I have 75 Gigs of songs on my Itunes. I am looking for a good system of organizing my songs so I can really utilize them. I have all artist and song names perfectly tagged. Unfortunately I have no ideas for genres. So many genres overlap and many artists have comeback albums as well as change their style of music completely. I don't want to do this track by track and don't really want to use www.allmusic.com since I don't really agree with their genres. Does anyone have a suggestion for genres or comment organization. I really would love users to post their system. That would help. Also post a couple artists and how they tag them as far as genre or category.
I use the defaulted Genres and decide my own when I want.
For example, I have lots of what I call Soundbytes so I hightlight them all, right click and select Get Info and in the Genre section just type Soundbytes. It changes them appropriately and the next time I choose one or many songs and start to type Soundbytes it comes up automatically.
Simply, call them whatever you want and then add to songs via Get Info.
I just organized my genres because I am transferring all my music from CD to my harddrive.
If you use an iPod there is a limit to what it will show you of details, for example you can only see what is called GENRE in iTunes, you wont be able to see all kinds of details you input in the collumn grouping or others.
So my idea was to group songs in various general genres: POP, R&B, ROCK, AMBIENT, ELECTRONIC, JAZZ, CLASSICAL etc... then I have created subgroups for each genre, but when I write in the genre in the "get info" menu I include the general genre and write for example:
R&B - funk
R&B - general
R&B - Rap/Hip-Hop
R&B - Soul
and the same with ROCK:
ROCK - Alternative & Punk
ROCK - Classic
ROCK - Heavy
This way when you use the browse function and browse your genres, all the ROCK will be alphabetically organized (as I have tried to illustrate above) and the sub groups are together so all types of ROCK is easilly found.
Before I used to have a genre for each sub group, making it a hasstle to find anything, mainly because alfabetically when iTunes organized my genres, Alternative Rock would be at the top and Heavy towards the middle.
This way an artist that is usually into R&B will always be found within the subgroups of R&B for example R&B - general or R&B - Rap/Hip-Hop.
Hope you get the idea...
There's several real problems with Genre tagging, as you have discovered.
First is obviously that nobody can agree on it. Everybody has their own opinions there.
Secondly is that even when some people can agree, it makes little sense to sort songs or even artists into one and only one genre.
In the long run, I support the idea of tagging each and every song with multiple genres, however there is little support for this in music organization programs (although there
IS support for this in the tags themselves). This idea lends itself well to a shared genre tagging database, where people's individual tags for a song can be combined and sorted into genre counts and percentages. Thus you can tag a song as "rock, hip hop, and new age" (for some ****** odd song), and when you combine everybody's tag for that song together and keep a running count, you have a reasonably good idea of what a song is. Just take the most used tags of the song and use those as a starting point. Sort of a way to reach consensus.
But for the time being, that's just an idea, and I tend to just use overly broad genres for tagging and then end up not using Genre much, if at all. Mostly I use it as an exclusion filter, to be able to not have audiobooks and comedy albums invade my music playlists.
As for comment tagging, Tag&Rename has the option to put the album review from amazon.com into my comments, and I've found that very handy. The one thing I dislike is that iTunes seems to limit its comment handling to 255 characters, which is stupid and annoying. Many of my comments are a few K in size, and it should be fixed to handle those properly. So should the iPod.
