Sculpting the iTunes Library

I love the smart playlist function on iTunes. I am so anal about getting all the data correct for my iTunes library—genre, year, song ratings, etc.—that it makes the smart playlist really functional. I even have smart playlists to help me manage my library to make my smart playlists even better: one playlist gathers every song in my library that I haven’t yet rated, so when I’m bored on a commute to or from work I just shuffle through it and rate random songs; I have another that collects any song in my library that doesn’t list its year of release, so when a lazy Sunday comes around I can get lost on the internet researching release dates; and another playlist collects any songs that I haven’t given a genre tag to.

The idea, ultimately, is to get those three playlists down to no songs. Some tasks are more Sisyphean than others, I grant.

But I love my smart playlists. As I update my library—rate songs, tag genres, or just download new stuff—the playlists update themselves. I have one playlist that gathers anything tagged as krautrock, psychedelic, or garage rock. You don’t really equate garage and kraut (unless you’re writing a Monks review, I guess), but somehow all the psychedelic stuff like 13th Floor Elevators or Electric Prunes creates a bridge between all the genres. It makes for a fun, varied playlist of obscure and not-so-obscure 60s and 70s rock experimentalists. I have another playlist that I just made, called “indie best.” It takes everything I’ve tagged as “indie rock” and whittles it down to those songs I’ve rated four or five stars.

Of course, what I deem “indie rock” as far as my iTunes library is but a segment of what you or I might consider indie rock in general. For purposes of properly sculpting different playlists, I’ve segmented all my circa-1980–present rock music into four categories:

1. Punk: mostly comprised of the most traditional kind of punk—70s British punk & post-punk, and early 80s punk & hardcore

2. Alternative: mostly 90s stuff—grunge and brit pop and vaguely "not indie rock but still rock" acts—as well as earlier stuff like the Smiths or the Talking Heads, and even going as far back to someone like Brian Eno; and also more recent stuff that is too polished to be indie—Radiohead, REM, Amy Winehouse, etc.

3. Classic Indie: bands that defined that aesthetic starting roughly around 1985 (Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du, etc.) and going through about 1995 or 96, maybe even 97. So covering the most traditional kind of "indie rock" in the sense Lou Barlow meant, going through the post-rock acts of the 90s and ending, more or less, with Tortoise's early material. I personally use them as the end of that era because of the original incarnation's direct lineage to indie rock and not jazz or electronica (e.g. Bundy Brown and John McEntire were in Bastro, McEntire was also in My Dad is Dead, Dan Bitney was in Eleventh Dream Day, etc.). So they kind of symbolize, for me, the moment that all that O.G. indie stuff transcended itself and moved into wholly different territory.

4. Indie Rock. Or more accurately, contemporary indie, which is more or less the indie (blog) rock being made in this decade.

So I made the “indie best” playlist because I’ve been overdosing lately on the older stuff and needed a kind of palate-cleansing dose of newish shit. (One thing I notice when I put those 1400+ songs on shuffle, though: I apparently sure do like Spoon, Belle & Sebastian, Okkervil River, the New Pornographers, Joe Pernice, and Andrew Bird—all of which I suppose is a shock to no one.)

The old stuff: I also have a playlist I’ve created that I use whenever I’m thinking about or working on my book. Basically I start with those four categories—plus a fifth category I’ve labeled “Louisville” that collects certain albums and songs I’ve acquired that pertain specifically to my research—and then limit it to the years I’m writing about. So the playlist starts around 1975 as a way of getting all the relatively older albums that would have been in the air in the early/mid-80s; then I adjust what year it ends on depending on what era I’m writing about—Squirrel Bait years (roughly 84–86), Tweeze era (86–88), and soon enough I’ll get to the Spiderland era (89–91). Narrowing the playlist down to these eras helps me put the records in context: such-and-such record couldn’t have been an influence because it came out at the wrong time; whereas so-and-so’s album is surprisingly resonant and I wouldn’t have thought about that if I hadn’t been trying to put my ears in that time frame.

Other smart playlists I’ve created: one for every decade, regardless of genre; one that gathers all the New Pornographers albums plus all solo offshoots; and a quarterly “My Listening Hours” playlist which gathers every single thing to come into my library over a three-month period so that I don’t lose sight of, or become overwhelmed by, what I’m consuming. (Incidentally that playlist is going to be purged and restarted beginning July 1—my week of MLH posts will start up next week.) I’ve touched on my reasoning for the playlist before.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about the playlists I update manually! But that’s another post. How about you? Am I the only Obsessive iTuner out there? How do you sculpt your library?

Comments

[gabbagabbahey]

Is Bob Mould in all four of those categories?

I gave up trying to genre-ify my iTunes library years ago... in fact I barely use iTunes at all anymore, because I don't listen to music on a PC. I use Windows Explorer to organise my mp3s and to put them on a player.

[Paul]

Good post. I do similar things, but not to the same extent. (Since one of my primary traits is laziness.) Somebody should write a program that will do this kind of tagging automatically (aside from the song rating).

I struggle with genres. As much as I would love to have the detail of "garage" and "punk" and "Brit pop" available for sorting, I have a hard time figuring out (1) how much detail to use, and (2) how to classify artists (especially with the whole indie/alternative mess).

I eventually decided to use broader descriptions like: Rock, Country, Pop, Jazz, Blues, Soul. Of course, this puts Buddy Holly in the same category as Radiohead, which really makes no sense and isn't the slightest bit functional.

So we really need a program that will tag specific genres and release dates!

[Richard]

Wow. That is fantastically anal. I don't quite go to that extreme (in part because updating iTunes is a slow process for me, since I have > 13000 songs on it and it's all on an external harddrive, which seems to slow things down), but I do do a little bit of this. For instance, I made a smart playlist of all songs in iTunes that I haven't heard yet (that is, that I haven't heard through iTunes yet; many of them I've of course heard before). Then I shuffle through the playlist, and anything that I don't like, or don't like enough to keep, I rate two stars. With exceptions for unexpected awesomeness, I don't rate much else, as yet.

But I've only recently started doing much of this. Previously, I either listened to artists' full albums, or I shuffled through the entire library. But the size of said library has forced me to make smaller playlists. Your earlier post in which you mentioned your "awesome" playlist struck me as a good idea, but one I haven't taken the necessary time to follow through on. Etc.

[scott pgwp]

I had a moment about a year or so ago when I decided to get this anal, and it required weeks of sifting and sorting through my library (at the time probably around 9,000 songs). Making all the years right was probably the most intensive part, as so many older albums get tagged with the date of their reissue (if given a date at all). But the genre tagging has actually not been that difficult. I started broad and then let the narrowing happen organically. For instance I'd listen to my "indie rock" playlist and get kind of buried in it--it was just such a big category. And I had a phase (still in it, actually) where I just wanted to focus on the old stuff. Not too hard to break out; I just sorted by year and then re-labeled everything that fell into that bracket in one fell swoop, tweaking what does and doesn't belong here and there as I listen to it.

For the older stuff, I have categories for "60s rock" (Beatles, Byrds, etc.), "70s rock" (Bowie, Big Star, Lou Reed, etc.), and "Oldies" (more doo-wop and pre-Beatles pop). So that keeps rough genres separated and keeps Buddy Holly away from Radiohead or Fleetwood Mac.

There are some artists who are hard to pin to a genre - Eno being a great example. I've moved him from "electronica" to "70s rock" and finally to "alternative," none of them exactly feeling like a great fit. But really what it comes down to is when I'm listening to one of these playlists I start to wish I was listening to such-and-such album too, which tells me I ought to consider putting it in that genre. (In Eno's case - Talking Heads was a no-brainer for the "Alternative" category, which led me to think Eno belonged as well.)

Other bands have different albums in different genres--Byrds and Lovin' Spoonful are 60s Rock and Country, Elliot Smith is in Classic Indie and Indie Rock, etc. That's okay with me too.

Richard - I hope to do a future post, maybe this week if I can get on it, about some of my manual playlists, including the Awesome playlist.

[Paul]

Have you considered listing more than one genre for the borderline cases? Using i-tunes "contains" feature for the smart playlist creation (i.e., "Genre contains electronica" or "Genre contains Alternative") you could capture Eno (Genre: "Electronica, Alternative, 70's Rock") in two different kinds of searches.

Does that make sense?

[scott pgwp]

Wait, what? If there is a way to mark a song or album as belonging to more than one genre, I am going to do a cartwheel.

[Paul]

Yes. I just tested it. In the genre box, use commas or spaces to separate the different genres you want to include for the artist. Then, when you create a smart playlist, instead of using the search "genre 'is' electronica," just use "genre 'contains' electronica."

If your i-tunes does not allow you to use "contains" as part of the searches you just need to update the version you are using.

[Richard]

This is good to know, Paul. Thanks.

[scott pgwp]

Absolutely - I have a couple of playlists that I update manually, but this fix would free me of that. Thanks Paul!

[Martin Wisse]

I tend to use smart playlists a lot in ITunes, though I'm more of a lumper than a splitter. I don't have a genre called indie rock, let alone subdivisions in it, just a genre called rock that has everything from the Beatles, Bowie usw to Dinosaur Jr. etc.

I'm also absolutely anal about getting release years and other data right, not to mention cover artwork.

[crapples]

One thing I like to do is put a "last played = not in the last seven days" condition on my smart playlists. That way if I shuffle a playlist, I'll only hear the stuff that I haven't heard in the last week. I use this frequently with medium sized playlists.