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How do YOU organize your iTunes library?

My buddy just outgrew his iMac's hard drive so he bought a really nice Lacie external drive and asked me to come over and migrate iTunes, etc.

I literally laughed when I started poking around his music. He wasn't using a single playlist for about 100GB of music. I just always taken it as a given that people with large libraries(and especially "album listeners" like I'm sure most of us are) create a playlist that is the name of the artist and album i.e. Television-Marquee Moon.

He says he just uses cover-flow to navigate through everything. Watching him take like 45 seconds to find a specific album using that method I just had to show him the light.

After a little tutorial he told me that this was like a revelation and he never even thought about doing this where as I never thought about doing it any other way. He freaked out at first because we started making a few hundred playlists but I think I have him on the right track. I mean...pick an album from the playlists listed and listen...right?

Does this make sense? Do ya'll not do this? What do YOU do?
128x128synthfreek

Showing 2 responses by kthomas

kthomas
911 posts
 
I use J River. You can create your own fields and index on any combination of fields (standard and user-created) one wants to. Even with 70K files, it's quick to navigate from any angle you choose. It's also easy to set up a playlist on the fly very easily, so I don't do a lot of playlist setup.

I can't imagine any setup that would require 45 seconds to look up a specific album.
kthomas
911 posts
 
Onhwy61 - the desire for more dedicated fields for organizing is the #1 reason I use J River. You can add as many fields as you like to their already large standard offering, and the fields can be complex (calculated, for example). All fields, standard or user, can be used to create indices, and the UI for when you choose an index, and then narrowing within that index, is extremely intuitive. All of the indices are stored separately such that searching and sorting are quick even with very large collections.

I've never understood why the other media players don't allow for this as well.
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