
THREE STEPS TO ORGANIZING YOUR MUSIC LIBRARY

30 11 2010

“THREE STEPS TO ORGANIZING YOUR MUSIC LIBRARY”
Article written by DJ Cab (John Cabarga)

Like most DJ’s today, I manage my entire music library from my laptop. Rather than bring a few hundred records with me to a party, I can choose from 30,000 songs at any given moment.  The key for me is to stay organized and keep my library in tact. But you don’t have to be a DJ to keep your music organized. Here are some tips to help you get your digital music library in tiptop shape.

1. Tag Tracks. This is the first and most important step to organizing your digital library. The four must have areas to tag are: Name, Artist, Album, and Genre. If you want to get crazy, there are all sorts of other information you can edit such as the year the track was released, composer, comments, etc. The more in-depth you want to go the better, but be careful not to over-extend yourself. The key to this, as with all organization, is consistency. If you’re comfortable with adding years to your tracks, do it. But remember, you will be doing it for every track.

2. Use Ratings. Ratings provide you with a way to prioritize your tracks.  It’s simple, the more stars you give a track, the more you like it. The Spaghetti Incident is probably the worst Guns N’ Roses album ever released, but there is at least one song in there I like. Rating tracks individually will help me differentiate between the tracks I like from the ones I don’t. It’s also important for the next step.

4. Create Playlists. Here’s where all your efforts get put to real use. iTunes provides you with the ability to drag and drop tracks to a list and separate them so you can play these tracks later on (hence, a Playlist). Great feature, but the real meat and potatoes is in the Smart Playlist feature. Here, songs can be automatically added to a list based on certain criteria you set. For example, let’s say you want to create a smart playlist that contains all your favorite tracks in your library. Simply create a Smart Playlist with the criteria of “Rating Equals 5 Stars.” Now, every track rated with 5 stars is added to this list. What’s more, is that every new track you assign a 5 star rating to in the future will be automatically added to the list as well. You can create as many playlists as you like. The key of course is having your tracks properly tagged.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It might take you some time and a little patience to set things up properly, but in the end, you’ll have an organized library and a better way to find the songs you love.     DJ Cab ~~  http://www.djcab.com/blog

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