Monday, March 21, 2011

Big Data

Anyone struggled to squeeze in iTunes music into iPod?
If you love music, 
and you have been accustomed to use iTunes to manage your personal library, 
I reckon that it is likely the case you might encounter. 
Needless to say that I, myself, 
have recently encountered the same kind of problem
as I recovered the old external HDD,
which contained more than 150 GB worth of music...

Wait a minute, my iPhone has only 32GB of 
storage and I am already consuming about 10GB of them 
for movies, apps, and all other types of things. 

Now,  here is the situation. 
1. You have so many songs (about 10000 songs).
2. You want to squeeze the 10000 songs into 1/20. 
3. The squeezed 1/20 of songs should be "balanced" and "reasonably preferable" to your taste *1. 
4. You do not want to do this all manually. 


1. Know your library's preferences. 
First step that you may want to try is to know what kind of library you have.
To know your library's tendency, "Genius" is a great tool and you can actually
run it and check your result. It automatically categorize your library into whatever
the size of it. This time, it is better to refer "Genius Mixes" since it demonstrates it clearer.


2. Create a smart playlist according to Genius Mixes. 
Once you get the genius mixes, note down what the categories are,
and make smart playlists. As far as Genius mixes tell me,
I have "Hiphop", "Brit Pop/Rock", "Adult Alternative", "Jazz"
"Electronica","Neo-Soul" and so on.
According to those categories, you can create your own smart folder;
something looks like below;
























3. Consolidate the Smart Playlist, and Control the Song Volume
Once you created the smart playlist, you can make a folder in order to gather your
playlists. Now that make sure that the sum of songs in the folder do not exceed the
amount that you are looking for. It is ok to be below since iTunes has the
functionality to "automatically fill the empty space with songs" so that
your storage in iPod/iPhone will not be sitting there do nothing.
Once you done with folder, only you have to do, is to plug in the device and
enjoy a happy life!