I have disliked iTunes for, well, forever really. When I used Windows I rocked Winamp, but since moving to Mac I have found that the only good alternative (Songbird by Mozilla) wouldn’t support my iPod. So I decided to make iTunes work for me, and I think I have managed to. Here are some of the steps I took:

Manage My Own Music

Mac: iTunes — Preferences — Advanced

Windows: Edit — Preferences — Advanced

While many people may like having iTunes do all the work to keep their library organized, while keeping copies of songs in the iTunes folder, I do not. For the longest time – when I really didn’t use iTunes – I thought I HAD to let iTunes copy my songs into its library. Now, however, I essentially use iTunes to point me to my songs that are kept on my external hard drive and organized how I want them to be.

Unchecking these options essentially means that you’ll only have your music in its original location and not all in the iTunes folder (which REALLY saves hard drive space when you have thousands of songs). Also, I like to control the manner in which I name and organize songs. By disabling these two features, the onus is on you. If you’d rather let iTunes do the work, then leave them checked.

Playlist Folders

Mac AND Windows: File — New Playlist Folder (then drag playlists into your newly created folder)

First of all, playlists will save your life in iTunes. Throughout the years I have kept my music collection relatively organized (either by genre or where the songs came from) and like to keep it that way in iTunes. When adding songs to my library I then immediately create a playlist that mimics the original organizational structure on my hard drive. The next step is to have Playlist Folders to house some of these playlists. This helps me in two ways:

1) I don’t have playlists all down the length of the sidebar because I can know minimize the playlist folder that contains my playlists. If I have 10 playlists that fit within one category, I place them in a folder and all of a sudden I can show or hide them. If you had 3 playlist folders that each contained 15 playlists, it’s a much tidier way to organize songs.

2) If I have several playlists with the same type of songs, but from different sources, I can now keep them all separate. Although I can’t endorse doing so, let’s say you used Limewire and BitTorrent and wanted to separate rock songs you acquired from each source. You could have BitTorrent – Rock and Limewire – Rock. And then CD’s I Own – Rock. Now you don’t have to look through all your rock songs in your all-encompassing “Music” folder.

Start/Stop Time

Mac and Windows: Right-click on song — Get Info — Start/Stop Time

First off, this does not trim the actual songs. Rather, it knows when to start and stop the song in iTunes and (most importantly) on iPods and burned CD’s. Why might you want to adjust when the song begins and ends?

1) Long intros or outros you don’t want to hear.
2) You recorded an online radio stream and the song has ads or contains the beginning/end of another song.
3) You want to create a playlist that just gives samples of songs (why? I don’t know)

Show Duplicates

Mac and Windows: File — Show Duplicates

Sometimes you’ll have the same song multiple times, because you’ve gotten your music from various sources. This isn’t so bad if you use playlists and playlist folders to access your songs, but once you go into your “Music” folder you’ll see every song added to the library. Then, you’ll see the 3 copies of Beastie Boys – Intergalactic. By selecting a set of songs and showing the duplicates you will see (and this is important) ALL the copies of the song. Don’t make the mistake of deleting all those songs, thinking you’ll still have a copy left over. Not the case.

The problem is that iTunes does not have a field to display the file path of each song, so it’s hard to know which you might want to remove. Not to worry, an AppleScript (for Mac only) exists that lets you place (among other things) the file path into the Comments field. Pretty sweet, huh? Make sure to choose the option to keep the original comments (if you’ve got something in there you care about). From the creator:

Copies your single choice of file name, file path (location), parent folder name, current playlist, volume, file comments, file creation date, database id, file creator, or file type to each selected track’s comment tag. These are data are not normally accessible from within iTunes. By placing in the track’s comment tag, you will have it available, even to sort by (when you sort by comments).

Find it here.

Home Sharing

Mac AND Windows: Advanced — Turn on Home Sharing

Let’s say that you have multiple computers in your home and you’d like the ability to share your iTunes library among them. There are a couple of ways. One is to network the computers, of course, and iTunes actually has an option under Preferences — Sharing that uses that method. Another way, though, is to use Home Sharing. Once you turn on this feature, all computers must log in using the same iTunes account, and each can share their library so that the other computers can access them. This is useful if you use multiple computers and don’t want to do the work of bringing songs into each, or if you have several people in the house and want to enable access to multiple libraries.

BONUS: The original playlists are even intact. Check out this screenshot from my Windows laptop that is sharing from my Mac.

Genius

Mac AND Windows: Store — Turn on Genius

If you’re perceptive, you will have noticed that the screenshot above has something called Genius highlighted. What is Genius? Well, simply put it’s awesome! The initial setup can take a bit depending how many songs are in your library. Here’s how Apple says it works:

What happens is that iTunes analyzes your library, sends the information to Apple (don’t worry, nobody’s going to know where you got that copy of My Humps) then does two things:

1) Lets you right-click on any song in your library, select Start Genius and then it builds a 25-song playlist containing music that goes well with that song.

Overall, I was impressed with its selections when I tried it out. It’s effortless and in most cases will create great mixes. This will depend on your library, of course, since that’s where the music is coming from. If you have a large collection, this may help you to discover music you didn’t you had, or had forgotten about.

2) iTunes automagically creates mixes for you, based on genres in your library. I didn’t have to do any work in order to get the following (click on image to zoom):

Pro: If you have album artwork for the song that’s playing, the square associated with the mix you’re playing displays it. If not, it shows a music note. Nice feature.

Con: The only complaint I have about these mixes is that it isn’t evident how to see what songs are inside them. You can skip songs, of course, but you won’t know what you’re going to. In this sense it serves more like an online radio station (but using YOUR music). To see the mix, press the little genius symbol to the right of the song title and it imports into your current Genius playlist. Click the image below to zoom in.

Moving Forward

Hopefully some of these tips will help you make the best of iTunes. For a long time I was very anti-iTunes and couldn’t believe Apple had anything to do with it. Now that I’ve delved a little deeper and made it work for ME, I can honestly say that I’m not upset by the fact that I can’t put the Artist field to the far left rather than the song title being there.