To restore order in your iTunes library

Most of us from one year to painstakingly collect your favorite music, which as a result is in iTunes. Unfortunately, the media bibliotke can often find items with invalid tags and cover art, even without them, as well as many duplicates.

I offer you a consistent leadership, with which you will be able not only to clean up the library main media player Mac OS X, but also regularly maintain it when new albums or individual compositions.

we find tags

As a Windows user, I particularly never really thought about the correctness of the metadata of the music, as the role is performed by a media browser file system (when I knew what kind of music) or Other folder for everything else, full of unpretentious Untitled Track and Unknown Artist.

Switching to Mac and iTunes made me take another look at the form of organization of music, so I had to make a great effort to bring this bedlam in the proper form. And I began, naturally, with the installation of the correct tags for music.

Manual filling of the tags, I do not want to even consider because it is death, but the focus on a few "representative of the genre" might be worth.

The most interesting of these is JaikozWhich is available to users of Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Of course, he's not so good to work with secondary, less important tags such as artist album, but it can be used to make the most important part of the work - find and fill key metadata: artist, album, song title, "digging" in the depths of probably the largest music information base MusicBrainz.

This application requires the File menu, select one of the items (eg, "Open Folder"), Then select the files in the left-most column of figures, and from the context menu click on an item "Auto".

After a while you will see that no trace, and even appeared in the cover of the music files from unknown names. Just press the button with the floppy disk in the menu bar and all the data saved in the music file.

Unfortunately, in trial mode Jaikoz allows you to process only 20 songs per session, so if the amount to be treated music exceed reasonable limits, you should consider purchasing the application or pay attention to a more advanced alternative in the form Pollux - one of the best automatic "tagger", for which the developer asks only $ 10 per year.

You could see overview this application on Mac Radar pages. Since it is so easy to work with, I'm not even going to dwell on this. The user only has to allocate unknown songs directly in iTunes, click on the «Tag Selected iTunes Tracks» menu item and wait until the utility finishes its work.

Now we just have to fill in the missing secondary tags using a free app Mp3tag. Frankly, this application is designed (and should work) only in Windows. However, do not make problems for us to run him through WineBottler. Immediately, I note that, by virtue of its origin, this utility will not be able to handle some of the file names in Cyrillic and other specific characters, which can eventually lead to their replacement by question marks or other "non-friendly" for Windows characters.

Before operating tagged need to select the source to find them in the «Tag Sources» menu. And if as a result of the application will find several options, the user can choose the most correct from the list.

Also, Mp3tag enables batch processing of audio files in cases where an automatic search for the tags can not cope with the task. To do this, the application provides Actions (Actions). They are the subject of a Help section on the official website of the application.

In any case, you may encounter a situation that none of the above methods will not help. For this case, there is an old and proven way - to do everything by hand :)

Adding cover

All three applications discussed above are able to add cover for processed albums, and iTunes is even a special context menu item called "Get Album Artwork."

However, the availability of the application, which makes it more or less automatically, is always preferable. They is a free utility GimmeSomeTune, Which is a common type of application is called "controllers for iTunes».

In addition, the application is able to display on the desktop information on the current track, update iChat status when changing tracks, supports hot keys, the remote d / a Apple Remote and scrobbling to Last.fm, it can automatically download cover art, if its songs not.

And then how to enjoy those found cover? To do this, there is a similar tool called CoverSutra. It has a rich history and a lot of fans around the world, making it "during the life of the classics of the genre." Among its advantages: a variety of functions, advanced search and a universal controller that can be used to control not only playing, but also some of the iTunes preferences.

In any case, for CoverSutra will have to pay $ 5 in the App Store or the Mac to find a cheaper or completely free alternative (eg, Bowtie.

Adding to the lyrics

So, like with tags and covers understood, but what if we suddenly want to sing with your favorite performer? To do this, the metadata editing window iTunes (Command + I), A special tab "Words."

Manual search and pasting text, as in previous cases, can be used only in rare cases, therefore, without delay, turn to software solutions.

At the beginning I would like to draw your attention to the utility Get LyricalWhich already appeared on the pages of Mac radar and has not changed since that time. Users still expect a minimalistic interface, support for "hot keys", as well as indication of success of several modes.

The second application was also dedicated a separate review not so long ago. Apart from the basic features, TunesArt can automatically upload the words to playable tracks from LyricWiki site and display them in a separate window.

A third application - Lyrica - says 17-year-old German developer and is already sold in the Mac App Store at a price $ 0.99 per copy. It is not enough convincing appearance is offset by the ability to search for text on the 6 different services, "batch" processing of songs from one playlist and search lyrics for only a few lines. By the way, the developer has promised to soon release a second version of the application, which will be added to the new text Internet databases, translation into other languages, improving performance and a completely new user interface.

Remove duplicate songs

With this we have a problem should arise, because iTunes developers have taken care of the implementation of the function that displays all duplicates. This requires a switch to the Music category, and on the File menu, select "Show Duplicates".

In this case, the window will only duplicate songs that should definitely analyze before deleting, because some of them may be extended or live versions of existing songs.

To switch to the normal display mode can be in the File menu or in the library window, select / click "Show all".

Remove the music that never listened

Based on my experience I can assume that if I did not have the strength to listen to an album or song, it is unlikely that it will ever happen. Therefore, we can try to get rid of music lying "dead weight" on the hard drive of the computer.

In addressing this problem, we will help the smart playlist. To create it, you can choose the File menu, "New Smart Playlist", to use a combination of Command + Option + N or click on the button "Create a playlist", located in the lower part of the window while holding the button Option.

In the resulting window should indicate the following sample conditions that will select all the songs for which the number of plays is zero:

Then everything is simple - if you do not really need these compositions, they can be removed with the help of keyboard shortcuts Option + BackspaceDo not forget to move the unnecessary files to the Trash.

Housekeeping tip: option "Live Update" allows you to maintain in the current playlist state, but in some cases may lead to a decrease in the performance of the musical player.

By the way, this way we can proceed with the tracks, which is less than the rating of two stars - in fact such "hits" come across from time to time. To do this, you can edit the current playlist, or add another one, this time with the condition for the ratings.

You can very effectively use this method, unless, of course, do not care about the conceptual integrity of the albums.

That's all. After these steps, our music library will be pleasure to watch. If you have any questions or want to share your own recipes and favorite programs to restore order in your iTunes library, you are welcome in the comments.