if it's there. I have read that you can get hacking software to reduce the font sizes, but I do't know if it's worth the extra hassle.
A compromise way to handle it is to print out your playlists and keep them in a notebook. It would be a royal pain to have to carry such a notebook around all over creation with you, but if you mainly use your iPod in one spot like in bed you could keep it by the bedside for reference as your signif. other goes to sleep while you fiddle with your iPod. Speaking of printing playlists, you may know this, but iTunes has a great utility for printing out such lists. Just go to File>Print>Song Listings.
The biggest gripe I have about the iTunes playlist system is that YOU HAVE NO WAY TO RENAME A PLAYLIST ONCE IT IS CREATED, unless I am missing something, which is always possible. I sometimes have to rename a whole lot of the crazy things, and to do that I have to create a new playlist, transfer the data via blocking-and-dragging, and then go delete the "old" playlist. It would be faster and simpler if Apple had a way to simply rename the playlist like you do a file. Again, if I am in the dark here, a little enlightenment would be appreciated.
I have not talked here about smart playlists or a few other things because I am not that crazy about them. Smart playlists seem to be smarter than I am, which may not take much. But for organizing your standard playlists, this is the best system I've come up with so far. If you have a better one, let me know about it.
Enjoy your music!
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