Who doesn't like listening to music on our computers and MP3 players! It's no longer uncommon to find more than half your drive space being eaten up by a massive movies and music collection. You might even have multiple copies wasting space on your hard drive, and searching for your favorite songs can become frustrating if your music is scattered across different folders. But you can actually find any song within 5 seconds, using a music manager.

There are numerous tools for organizing music such as Apple iTunes, MediaMonkey, Helium Music Manager and Collectors.com MP3 Collector. These tools scan your hard drive for songs and organize them automatically, so it doesn't matter if they are spread across different fold.ers or drives. The organizer uses ID3 tag information, so your entire collection needs to be properly tagged. It doesn't matter if you haven't embedded the album art; sOTe organizers can do this job automatically. Once you have imported your collection, you can find your favorite numbers within seconds. You just have to type the title or artist name into the search field and hit [Enter]. Some of the other important features of music organizers are playlist management, CD ripping, and audio conversion. The task of searching for songs and creating playlists becomes a breeze, and you can burn your compilations to audio CDs in no time.

Some have a feature called party shuffle, which randomizes playback so you don't have to worry about changing songs and there's an element of surprise as well. In this workshop we use Apple iTunes, a free, feature-rich media player and organizer.

Step 1: Install and setup

After you install iTunes, it can scan your computer for media files. If you need
to add more later, click 'File I Add File to Library' or 'Add folder to Library' and browse to the relevant file or folder.

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Step 2: Browse and play

After the music is added to iTunes, it is organized using the ID3 tags. You browse by genre, artist and album in separated columns or an album art grid. This makes it easy to find what you are looking for. To enable the browser, click 'View I Show Browser'.

Step 3: Delete duplicates

Sometimes, there are multiple instances of a song in iTunes because you have more than one copy on your drive. You can easily delete these by clicking 'File
I Show Duplicates'. It will give you a list" of all duplicated files and you can select and delete the files you wish to discard.

Step 4: Smart playlists

Smart playlists in iTunes are lists filtered by a song rating, artist name, album name or even track numli>er. Click 'File I New Smart Playlist' and define rules to create the filters. Now you don't have to select songs and albums individually.