Managing Your iTunes Music

I’ve finally completed my enough of my various computer projects that it’s time to start working on organizing, tagging and adding album artwork to my songs. With a library of over 25,000 track’s it’s going to be quite the ‘project’.

Of course Mac developers love to make projects like these fun, easy and quick! They develop really awesome programs that aid in this whole iTunes Library organization process and usually speed things up. The first application is by Equinux and it’s called Cover Scout. It will look on Amazon and Google Images for album artwork. The interface is very easy to use and in no time at all you’ll have all the album artwork you could ever want. It even allows you to resize and rotate the artwork. Cover Scout pretty much works with all well known musicians and groups, but I noticed it had some trouble finding the ‘underground artists’ which is to be expected, but since it has the built in Google search you’ll mostly likely be able to find it. The application has a demo so you can can download and try it out, the full version is $19.95.

For tagging my music a.k.a displaying the track name, artist, album, date, genre, track number, etc I usually just do it right from iTunes. In the newest version of iTunes, it will automatically fetch all artwork for tracks that don’t have any. While this is really nice, I find it to be rather annoying. From time to time I’ll move my iTunes library around from computer to computer and I’ll forget to grab the artwork which is stored in your Music folder so I have to re-get all the artwork.

The method I use will actually embed the artwork into the audio file so it’s there no matter how much you move around your library.

First I selected all 25,000 songs and went to Advanced (found in the menu bar) and Convert ID3 Tags…A little window comes up and where it says ID3 tag version: with the drop down menu I choose version 2.4 which is the latest. While it probably won’t add any major additional features, it’s good to keep things up to date. Version 2.4 adds support for things like bookmarks in audio files (audiobooks and podcasts). Once that’s completed you can just start tagging and adding information to the songs. You can right click on a single song and choose ‘Get Info’ from the menu or you can select multiple songs and right click on them and again choose ‘Get Info’ from the menu that comes up.

Some people like to use applications that assist in tagging but I prefer to use iTunes. If you want to try some applications out that help with tagging try out:

IEatBrainz
TUAW Article on Tagging
TuneTagger

Other neat iTunes applications:
You Control Tunes
CoverSutra
The Filter