Use iTunes smart playlists to reveal missing metadata

Aug 18, '06 07:30:04AM

Contributed by: Coumerelli

So, I'm trying with all my might to put as much meta-data in my, well, data (iTunes, and more recently my 6,000+ photos) as I can. Sometimes I want to get a good picture of how much more I have left to tag. In iTunes, you can certainly sort according to any field so long as it's visible and just scroll through and add as you go along. But with that method, there's no progress chart to go by.

And here's the hint...

Did you know that if you make a smart playlist using, for example, genre, you can leave the genre completely blank? If you do, then all songs that have no genre will show up in the smart playlist. So the conditions for the smart playlist would basically be: Genre -- is -- [leave this empty]. So, I have smart playlists called No Album, No Year, etc., and then I can just select one of those lists and see that, Hey! I've only got 78 more songs that need an Album tag! You can do this, it seems, with any field. It's a nice way to show what a song doesn't have.

Furthermore, you can do this with Keywords in iPhoto. Since dates sometimes are out of sync, an unmarked photo might sneak itself up into already-keyworded territory when it's imported and consequently gets lost. So just make a Smart Album with Keyword -- is -- [leave this empty]. Now, just as soon as there is even one keyword, it will disappear from the list, so you need to keep track of it if you want to put more on it. Happy metadata-ing.

[robg adds: In iTunes, if you use "Contains" in the smart playlist's setup, you'll get a warning when you try to create an empty condition. You get no such warning, however, if you use "Is" instead of "Contains."]

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