Organizing Holiday Music on iTunes

[Peter]

I’ve got our 50 or so Christmas CDs sitting in a bag and I think this is the year for loading them on the hard drive. But, I don’t want to mingle them with my music library and I need very straightforward access or my wife will lose patience. I’m wondering how others organize their holiday music.

 

If we were in my ideal world, I’ld have a separate file on my hard drive labeled “Christmas Music” and I could segregate it from my regular library and then click on it and I could then get the holiday music list. Sort of like a new election just under “Radio” and “Music.”

 

Peter

 

 

[Audio_ELF]

Why not just use the Genre function within iTunes.

 

I use a few different genres ... combination of

Christmas - Popular

Christmas - Traditional

Christmas - Classical

 

You can then either just browse for the genre - or create a Smart Playlist within which you just choose the required genre. If can even create a folder to hold them all in it makes it nice and neat on your iTunes library window (see picture below).

 

Eloise

 

[Peter]

Thanks Eloise,

 

Follow-up - Is there a way to have the actual music files segregated on my hard drive and then consolidate them in my music library? In January I could then "de-consolidate" them, ie, pull out of my iTunes library but keep them on the hard drive in their file - ready for pulling in again next December?

 

Peter

 

[Audio_ELF]

You could put all the files into a separate folder, then (first make sure iTunes is not set to "copy files to the iTunes media folder) drag them into iTunes. It should be fairly simple to delete them again at the end of the Christmas season (look for all "christmas" genre) and then import them again next year. No way to automate this though.

 

Eloise

 

[wgb113]

Or, if like me, you don't want Dominic The Italian Christmas Donkey popping on at your July 4th BBQ you can go a step further in iTunes and tell it to skip that genre (you tag them as) when using the shuffle function.

 

Bill