Random iTunes Wrangling

Now that I've got my desktop back up and running -- although I wasn't careful and ended up nuking all the additional play counts and ratings from my iPod since the last time I synced, pre-hard drive crash -- I'm toying with a better way to slice my music library so it will fit on the portable device.

Of course, I could go out and buy one of those new 160GB models. It is my birthday, after all. But I probably won't.

I feel like sometimes I'm out of step with the overall digital music community in that I still care about albums, and iTunes never seemed well-suited for dealing with albums. For example, it tends to ignore album information when auto-downloading album art, which is weird. Anyway, to combat that, I had created a couple of manual playlists for the albums I absolutely have to have on my iPod, and for the ones that are the bread-and-butter of my CD collection.

Except that those are a pain in the butt to maintain. I was planning on taking everything in those two playlists, and rating all tracks in the "Desert Island Disks" at 5, and everything in "Essentials" at 4, and then rely almost exclusively on track ratings for most of the sync selection.

It then dawned on me that, when browsing through "Album View" -- which has an annoying bug in it, but never mind that -- there was a rating scale underneath the album cover. Turns out I can create an album rating that entirely separate from the track rating! Not entirely separate, actually, but that's a neat little feature, too. Turns out iTunes automatically assigns an album rating equal to the highest track rating on an album. I think. I guess it could be the average, but I haven't double-checked. The point is, I could non-destructively rate all those albums separate from their tracks, and now I can use some combination of album and track ratings to feed my iPod. Works great for party shuffle, too!

Now if I could just figure out why my iPod shuffle refuses to work.