Using iTunes to organise your recordings

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As an avid producer of podcasts, I have for ages been trying to find a good way of organising my recordings. I needed to keep all my recordings together in a sensible directory structure AND a way of tagging, categorising and searching them.

I was getting to the point of writing some sort of recording content management system when it suddenly struck me - “Hang on, isn’t that what iTunes does?!” Doh!

So I’ve started an experiment. I downloaded iTunes onto the PC where I store all my recordings, interviews etc. Then I brought each recording into iTunes (File -> Add file to library). When you do this at least 5 cool things happen:-

The sound file gets copied into a sensible, non changing directory structure maintained by iTunes (ensure you have Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced tab, Keep iTunes Music Folder organised and Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library ticked);
You can now edit the information associated with each recording - right click on the recording and select Get Info. You can edit the title, year, and add a description among other things.
You can group clumps of recording together by assigning them an “album” - for example, if you were putting together a podcast series about Alien Abductions, you could put all you interviews and other recordings into an album called “Alien Abduction Recordings”.
You can use the search box in iTunes to find stuff - invaluable when you recording library gets really big. Top tip - put tags in the Composer field when you edit the info, this field is searched by the iTunes search box. So for example I did a recording the other day of a guy called Jim on the seafront at the Al Fresco cafe, my tags were “jim andy beach seafront al fresco”.
Another way of “tagging” is to use playlists. Make playlist of your top dozen or so “tags” and drag the relevant recordings into them - cool.

I’ll keep you posted on how my iTunes experiment is going.

Technorati Tags: itunes, mp3, recordings, podcasting, organising, tagging