I recently completed a year-long sweep of my mp3 (or m4a to be precise) library, cleaning out the cruft and sorting the metadata in a proper geek-out manner. This is what I did:

1. Obvious one to start, but: I used "Show duplicates" (in the "View" menu) to find tracks I had several copies of. Great track though it is I don't need 5 identical copies of "Burn Baby, Burn".
2. I then trimmed my genres down to about 20 (from the 60 or so options Gracenote DB had chosen - HipHop, Hip-Hop and Hip Hop - thanks!). This is a manageable figure that means I actually use that classification now. I also set up 3 meta-smart playlists: Hard (rock, indie etc), soft (chilled, easy, ambient etc) and bouncy (hard house, indie dance, psy-trance etc).
3. Next I set up smart playlists to play all the tracks that I hadn't listened to yet - this turned out to be an impressive ~5000 of ~7000 tracks.
4. As they played through over the next 11 months I flagged crap tracks as 1 star for later removal (some 700 tracks by the end of the process), and tracks where the metadata needed attention with 2 stars. (I had to use the flags as they're both things that you can't do on the iPod itself.)
5. Finally I added sleeve art to most of my tracks automagically using the excellent "Tune Sleeve" software. This particularly beats iTunes 7 sleeve art function as that doesn't embed the images in your mp3 file (so presumably they don't turn up on whatever mp3 player you use), and also it forces you to sign up (with credit card details!) to run it.

Labels: ipod, itunes