Most people only listen to a handful of artists regularly, but either have to create separate playlists or manually search through the library to listen to their songs. iTunes doesn’t allow the user to just add favourites to a specified list, so we’ll use the playlist feature instead.

1. Create a new folder. iTunes folders are fantastic for storing different playlists. To do this, press the File menu, and hit New Folder. Give it some name like Artists or Favourites. This where we will store our most-listened to artists.
2. Once you’ve renamed the folder, open the File menu again and this time press New Smart Playlist. In the window that pops up, make sure “Artist contains” is selected. In the empty box, type the artists’s name and hit OK. Drag your newly created playlist into the “Artists” folder. Now you’ve just made a playlist for one of your favourite artists. Repeat this step until all your favourite artists are in the folder.
3. Next we’re going to follow the same process as step one, but instead of calling the folder “Artists” or “Favourites”, we’re going to call it “Genres”.
4. Open the File menu and hit New Smart Playlist again. Change “Artist” to “Genre” and “contains” to “is”. Then type the genre name into the empty box. Press OK and drag your newly created playlist into the “Genre” folder. Repeat until all your favourite genres are in the folder.
5. If you want to separate these playlists from the rest of your library, create a new folder and call it “Playlists” or something similar. Then drag the iTunes-made smart playlists into the folder.
6. Now you’ve organised your music into relevant playlists, it’s time to make browsing the library easier. In each of your artist’s playlists, switch the view from List View to Album View. To do this, simply go to the View menu and click on Album View. This transforms iTunes from a list to show you all of the artist’s albums categorised by album with the art and lists the songs. This is a far easier way to browse your music.

Now that you can easily find your favourite artists in iTunes, it’s time to sort the actual library. Here are some general tips to keep in mind when adding or sorting your music collection:

• Keep basic genres. Instead of “Punk Rock”, stick to “Alternative” or “Rock”. It will give you less genres to search through.
• Avoid the “Featuring” tag in the Artist metadata. If an album has songs that feature other artists, add that in the song name, not the artist. This will make it easier to manage your albums.
• Fix songs without the proper metadata. Your songs should be easy to find and identify. Spend a few minutes each day correcting your existing library and over time you will discover that your library is much simpler and easier to browse.

Rather than manually clean up your iTunes library, there are some time-saving solutions that will help fix up unsorted iTunes libraries.

Your first port of call would be to track down all the duplicate songs with the same artist and song name. This is easily done by using a built-in iTunes feature. Simply click the View menu and select Show Duplicates. This handy feature does the hard work for you and finds all the tracks with more than one copy. You can then sort through this list manually and delete those you don’t need.

There are also various software packages that can be downloaded to clean up your iTunes library. One such program, TuneUp, is a digital music management application that finds all the unnamed or incorrectly tagged tracks and updates them with their official listings. It claims to fix up to 90 per cent of disorganised and unidentifiable tracks.

On top of being able to cycle through alphabetical lists of albums, artists, playlists, genres and more, you can turn the iPhone on its side and browse through your music by album artwork.

This clever feature is called Coverflow and it’s directly borrowed from iTunes. It is reminiscent of browsing through your CDs at home to select music. When you turn the iPhone on its side, the inbuilt sensor automatic switches the iPod to Coverflow mode. Simply drag or flick your finger across the album artwork until you find the one you want, then just tap on the album – the cover art will flip over so you can see what songs are available.

Of course, there is also shuffle and repeat options for those who want to mix it up or enjoy repetition.

Copying your Music
The iPhone is designed to sync with iTunes on either your PC or Mac, just like an iPod. But rather than take everything on your iTunes library, you need to create a playlist of what music, videos, podcasts and audiobooks you want. You can’t just drag the songs you want across from your iTunes library to your iPhone like you can do on your iPod.

The upside of this is that it keeps your music collection a lot more organised, making navigation to you chosen song much easier. You can also make multiple playlists to reflect your mood, as well as video, podcast and audiobook playlists.