iTunes Tune-up 6: The Smart To-Do List

In an ideal world, each song I add to my iTunes library would have all the appropriate fields filled out the way I wanted them. In reality, my library is now a few years old and many tunes were imported before I even knew I wanted certain information included.

Adding that data after the fact can be time-consuming - especially without some way of noting which tracks you've changed and which ones still need work. I use the smart playlist function of iTunes to keep a running to-do list for me.

Recently I wrote about sorting songs by tempo. In order to retro-fit my tunes with that information, I needed some way of knowing which of the thousands of tracks I had still needed the Beats Per Minute (BPM) field filled out. Here's how I did it:

Step 1 - Create a new smart playlist.

Step 2 - Tweak as necessary (I removed things like classical music and podcasts).

Step 3 - Get to work.

Even with classical tracks and podcasts removed, the remaining BPM to-do list is still pretty imposing - it currently has about 3,100 songs. I work on it a little bit each day, though, and each day there are fewer tracks than before. The smart to-do list lets me easily pick up right where I left off.