Bringing Order to Chaos...

I've never been the biggest fan of iTunes. It just doesn't seem to work very smoothly on PCs. I hear that this isn't the case on Macs but I remain skeptical. Maybe it's just a bad port, who knows. But the hard truth is my mp3 collection has reached a point of critical mass that makes it almost unmanageable. I've tried sorting them by genre, alphabetically and more recently just by year, but using directories and XP's file system has never been the most efficient solution. So yesterday Tom was showing me some of iTunes filter options and afterwards, I decided to undertake a project to import a large portion of my mp3 library into iTunes to see if it would actually make things better.


But the task is both tedious and time-consuming. It is a three step process of renaming the files, retagging them, then importing them into iTunes hoping that iTunes' database can find the album in order to properly display the artwork in coverflow. There are quite a few areas that can cause snags along the way. I went ahead and processed 8 gigs of my more recent mp3s and already I can see the advantage of using iTunes with its Genius feature in order to automatically generate random playlists. Plus by using my iPhone's Remote app, I would be able to control my entire mp3 library from my phone.

So far so good, but I just moved over the majority of my Alternative/Rock mp3s to my new dedicated mp3 hard drive, nearly 40 gigs worth of music. This is by far the largest genre of music I have, and by that token the biggest hurdle I have to overcome in order to finish this project. I've already decided to give up on trying to organize my gigs of classical music or the gigs of singles I have from the late 90s and early 2000s. The design of iTunes facilitates the albumization (I just made that word up) of music, which is odd considering buying songs individually on iTunes was one of its early strengths. Hopefully when I'm done, listening to music will be an even more enjoyable experience.