Many times it is difficult to find new music. One idea is to host a mix-tape party. Invite your fellow music lovers to send 5-10 songs from artists loved but not widely known. At the party, play all of the submitted music and provide a print-out of the songs and artists.
Getting the music
1. Send out a message asking people to submit their songs. Recommend they send MP3 files as they do not contain DRM (digital rights management / copy protection).
Option a. – email the MP3 songs
Option b. – use a service like drop.io or yousendit.com to upload and send a link
2. Save each person’s submissions to a folder.
Organizing and Tagging the music
3. In iTunes, go to the Music view and make sure the column Date Imported is showing. Sort this column so the most recent song imported is at the topic of the list.
4. Select File, Library Import and select the folder from one person
5. You should see the songs from the person you just imported. Select their songs and click Ctrl-I (or Apple-I). This allows you to update the meta data about the songs. In the grouping field, put in text like “Sean’s picks” to identify those songs as coming from that person.
6. Do steps 4 & 5 for every person.
7. Now your iTunes library has all of the songs and each is marked with the person’s name.
8. Create a Smart Playlist. The filter should be Grouping contains “picks”. This playlist shows all of the songs sent in. Order the list as you desire by clicking the appropriate column.
Creating a printout
9. Ctrl-Click on the play list and select Export. This will save a file called playlistname.txt with all of the song information including whose pick it was.
10. There is a lot of unnecessary information in this file. Open the file in Excel or Google Docs and delete the unwanted columns (right-click on the column and select Delete).
11. Print out this list.
Play or Burn the MP3
12. After taking into account copyrights, click on your playlist and click Burn CD. Since you most likely have more songs than will fit on a standard CD, use the MP3 selection when burning. Note this will not play on standard CD players but will play in most computers and standalone DVD players (as long as they are in MP3 format). Play this CD at your party (or play the playlist through your computer or iPod).
