iTunes is an awesome program. As anyone who uses it regularly knows, it gives you a great deal of power and flexibility to organize your music, and, especially, to organize what you put on your iPod. But when you start putting a lot of music on your Mac (or PC) with iTunes, you run into a problem: you end up with so many playlists that you have to scroll up and down looking for the one you want. And this is even more complicated on the iPod, since you can only see a few at a time.
The solution is pretty simple: iTunes needs nested folders.Ideally, you should be able to create folders to put your playlists in. Think of list view in the OS X Finder: you can have a folder, and, when you click the disclosure triangle, you can see its contents. iTunes needs the same thing. With nested folders you could create as many folders as you want, and reduce the number of playlists you see at the top level.
You could create folders with the names of specific artists, genres, types of playlists (party, chill-out, etc.), music you’re tired of, or whatever you want. You could then group your playlists in whatever way fits your style. Ideally, you’d even want to create aliases for playlists, so you can put some playlists in multiple folders. (The same way you can put songs in multiple playlists.)
Here’s an example of why I’d like to see this. I’m an eclectic listener, and my iTunes library contains rock, jazz, classical music, Grateful Dead concerts and more. I’ve got a lot of live recordings, such as two box sets of Bill Evans concerts that I have grouped into playlists according to the setlists of the original concerts (the songs cover more than one CD for each one). That gives me 14 Bill Evans playlists. I’d find it much easier to have a Bill Evans folder, then have the playlists appear when I click the disclosure triangle. Same for the Grateful Dead – I’ve lots of their live shows, and I don’t need to see one line in my iTunes list for each one.
Naturally, if this were implemented for iTunes it would have to be done for the iPod as well. And it would be just as useful on the iPod – with its limited display – as it is in iTunes.
Will we see this feature soon? I’m sure someone at Apple has already thought of it. If not, I hope they visit this site.
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