All about iTunes

Why I think you should use & how to get the best out of iTunes

There are many people that don't realise the full beauty of the 'iTunes' application, or even if they do use it - they not using it to its full potential. At every turn that I've used iTunes you can see how the designers are one step ahead of you and have thought things out so that things work wonderfully - and better than you would expect them to.

A lot of people get their iPod, import some CD's onto it - and treat it just like a CD walkman that you insert one album in by one artists - they scroll to that artists/album, hit 'play' and off you go.

This is fine - but this is not maximising the capabilities of your iPod, and using the man built in strength of iTunes to customise what you listen to.

The first step is to enter as much 'meta data' tags as you can. A 5 star rating, the Genre of music, and the year it was release. These three fields can really help you build up some super smart playlists which automatically throw up the songs that you want to hear.

Songs Ratings

The first thing you should do in iTunes is to give all yours songs 5-star ratings. And I mean all of them. Yes I know it takes a long time to do, and that some people argue "But a song I would really like one day I might not like the next day". Get over it! You can usually give a song an average rating on how much you like it. You can also rate songs 'on the fly' as you're playing them on your iPod - so you can sit on the train rating things as you go! (See below for how to do this).

As a rough guide, I tend to rate songs from 1 to 5 stars on the following basis:

1 star : "I know this song, but don't really like it"
2 stars : "Not bad, but wouldn't play all the time"
3 stars : "This is a good song, I like it"
4 stars : "I really like this song, love it!"
5 stars is reserved for those ultra-special tunes which are just totally awesome.

Out of nearly 4,000 songs on my iPod, only 19 have 5 stars! There's also two tunes that I wish sometimes I could rate with 6 stars.

Anyway ... rate your songs from 1 to 5 stars, because once you've done this, you can start to fun with smart playlists, which is the goal that where aiming for here. But before you do that, you also have to assign Genres.

Genres

When you import songs in from a CD, or when you buy a track from the iTunes music store, it will usually come with its own associated genre. But don't just accept what it gives you - edit it so that it consistently matches your own genre labels/tags that you like to use.

Smart Playlists

Smart playlists are you friends. They are are stunning feature to iTunes and your iPod. Treat them well and they will treat you well in return.

To make them worthwhile though you have to give us much information about every track on your iPod. i.e. DO give all your songs five star ratings. Define what genre they are in. Write comments in the comments box about that song - as every piece of metadata that you associate with a track can then be used as a search field in iTunes.

A few of my favourite smart playlists that I have created for myself in iTunes are here:

'Recently Added Favourites'

When I get some new tracks on my iPod the first thing I'll do is try and rate them. Then, next time I'm out and about this playlist will give me my recently added songs (within the last 3 weeks) that I've given a 3 star or higher rating to.

This way, I know I'm going to be listening to some new music that I've rated highly.

In addition to this, I also have just 'recently added' which is everything I've added in the last 2 weeks - whatever the rating.

'Recently Played Favourites'

This is neat, because it picks up on stuff that you've been playing at home on iTunes as well as whilst you're out using your 'pod.

I've set mine to make a list of anything I've played in the last two weeks, and has a play count of 10 or higher.

Therefore, if I've added a new song but only played it twice at home, it's probably because it's not that great. However, if it's had more plays than that, then it's going to be something that I know that I like.

Using the composer field for your own customisation

I'm quite keen on knowing what keys particular songs are in. So much so, I've got a whole webpage written up here to why I like the key of E Flat major so much.

I've taken it to the extent of filling in the 'composer' field what key a song is in (or at least what it starts in, or is predominantly in) and then making a playlist out of that. i.e.by saying: All songs where COMPOSER = "Eb", then I get all the songs (where I've worked it out and filled it in) that are in E-Flat major.