Chapter 8. Maintaining Your Music Library

IN THIS CHAPTER:

About Organizing Your Music

Repair a Missing Song Entry

Reimport a Music CD for Improved Quality

Customize Importing Options

Import a CD in CD-Quality (Lossless) Format

Convert Audio Files to Other Formats

Consolidate Your Music Library

Find Your Music Files from iTunes Entries

Examine and Modify Song Information Tags

Eliminate Duplicate Tracks

iTunes' main advantage, what gave it the edge over existing MP3 player applications at the time it was released, is its database-oriented navigation system. With songs listed not by their filenames and folders, but navigated using the embedded info tags that group them into albums and artists so that users can browse them more like physical CDs on your shelf, iTunes quickly pointed the way toward a richer world of data organized by its inherent criteria rather than by outdated, generic computing metaphors.

The features of iTunes are designed to let your music become organized naturally as you import or acquire it. The info tags are automatically applied to songs as you import them from CDs, and they're already embedded into each song that you purchase through the iTunes Music Store. Yet this process isn't foolproof. It's possible for songs to get into your iTunes Library without having their proper info tags set. It's possible that, over time, through the trivialities of everyday computing life, your files might become accidentally moved or lost, or iTunes might simply lose track of them through something as simple as a wayward click or drag in the file system. In an ideal world, iTunes' song database can't become corrupted on its own. But what kind of an ideal world is it where hard drives crash, Internet connectivity is intermittent, and an inquisitive little brother might rummage through your computer and rename files while you're not looking?

This chapter presents a few procedures that will help you keep your iTunes Library in tip-top shape, organizing your music according to the best practices available for maximum efficiency in finding what you want. You'll see how to consolidate scattered files into your organized iTunes Music folder, how to fix broken song entries in the iTunes Library, and how to reimport a CD if there are encoding errors in the tracks you imported previously. These more advanced topics are intended to help you keep control of your digital music collection even in the face of a decidedly unideal computing world that's determined to make things difficult for you.