You started out with a few hundred songs and that was a few years ago now. It’s getting to a point now that your collection of iTunes music is just insane, and trying to find what you want is almost impossible. Here are some tips to managing and maintaining a large iTunes library.

Whether you paid for your iTunes music or you were savvy enough to get yourself a free iTunes music voucherthe secret to organizing your playlist is to divide your music in broad chunks first and only then start to break down the finer details.

Do a search for say ‘Queen’ for example, and change the genre for all tracks to ‘Classic Rock’ You may have fixed the genre for a few hundred songs with that one action. Do this with ten of your biggest artists and you have made massive progress in organizing your oversized music collection.

Here’s another way of fixing big batches of tracks: use maintenance smart playlists to catch untagged stuff. Set up an Unrated (0 Star) Smart Playlist, and SPLs for tracks with no genre, no artist name, or no year. Here’s a good way to add year tags quickly: create an SPL for tags with no year, then type19 in the search box. Chances are that most of the results will contain 19 because they have the year of issue in the album name or comments field. You can select and change the year quickly. Repeat with ’200 to get all the 21st century tracks. This type of trick won’t catch everything but it will save you a heap of time.

It is not advisable to create manual playlists when organizing your iTunes music collection. Manual playlists are for your own personal compilations only and you should be using Smart Playlists (SPLs) for your tasks of managing your large iTunes library. SPLs are updated automatically as new music is added to iTunes – which is why it is essential to use these when organizing your collection.

When it comes to fixing the tags on your music, think broad again and instead of fixing the tag for each album, fix the type of tag for say genre instead and organise a few thousand tracks in the process.

Try a few different approaches to how you organize and categorize your iTunes music so that you can actually get to the songs you like and listen to. Try creating a smart playlist of all songs that have either never been played or not played recently and then rate these songs lower so they do not come up in the playlists randomly, for example.

There is a great feature in iTunes called ‘Skip Count’ which tells the system how many times you have skipped past that song when it was on the playlist. Try creating a smart playlist with these rules: Skip Count is greater than 3 and Rating is greater than 3. Select everything this Playlist finds and bump the rating down to 2 so you don’t see it as often.

You can also try to emply the help of automated tools and services to organize your iTunes music library but most of these come at a price. If you really have a huge iTunes music collection and you don’t want to organize it yourself then these tools can definitely help.

Learn more about how easy it is to get free iTunes music vouchers,and see the latest offers on all Apple iTunes Gift Certificates, Gift Cards and merchandise. Check out the latest iTunes Hints and Tips.