Organizing the Musical Mess

My music is a mess at the moment.

My fiancée and I have merged our two music collections, mostly electronic, and somehow I ended up with duplicates in my iTunes.

Meanwhile, he’s busy making sure each bit of album artwork is there and all the songs are perfectly labeled and organized under their albums and bands. Luckily, iTunes will do most of this work for you. There is even a place where you can view any duplicate songs and delete the ones you do not want.

Pretty amazing.

I sometimes hear questions about how one should organize music collections. To me, this is an odd question. In these days of mp3s, programs organize music in the same fashion: artist, album, song. And as I said, it will even look up the artwork for you. So even though my music is a mess right now, it won’t take more than few minutes to fix it.

The same basic idea applies to physical music, such as CDs and vinyl. You could organize your desk or kitchen cabinets a million different ways, but there are only so many different ways to stack jeweled CD cases. You could organize them by year or genre or in alphabetical order, but it is still based on the size and shape of that physical object.

Pretty amazing.

Too bad all of our systems aren’t that easy. Still, am I missing something? Do you have a special way you organize (or don’t organize) your music so that you can find the song you want?