Tidying up your iTunes library

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Most of us, year after year, painstakingly collect our favorite music, which ends up in iTunes. Unfortunately, in the media library you can often find copies with the wrong tags and covers, without them at all, as well as many duplicates.

Here's a step-by-step guide that will help you not only clean up your library in the main media player of Mac OS X, but also regularly maintain it when new albums or individual songs arrive.

Finding tags

As a Windows user, I never really thought about the correctness of the metadata of my music, since the role of the media browser was played by the file system (when I knew what kind of music it was) or the Other folder for everything else, full of uncomplicated Untitled Track and Unknown Artist.

The move to Mac and iTunes made me take a different look at the form of organizing music, so I had to put in a lot of effort to put this bedlam in a proper way. And I started, of course, by setting the correct tags for musical compositions.

I don't even want to consider filling in the tags manually, because it is like death, but it is perhaps worth dwelling on a few "representatives of the genre".

The most interesting of these is Jaikoz, which is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux users. Of course, it is not so good for working with secondary, less significant tags like the album artist, but with its help you can do the most important part of the work - find and fill in the main metadata: artist, album and song title, "digging" in the depths, probably the largest music information base MusicBrainz.

For the application to work, you need to select one of the items in the File menu (for example, "Open folder"), then select the files in the leftmost column with numbers and click on the "Auto-correction" item in the context menu.

After a while, you will see that there is no trace left of the unknown names, and the music files even have a cover. It is enough to click on the button with a floppy disk in the menu bar and all received data will be saved in music files.

Unfortunately, in trial mode, Jaikoz allows you to process only 20 songs per session, so if the amount of music to be processed exceeds reasonable limits, you should consider buying an application or pay attention to a more advanced alternative in the form of Pollux - one of the best automatic taggers for which the developer asks for only $ 10 per year.

You may have seen an overview of this application on the Mac Radar pages. It is so easy to work with her that I will not even dwell on it in detail. The user just needs to select unknown tracks directly in iTunes, click on the "Tag Selected iTunes Tracks" menu item and wait for the utility to finish its work.

Now all we have to do is fill in the missing secondary tags using the free Mp3tag app. Quite frankly, this app is developed (and should work) on Windows only. However, it will not be a problem for us to run it through WineBottler. I note right away that due to its origin, this utility will not be able to process some file names with Cyrillic and other specific characters, which may ultimately lead to their replacement with question marks or other "non-Windows-friendly" characters.

Before working with tags, you need to select a source to search for them in the "Tag Sources" menu. And if, as a result of work, the application finds several possible options, the user will be able to choose the most correct one from the proposed list.

Also, Mp3tag allows batch processing of audio files in cases where automatic tag search fails. To do this, the application provides Actions. A whole section of help on the official website of the application is dedicated to them.

In any case, you may run into a situation that none of the above methods will help. For this case, there is an old and proven way - to do everything manually:)

Adding covers

All three applications discussed above are able to add covers for processed albums, and iTunes even has a special context menu item called "Get Album Cover".

However, having an application that does this more or less automatically is always preferable. This is the free utility GimmeSomeTune, which represents a common type of application called “controllers for iTunes”.

In addition to the fact that the application can display information about the current song on the desktop, update the iChat status when changing tracks, supports hotkeys, the Apple Remote and scrobbling on Last.fm, it can automatically load covers if the song does not have one. …

And then how can you enjoy the covers you find? For this there is a similar utility called CoverSutra. She has a rich history and many fans all over the world who made her "in her lifetime a classic of the genre." Among its advantages: many functions, advanced search and a universal controller with which you can control not only playback, but also some iTunes settings.

In any case, for CoverSutra you will have to pay $ 5 in the Mac App Store or find a cheaper or completely free alternative (for example, Bowtie.

Add lyrics to songs

So, it seems, we figured out the tags and covers, but what if we suddenly want to sing with our favorite performer? To do this, in the iTunes metadata editing window (

Command + I

) there is a special tab “Words”.

Manual search and insertion of texts, as in the previous cases, can be used only in isolated cases, so we immediately turn to software solutions.

In the beginning, I would like to draw your attention to the Get Lyrical utility, which has already appeared on the pages of Mac Radar and has not changed since that time. Users will still expect a minimalistic interface, support for "hot keys", as well as an indication of the success of several modes.

A separate review was also devoted to the second application not so long ago. In addition to the basic features, TunesArt can automatically download the words for the songs being played from the LyricWiki site and display them in a separate window.

And the third app, Lyrica, was written by a 17-year-old German developer and is already on sale in the Mac App Store for $ 0.99 per copy. Its insufficiently convincing appearance is compensated by the ability to search for lyrics on 6 different services, "batch" processing of songs from one playlist and search for lyrics in just a few lines. By the way, soon the developer promised to release the second version of the application, which will add new text Internet databases, translation into other languages, performance improvements and a completely new user interface.

Remove duplicate songs

We shouldn't have any problems with this, because the iTunes developers took care of implementing a function that displays all duplicates. To do this, switch to the Music category and select Show Duplicates from the File menu.

In this case, only duplicate compositions will remain in the window, which should definitely be analyzed before deleting, because among them there may be extended or concert versions of already existing songs.

To switch to the normal display mode, you can select the item / button "Show all" in the File menu or in the library window itself.

Removing music you've never listened to

Based on my own experience, I can assume that if I still did not have the strength to listen to a certain album or composition, then it is unlikely that this will ever happen. Therefore, you can try to get rid of the music lying "dead weight" on the hard disk of your computer.

A smart playlist will help us solve this problem. To create it, you can select the "New Smart Playlist" item in the File menu, use the combination

Command + Option + N

or click on the "Create playlist" button at the bottom of the window while holding down the key

Option

In the window that appears, specify the following selection conditions, which will select all musical compositions for which the number of plays is equal to zero:

Then everything is simple - if you really do not need these compositions, you can delete them using the keyboard shortcut

Option + Backspace

without forgetting to move unnecessary files to the Trash.

Note to the hostess: the "Live update" option allows you to keep the playlist up to date, but in some cases it can lead to a decrease in the performance of the music player.

By the way, you can do the same with tracks whose rating is less than two stars - after all, such "hits" come across from time to time. To do this, you can edit the current playlist or add another one, this time with a condition for ratings.

You can use this method very effectively if, of course, you don't care about the conceptual integrity of the albums.

That's all. After these steps, it will be interesting to look at our music library. If you have any questions or want to share your own recipes and favorite programs for tidying up your iTunes library, you are welcome in the comments.