The Musings of Adam Lawton

This entry was created using iTunes 7.7. Well technically it was created using Wordpress, but the instructions given were based on iTunes 7.7. I can’t imagine a whole lot will change in future versions but if they do I’ll be sure to update.

I’ll admit to living a life of piracy once upon a time, but those days are long over. I had way more songs than I ever knew what to do with and since I had so many I never even listened to most of them.

My music collection is now a 100% Industry and Economy friendly stockpile at around 5,100 songs. Since I paid for them I can enjoy them, but at times I used to still get tired of listening to them. It’s not so much that I don’t like a given song, but I might just not be in the mood for them for whatever reason. Of course, you can just set your music library to play randomly, but most of the time Final Fantasy Piano music followed by Dragonforce Heavy Metal doesn’t really flow together well. That’s where iTunes really shines - with Smart Playlists, and I’ll show you how to make the most of them.

My iTunes library has a hefty collection of what I (and millions of others) call Tags. Tags are just what you think they are, like those on Delicious, Last.fm and other popular social networking sites. Unfortunately iTunes doesn’t support Tagging, but it does support some rather powerful Smart Playlists if you know how to use them.

iTunes Tagging is nothing new and many people have their own methods for doing so, but I’ve done it my own unique way and am going to show you how. The process it takes to do this is a little time consuming, but totally worth it. I’ll explain how my iTunes library is set up as a starting point for you. You can (and should) of course alter it as you see fit for your own needs. It’s going to be assumed that you have other non musical files such as Podcasts, Movies, TV Shows and other such wacky items, so we’ll also need to create a Smart Playlist that filters these out for your purely musical ventures. Fire up iTunes and let’s get started!

For each and every Smart Playlist that I ask you to make, be sure that Match (all) of the following rules is checked.

• First, create a new Smart Playlist by going to File > New Smart Playlist.

• In the Smart Playlist window that opens up, choose the following from the drop-downs in this order: Podcast - is false. Add the following as well by clicking on the + button for each string: Playlist - is not - Movies | Playlist - is not - TV Shows | Playlist - is not - Music Videos.
• Click OK and you’ll be taken to the new Smart Playlist. If the Smart Playlist isn’t highlighted for text input, single click on it from the left sidebar and wait a second until it lets you input text. Name this Smart Playlist Music Only.
• Create another Smart Playlist by going to File > New Smart Playlist.
• In the Smart Playlist window that opens up, choose the following from the drop-downs in this order: Rating - is greater than - (and click on the dots until you have) 3 stars.

• Now click on the plus button and do the following in order: Playlist - is - Music Only
• Click OK and you’ll be taken to the new Smart Playlist. If the Smart Playlist isn’t highlighted for text input, single click on it from the left sidebar and wait a second until it lets you input text. Name this Smart Playlist Top Rated.
  

For the most part, neither one of these Smart Playlists you just created will ever need to be seen by you again - but they are important to have. If you want these out of the way then you can go to File > New Folder and stick these in there, then collapse the folder by clicking on the triangle next to it in the left sidebar. This is not necessary to do however.

Now comes the fun part: Tagging your songs. Admittedly this has been an ongoing process for me for quite a while now, but think I have it down pretty much to where it’s as streamlined as possible. Like I said before, iTunes does not support Tagging directly so I’ll show you how to trick it into doing so!

• Create a new folder under, get this: File > New Folder. I’ll assume that by now you have a firm grasp on how to do these little things without so much explanation anymore so I’ll just keep it simple and clean.
• Name the new folder you just created Music Tags.
• Click on the Music Tags folder so that it becomes active. By doing this, any Smart Playlist that you create will automatically be grouped in the Music Tags folder, unless you click off of it.
• Okay, I’m going to assume that you have some songs that could be classified as “Tingly,” meaning that anytime you listen to these songs you feel all warm and tingly. Keep in mind that this is just an example and you may not have any songs that make you feel tingly whatsoever. Incidentally, neither do I but I’m just showing you how to get Tagging to work so for now we’ll just stick with Tingly as our first iTunes Tag. So take some time to find a song that you can classify as Tingly. Go ahead, take your time. I’ll what I’ve written for you will wait, so no rush. What, no song that you can define as tingly? Ah, well just pick one it doesn’t matter - you can change it later.

• Make a Smart Playlist with the following conditions: Comment - contains - ;tingly; | Playlist - is - Top Rated and make sure it’s under your Music Tags folder. Rename this Smart Playlist to Tingly.
• Perfect, now we have a song that we want to Tag as tingly. Select the song that’s going to get this prestigious honor and go to File > Get Info. Make sure that this song doesn’t have any rating (stars) by going to the Options tab from the Get Info command and making sure that you don’t see any stars where it says My Rating.
• Once you’ve made sure there’s no rating, go to the Info tab. To make Tags work we’re going to use the Comments field. There’s only one drawback to using Tags, which is to enclose each of them in a special character such as ;. Below is an explanation as to why you need to do this, but for now put ;tingly; in the Comments field.

• The reason you want to enclose your Tags with a special character is because if you don’t, other Tags may pick up on a partial tag from the Comments field and ruin the intentions of that Smart Playlist. For example, if you have a Smart Playlist that you have set up to show the Tag metal; it would also pick up on heavy_metal; if you had that Tag as well. If you make your Tags ;metal; however, it would not show up in the ;heavy_metal; Smart Playlist because now you have ;h instead of ;m.
• Go now to the Tingly Smart Playlist you just created. Notice how it’s still vacant. This is to be expected and in fact desired. Head on back to the song that you Tagged as tingly and give it a rating of either 4 or 5 stars. Now go back to the Tingly Smart Playlist and you should see your Tingly song in there waiting for you, just begging to be listened to. Not only am I going to make you an iTunes Tag Whiz, I’m also going to show you a magic trick. While inside the Tingly Smart Playlist, give your song a rating of anywhere between 0 - 3 stars. Bada bing, it’s no longer going to show up as a Tag. That’ll help you impress the ladies. The reason (they no longer show up - the song, not the ladies) is because if you take a look at the conditions in your Tingly Smart Playlist, you’ll notice that one of the conditions say that a song must be in the Top Rated Smart Playlist. The Top Rated Smart Playlist which you created back in the beginning in turn says that a song will only appear in there if the song’s rating is greater than 3 stars. This is a very powerful feature if you have an iPod or iPhone with it’s limited capacity, ensuring that only the best of the best songs get loaded onto it.
• Many songs in my library have more than one Tag on it. No Doubt’s Underneath it All have the Tags ;alternative; ;love; ;reggae; with each Tag having it’s own unique Smart Playlist. As I said before, this is little time consuming at times because of the need to create Smart Playlists for each Tag, but it DOES make your digital life a lot more enjoyable. A good habit to get into is to create a Smart Playlist the moment you create a new Tag, and to also keep a simple text file with a log of all the tags you use just in case a Smart Playlist ever gets deleted on accident.

Before you go crazy Tagging your library, keep these things in mind:

• You don’t need to use ; but it’s easy to hit from the home row position. You could if you prefer use !,@,#,$ and so forth. I must insist however that you use some sort of special character to do this, because down the line you may come across some bumps along the way.
• To keep good clean habits, all of my Tags are in lower case. If a Tag spans more than two words like “New Wave”, use underscores so that it appears as ;new_wave;
• When you Tag music that has multiple Tags, keep them in alphabetical order. ;lullaby; ;music_box; ;nintendo; ;zelda; is going to be a lot more manageable than ;zelda; ;lullaby; ;nintendo; ;music_box; Otherwise, you may find yourself with more than a few duplicate Tags.

That pretty much sums up how and why you would want to use Tagging in iTunes. Now whenever you use iTunes, just click on one of your Tagged Smart Playlists from the left sidebar depending on what you feel like. For a little added treat, set Shuffle and Repeat Playlist on. In the next iTunes Series, I’ll show you how to make your most of your iPod or iPhone with your new Tags.

In case you were wondering, here is the majority of the Tags that I personally use:
accordion, alternative, ambient, angry, anime, arabian, banjo, bass grinder, battle, bemani, birthday, blipp-blopp, breakbeat, celtic, chillout, choral, christmas, classical, club, collaboration, concert, country, covers, dance, dark, dialog, disco, disney, dixieland, eerie, electronica, emo, enka, euro, floorfillers, fluttery, folk, french, funk, german, gothic, guitar, hair_metal, halloween, hands_up, harp, heavy_metal, hip-hop, holiday, industrial, instrumental, irish, j-pop, j-rock, karaoke, japanese, latin, live, love, lullaby, mash_ups, metal, music_box, musical, nature, new_wave, night, opera, orchestral, passion, piano, pop, punk, r&b, rap, reggae, remix, renaissance, rock, rockabilly, sad, shindig, ska, toy_piano, trance, vaudeville, vocal, waltz, water.

The night Tag has songs that sound good at night, usually some hard dance stuff from Cascada.
The water on the other hand isn’t as easy to explain. Think harps and xylophones. Some of the stuff Tagged with this if you’re familiar with any of them are the Fairy Themes from The Legend of Zelda series, the Prelude from Final Fantasy VII and so forth.

It’s only important that your Tags make sense to you.