The joy of having a clean media library

I listen to a lot of different music and thus there have been quite a number of tracks accumulated over the past 15 years. A wacky 22’146 tracks to date. Keeping this enjoyable on a file-system level is almost impossible. One of the first things I did when I switched to Mac 5 years ago was to start importing tracks into iTunes. It took me quite a while, but it was well spent and I’d never again use winamp or anything like it.

The following procedure has been the most satisfying for me. But you’ll need a Mac to use it. :P

1. Get the tools: iTunes (free), Amazon Album Art widget (free), Shtaggle (free), TuneUp (limited free, 30$ lifetime) and install.
2. Setup your iTunes to “manage tracks” on your harddrive or network share (iTunes -> Preferences -> Advanced). If enabled, iTunes will always save tracks in the selected directory if you import new albums in this fashion: /Artistname/Albumname/03 Trackname.suffix
3. Launch iTunes, Shtaggle and TuneUp. Make sure to read through all the preferences of these tools, because they allow you to set a lot of personal options.
4. Create an empty playlist which you will use to import and edit albums to keep ‘em separated to avoid a chaos due to missing ID3 tags.
5. Move one of the albums you’d like to import to the playlist and wait until all objects have been imported.
6. Check for missing tags: Track names, Album names, Artist names, etc. If the album you’ve imported is an original record: Use TuneUp and have it run it’s detection mechanism on your import. Netlabel music: Sorry, this is going to take your time. Cmd+i on the full album and edit the album tags. Single tracks: Cmd+i, track by track ..
7. After tagging the album, check for missing cover art. Use the dashboard widget to run a search on Amazon if TuneUp failed to find album art. For netlabel records: Sorry, again this will need your time. Cmd+i on the full album and drag an image to the album art area.
8. Play each tag and set some tags (to your liking) with Shtaggle.

Some tasks (for example cleaning up tracknames: 04-trackname -> Trackname or moving ID3 info from one field to another) are easily done by using scripts provided on Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes. Very powerful ressource btw. For example, you can now create intelligent playlists inside iTunes which include tracks haveing the <happy> tag and genre != techno to exactly get what you want. Apple’s “Genius” does something similar but is limited to the music which is available on the iTunes store. Genius is nice, but only works 50:50 for me. If you use an iPod and an AppleTV, this is going to make things a little easier. And at some point, it will be possible to use the same method to keep your movie library clean and in synch with other devices. Of course you are kinda limited to Apple hardware at this point. If you don’t feel ok with that, this is no option for you. I am not a friend of this myself, but I am willing to give up a little bit of my freedom of choice for a well working solution. So far, it’s working pretty well.