At the moment, my iTunes collection contains 12,383 songs culled from 949 albums by 413 artists. I listen to perhaps 50 of these albums regularly, and maybe another 50 somewhat less regularly. There are hundreds of albums in my collection that I listen to rarely, if ever. Because the Main Library window in iTunes has a built-in bias toward songs, as opposed to albums, I’m always having to scroll past dozens or hundreds of tracks I rarely listen to but nevertheless want to keep in my permanent iTunes collection. For example, I own five Frank Sinatra albums from his classic mid-to-late-1950s period. I love those albums, but I don’t listen to them much—and yet I often have to scroll past two screens’ worth of them when I’m poking around iTunes to figure out what I want to listen to next. Likewise with the albums I do listen to a lot: Why should I always be forced to scroll through a screen and a half of Fountains of Wayne songs when I always have those tracks turned on and synced with my iPod? I’d rather just activate all my Fountains of Wayne songs and forget about them.

I could lessen the load on my Main Library window by visiting Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and plunking down $5 for iTunes Library Manager, a shareware program that allows you to maintain several separate iTunes libraries. There are lots of excellent free iTunes scripts at Doug’s iTunes site, including several that do batch edits of song titles to get rid of awkward capitalizations, extraneous song data, and the like. But I don’t want to have to chop my iTunes collection into parts to make it manageable. I want to keep everything in the same place. So iTunes Library Manager is not the answer to my dilemma.

Fortunately, there’s a simple and elegant solution to the problem of the unwieldy iTunes collection, if only Apple would implement it: iTunes should allow you to collapse an entire album or an artist’s entire oeuvre into one line in the Main Library window, and it should put a checkbox next to each line allowing you to activate or deactive the contents of that line with one click. What if you could control-click on any song in the Main Library and pull up a menu like this, which is a Photoshop-altered version of the actual control-click menu in iTunes 4.7:

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