Alan, I wanted to ask you what you have in your iTunes sidebar? What do you mean by maintenance? Do you have any ideas you could share with how you organize your music in playlist and smart playlists? I'm an iTunes power user and am always looking for hints and tips with this area. Thank you!
I make a lot of smart (and some dumb) playlists in iTunes. I have to, to keep everything organized. Smart playlists only work well when you have a stellar tagging system. So my Maintenance tab helps me keep up on my tagging.
Inside the Maintenance folder I have five smart playlists:
- Added Recently (This includes any new rips I've imported over the last 30 days. As I rip new CDs, I like to listen while I tag and rate every track. So any time I open iTunes with nothing specific in mind to listen to, I just start up my "added recently" smart playlist and tag/rate while I listen.)
- InAccurateRip (This includes any rips that did not rip 100% bit-perfect accurate. Sometimes this happens because the disc is brand new and not enough people have ripped it to have adequate comparisons for AccurateRip. Other times there is a flaw in the disc and I'll need to buy another copy to re-rip if I want bit-perfect rips (which I do want). So this is a temp storage space for those inaccurate rips.)
- Lossy Files (I rip using Apple Lossless. I buy high-res digital downloads (24-bit/96kHz stuff) when available. But sometimes the only digital version available is a scratchy old 256kbps lossy file. When that's the case, I tag it and it gets stored here. Occasionally I'll look at this smart playlist and check to see if a higher-res version has become available anywhere. If so, I'll buy the lossless or hi-res version to replace the lossy.)
- Not Researched (One of the things I take pride in is the accuracy and detail of my music library. It truely is a library - cataloged, organized, complete, and accurate. When I rip a new CD, I try to get the metadata as accurate as I can, but I don't always have 30 mins to read through the wikipedia page, the discogs page, and any other information source, so I just rip and tag it as "not researched". Then, when I do have the time (usually while I'm on the treadmill desk for a few hours), I'll research that release, update the metadata, and remove that album from this smart playlist. The research I include makes notes of any featured performers on tracks, release version info, mastering info, recording info where it makes sense, etc.)
- Researched Info (This smart playlist holds all of the albums that have been researched. It's basically just the reverse of the playlist above and kind of unneccessary, but it took two seconds to compile (it catches everything not tagged with "not researched") so I figured, why not?)
The rest of my smart playlists are a lot more FUN and listenable. But you specifically asked for the Maintenance ones, so here they are. If you're interested in the fun and listenable playlists, I'd be happy to share those in another ask.
