Help me organize my music.

Here’s what I do: (in response to cleversimon)

1) Genres: I only use the broadest names for my genres. Jazz, Rock, Electronic, Hip-Hop, LIve*. I get all kinds of music with incredibly detailed genres, but fuck. Until we can get every “Glitch-jazz Eastern Noise” group out there to agree to label their tracks the same, those specific genres are pretty useless. Every once in a while I go through my collection and re-name all those bullshit genres to something more meaningful.

2) Ratings: Every track gets a 3-star rating. If I’m listening to a song and I like it, 4-stars. If I don’t like it 2-stars. If there’s something wrong with the track (wrong artist, track title messed up, poor quality) 1-star.

3) Unlistened Playlist: This is a smart playlist that contains songs that have never been listened to and have a rating 3 or higher. Every once in a while I’ll listen to this on random to try and discover interesting shit I didn’t know I had.

4) Top Rated Playlists: I’ve got a general top rated (4 stars, not in genre “Live”) and a top rated for a few specific genres (Top Rated Hip Hop, Top Rated Jazz, etc.) Great for putting on random.

5) Stuff that should be rated: If you haven’t been doing this from the beginning, getting the ratings started may be hard. To help me I made a playlist that contained the top 50 most played tracks with a rating of 3. The idea was that I probably liked these tracks a lot, but hadn’t gotten around to giving them a high rating.

6) Top rated albums: This is something that’s new in iTunes, so I don’t use it too much yet, but now you can give separate ratings to albums. Good way to mark albums that you like, but may not necessarily be filled with individual tracks that stand out.

*Live is my genre for any “bootlegged” concert recording I have. These are kept separate so I can filter them out of most playlists. Otherwise my “Top Rated” smart playlist would fill up with 30 minutes YEMs, and we know Stephanie would not go for that.