How to Manage Your MP3 Player

For anyone with broad musical tastes, an MP3 player is a gift from the gods. If you have digital access to any music that you love, it'll probably end up in your pocket musical universe. Then what? Will you have your hundreds of tunes on endless shuffle? Not everyone is always in the mood to go from classic metal to baroque harpsichord to alt.country to fertility dance field recordings to punk opera to... Yes, you probably want to keep all this stuff in appropriate categories, whatever that means to you. Here are some suggestions.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Create mix CD's for the moods, themes or categories of your choice. If you make them as gifts for someone else, keep the songs on your computer or whatever you use to burn CD's.

2. Import these mixes to your MP3 player as playlists. This is the beginning of your category management system.

3. Make longer playlists specifically for your MP3 player. These could last for hours or days if you have the desire and the memory. You can arrange songs to play sequentially (such as a party mix that begins with meet-and-greet music, builds to wild dancing, and ends up in a chill zone). You can assemble a playlist that might work as a shuffle (sunlight-themed music for bright days).

4. Reassign the genres of tracks that you think belong together. This will give you another set of categories to cross-section your library for greater variety. For instance, much of the music you import might show up as "rock," "alternative," "hip-hop," "classical," and so forth. Maybe you'd prefer to label some of these things as "surf guitar," "screamo," "funky bass," "restless chamber," and so forth. Go ahead. Nothing's written in stone.

5. Expand your playlists whenever you want. As long as you don't change a playlist name, the new and improved version will just overwrite the old when you reload it.

6. Delete songs from your playlist whenever you want. Maybe you're running out of memory (it does happen eventually), or maybe you've heard something on your MP3 player a little too often. You don't need an excuse. You're the one in charge of this wonderful pocket library.

Tips & Warnings

• If you reassign genres, be sure you make the changes at your source (your computer's iTunes program, for instance) as well as on the MP3 player. Otherwise, the next time you reload a playlist, "surf guitar" and "funky bass" might show up as "rock" and "alternative" again.
• If you bring your MP3 player to parties for boom box interface, mark it externally with some kind of sticker. Friends might recognize each other's iPods by sound, but the darn things often look alike!
• If you store your music on a computer, back it up on an external drive. In addition to saving files that you might not have stored anywhere else, it can also save playlists that you don't want to keep on the computer.