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
i only use playlists so i only include enough songs to store on my iphone, touch and ipods. for example, i setup a playlist called "4iphone" and move enough music in it that doesn't exceed 14gb. same goes for the other ipods. i mainly listen to 8 hours a day in random order. when i listen in my dedicated audio room, i use my iphone or touch to remotely control the itunes on my mac and the iphone/touch "remote" interface has a nice interface, search by artist, albums, genre, playlists, or randomize by artist, or whole music library.
Synthfreek,

I have been playing around with your suggested playlist method of organizing iTunes. I now see some of your logic.

I didn't know about the macro to make a playlist from a selected artist or album and that is very cool.

I appreciate that selecting a playlist of an album is the only way to show that album's artwork by itself on full screen without showing other albums around it (standard cover view).

However, I haven't figured out how you can be taken to a specific playlist by typing in the search bar. With my huge library, that is essential for me to get to what I want quickly.
Within reason there's no right or wrong way to organize playlists. Whatever works or doesn't work for someone really doesn't have any bearing on what works for someone else.

I wish there were more dedicated fields for organizing. For instance, having separate producer, engineer, record label, mastered by, and musician fields would make it much easier to generate smart playlists.
Thomasedison you don't use the search field just click on the very first playlist(or any playlist) and just start typing.