iTunes Library Cleanup

Being one who has a huge music collection (like 70 Gigabytes, and that doesn’t include all of my CDs), I want to make sure that all of my music is organized. That includes playlists, album art, ID3 meta-info that’s populated. One particular category that I have been focusing on lately is Lyrics.

Here is my new music purchase (Amazon MP3 as of late) regimen.

Step 1: Find Song or Album you want to purchase.
Step 2: Purchase Song or Album
Step 3: Wait for Downloading to finish
Step 4: Play songs (with Harmonic running in the dashboard).

Why play the songs, other than wanting to listen to them I want to see if Harmonic can locate the lyrics. Most of the time, it can, but sometimes it cannot. Then the search begins. And if I can’t find the lyrics, then I have to type them out myself.

Having over 12,000 files in my audio collection, I knew a bunch of songs I already had in my library were not complete with lyrics. So I started searching for a script to see if I could find all of them.

Oh, did I hit the jackpot. There’s a site called “Doug’s Apple Scripts for iTunes“. Here is the holy grail of just about anything you could possibly want to do with your iTunes library.

I found the script I was looking for. “No lyrics to Playlist”. This little script scanned through my library and added all of the items that did not have lyrics populated and added it to a playlist. Now, I can go through my songs and just attempt to play them and see if lyrics show up. If they do, cool, if not, I can do a search and lastly, if need be, type them up.

This wasn’t the only script I went after. I also went to look for a ‘No Artwork’ playlist. And again, I found that script. It’s called “Tracks Without Artwork to Playlist v3.3”.

The only drawback to these two specific scripts is that they’re not able to be put into a Smart Playlist. If they could have this accomplished, I’d be all set, and everything would be perfect.

If you’re wanting to clean up your iTunes database or just finish it off so it all looks spiffy on your iPods, I would recommend Doug’s Apple Script as your first place to find items.

I'm into everything technology related, particularly anything Apple related. I enjoy programming and tend to lean towards server-based technologies over client-based. You can contact me on twitter, via e-mail, or follow me on friendfeed.