Organize Your iPod
An unorganized iPod looks really sloppy and unintelligent, It's also harder to find the music you're looking for. An organized iPod makes it easier and faster to access your music. You also come off looking like you know what you're doing. Leave that up to iTunes and you're headed down the right path.
Steps
- Put all songs by the same artist under one name, preferably with the correct spelling. Go to iTunes and right click on the song and select get info ( or for Mac Users press Apple + I), Type in the correct artist name and other info. If you're editing multiple songs by the same artist, click the first song, then hold down CTRL (or Apple) and click the others by that artist, Right-click one of them and select get info (or press Apple + I), just as you usually would. iTunes will ask for confirmation to edit multiple songs' info; click continue.
- Do not settle for untitled batches of tracks. Find out their names.
- Put songs performed by a main artist and assisted by a featured artist under the main artist only. Put the main artist in the artist section and after the song list the second artist's name as a featuring credit.
- Originally in iTunes: Name: Song, Artist: John Doe & Jane Doe
- In this way: Name: Song (feat. Jane Doe), Artist: John Doe
- Make sure album titles are the same and correctly-spelled throughout the album. Add album artwork to the album if you wish.
- Find out the original albums of songs in "Greatest Hits". This way you will not have two pointless albums; one for an original song and one from a "Greatest Hits" album.
- Put any soundtracks in the genre "Soundtrack" for easy access. You can even subdivide further and put "Movie Soundtrack", "Broadway Cast Recordings", "TV Show Soundtrack", etc. Don't worry about most other genre classifications however (Rock, Pop, Indie). It takes even longer to edit those and it's not really worth it.
- Click on the "Time" tab at the top of iTunes to organize your music by time. Go through and find duplicate songs. Also, you can click File at the very top and select "Show Duplicates".
- Connect your iPod to the computer to sync back up with iTunes. Enjoy your new found simplicity and organization.
Tips
- Album titles that start with "The" are alphabetized under "T". Artists that start with "The" are alphabetized under the next word. For example "The Who" would be alphabetized under "W".
- Tagging your music files correctly can be time consuming and tiresome but it's worth it. Hang in there!
- Wikipedia is a great resource for finding out information about albums, artists, and sometimes songs.
Warnings
- Keep a backup of your music somewhere. Although Macs are widely known for not crashing, iPods are the opposite and with anywhere over a gig will take a long time to tag. It's not something you'll want to do more than once.
Things You'll Need
- iPod
- iTunes
- Computer
- Your Music Collection
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