EDITING/DELETING GENRE CAEGORIES IN ITUNES

Nicholas,

Certain Genres cannot be deleted.

Non default Genres will only show up in your list if the is a song in your library that uses it.

A good way to eliminate unwanted Genres is to view you library sorted by Genre. Then scroll through and edit the song Genre info.

You'll find once you've eliminated all references to a particular Genre it will no longer show up in the list.

Matt

Nick,

Yes That is correct.

Matt

I too have a lot of unused genres. Some of them appear to be nondefault (a word?) and are unused but still there. I have for example two "Children's Music" genres listed, but no files in either of them. Is this a default genre? If so, why would there be two?

Donnie,

Yes, I believe "Children's Music" is one of the defaults.

Are both the listings you have spelled and punctuated the same way? No extra spaces?

Matt

Yes, spelling, punctuation, and spacing appears to be the same.

Donnie,

I'm afraid I don't have a good answer,

All I can say is that you shouldn't have exact duplicates in the Genre list.

Matt

Try looking for spaces after the last character. I noticed I had some band names that were doing the same thing (seemed to be duplicates) then found that there was a space typed after the last character, which iTunes took as a unique name.

A good way to test your punctuation (and find "spaces", i.e. even a trailing space on a name of a genre or artist creates another category) is to...

1) Sort by genre (Apple + J first and select to show genre if not already a column view)
2) Select the first item in a genre set (click)
3) Scroll down to the last one in the set and shift + click to capture all in the list (good when you have a few thousand songs to scroll through!)
4) Get Info (apple + I key)
5) Of the options across the top make sure you've selected "Info"
6) If the field for the value you are checking for hidden duplicates (i.e. Genre, Artist) is BLANK then the values, whether they all look the same, ARE somehow DIFFERENT.
7) In the Info field you want to update type in the value/name you want
8) Hit OK...iTunes updates ALL the fields you selected and "corrects" those with "hidden" differences (those not needing to be corrected obviously are the same in the end)
9) BE CAREFUL - updating multiple songs is easy - UN-updating is not (there is no "undo" in this mode.

Note that you cannot do this with song titles but I've done it with Genre and Artist (i.e. change Police and The Police to the proper "The Police" without having to do them individually)

Hope this helps

Andy

BTW,

When making your own categories keep in mind you might want to develop names that begin with a different letter of the alphabet when possible. For example...

Rather than having:

Pop, and
*Pop Vocal*, and
Techno, and
Trance

Try:
Pop
*Vocal Pop*
Industrial/Techno
Trance

This means as you write in the genre field it autocompletes to that particular alphabetic reference first, meaning you don't have to go on typing to a second word to pull it up. You can still search by ANY name in the field, no matter where it is in the field still when making smart playlists (i.e. Underground: Punk/Ska/Industrial as a genre I use and can make smart playlists that separate out each by telling the smart list to look for only "punk" say, or "ska")

Andy

Good tips, A. Timleck. Thanks for posting them.

Thanks...now if we can be rid of those other cats we don't need (or at least maybe I could change "Religious" to "Secular Fundamentalist" then I might have something to put in it!

Andy

Well, there is a PList inside the iTunes package containing [what looks like] the "default" Genres, so maybe editing that would be a solution.

Since iTunes remembers the user added Genres, I would think that information is written/stored somewhere. And if it's written somewhere, it should be editable.

Obviously, any such editing is at the user's risk and should only be done using the normal 'back up what you're working on' procedure.

Peter

Have you dared try that yet??? Sounds like a solution...

Andy

Nicholas:

You may want to try De-Genre from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes. However, you will not be able to delete the preset genres, just ones from other souces.

Lita