Keeping your best music on multiple discs with iTunes

2008-02-24T00:00:00+01:00

Like most of us, I like to listen to music when I'm in my car. Since the radio doesn't always play what I want, I always keep a few compilations from my own library handy to put in my car's MP3/CD player (no, I don't have an iPod dock yet). However, I always found it very hard to keep track of the songs I had already burnt to a disc for my car, and I eventually lost the courage to burn new discs with more recent library additions. However, over time, most of the discs I did create went on a journey to CD heaven, and so now I found myself having to compile new MP3 discs all over again. Luckily, iTunes turns out to make the task of creating and managing compilation discs a breeze.

Some of the problems I wanted to solve when burning my music library to discs were:

Because of the size of my music library, writing my whole music collection is not really a good idea. I therefore have to limit the discs I want to write to my best songs only. But ...
Not all my music in iTunes is rated (yet). Whenever I rate new songs as 'good', or I import new albums, I would eventually like them written to a new disc.
I don't want the discs to have duplicate songs, I already have to use a lot of discs to write everything as it is.
Discs in my car tend to have a short lifespan, because of the varying weather conditions, and the way I handle my discs (I always find myself too busy watching the road to put CD's in pockets etc.). So, whenever one of my disc dies, I would like to replace it with a new one.

To solve these problems, these are the steps I use to create my music compilation discs with iTunes:

Create a smart playlist containing only your best songs. If you have other criteria for music destined for car usage, add them to this playlist. Limit the playlist to the size of 1 CD (i.e. 704 Mb). Let's call this playlist `New Car Disc'.
To create our first compilation disc, we create a new (regular) playlist `Car Disc 1', and drag the complete song list from the `New Car Disc' playlist into it.
Since we don't want any of the songs from `Car Disc 1' in our second compilation disc, we modify our `New Car Disc' playlist to exclude all music from `Car Disc 1'.
At this point, `New Car Disc' contains a new batch of songs, which make up `Car Disc 2'. Repeat step 2 and 3 to divide all the best songs of your library into discs, until the `New Car Disc' playlist contains less than 704 Mb of songs.
Now, you can burn all (or some of) your `Car Disc' playlists. I always use an Export Playlist script, which makes sure that the alphabetical order of the exported files is the same order as those in the playlist. This tends to work with most MP3 disc players. Simply copy this script to your Library/iTunes/Scripts folder, and invoke it from within iTunes.

By using the scheme described above, whenever new songs get rated, they are automatically added to the `New Car Disc' playlist, allowing you to incrementally write new discs as you rate your library. Anytime you have enough music to fill another cd, just randomize the `New Car Disc' playlist (by deleting all songs in the playlist, which regenerates the playlist), and create a new disc. Another plus of keeping the playlists of your written discs around is that you can easily create new copies of a disc whenever you didn't handle it as you supposed to.

A downside of this approach is that you still have to manually create playlists, drag the songs into the playlist, and adapt the smart playlist to exclude the new one. I would have liked to automate this process using AppleScript, but unfortunately AppleScript does not support the creation of smart playlists yet :( Let's hope Apple adds this to a future version of iTunes.

El Tramo | Compilations

Keeping your best music on multiple discs with iTunes