I recently bought [...]]]> I kinda avoided using iTunes because it was unfamiliar to me, and I much preferred to play songs on a track by track basis on VLC players, and since windows media player stopped being an mp3 player and started to become more of a music managment device it because kinda difficult to manage.

I recently bought an iPhone and it sort of forced me to use iTunes, (it won’t allow me to use any other music player on it), and after being annoyed initially, I got into the full flow of things.

I started to rate every song in my music collection from 1-5, I deleted all the 1-star songs, then I got all the album artwork for every song, and name all my music correctly (correct artist, track, album names).

It took my quite a few days to do but got there eventually.

And sometimes it can be a bit of a mind-numbing chore, leaving you wanting to quit and go away and do something else. However once completed the rewards are immense.

Some of the benifits listed below

• Much more organised music collection allowing you to find tracks quick and easily (thanks to correct tags used)
• Better understanding of your music tastes, from rating track
• Easy to create playlists of different genre’s, tempo’s etc of music allowing you to listen to music to suit your mood
• Album artwork makes your music collection appear more “real”, especially when flicking through tracks on your iphone
• Makes you more familair with your favourite artists, how many songs out there do you like but don’t know the name of?

I found this resource invaluable in teaching me how to oranise my music http://ipod.about.com/od/advanceditunesuse/ss/album_artwork.htm

Also the shazam app for the iphone is really good for identifying songs that you dont know the names of, I’ve had quite a few songs in my collection that I didn’t know the name of [because they had generic names like Track1 - Now69 etc], with shazzam I simply press ‘Tag’ and it recorded 10 seconds of a song and came back with the artist and song name.