how anal/creative are you with itunes genre labeling?

I have (half-arsedly admittedly) implemented a multi-genre tagging system so songs are tagged as e.g. alt pop or alt rock or electronic pop or classic rock. Then I use a smart playlist to pick out all the pop or all the rock or all the alt.

IOW very anal ;_;

i'm not very anal about the genres at all (most things fall under Alternative & Punk or Electronica/Dance) but I am always having trouble deciding how to label musics from different parts or the globe, say Africa, Brazil, Turkey, and so on. I hate how Brazilian clashes with Ambient, or African with Reggae/Dub- i feel like all the labels should be Regional, or all of them should be Generic, not this uneven mish-mash which exposes my own anglo-american ingornace... anyone have a solution to this?

anyone have a solution to this?

I try to label them genre appropriately no matter where they're from. Cumbias get labeled as Cumbias, etc. It's tough, but in my experience your source for the music is as good a source for the genre info as any.

Label 'em twice, region and genre. As above, use smart playlists to separate out the genres and regions.

Though I wish you could "tag" rather than having to affix singular labels. Then I could label something as "Hip-Hop (Hardcore)" "Buddhist" and "Moody" and cross reference all the shit. That'd be nice.

Hello am I killfiled here? Space separated tags and smart playlists, does that not achieve more or less what you want?

lol does indeed

I don't tag anything except "album" on entire albums I have stocked in there.

Anything that came out this year I tag "2007: New Stuff"

Then I can have a huge shuffle with just stuff that came out this year, like my own college radio station (but, you know, one that plays rap).

Upon reading this thread I started re-labeling all my stuff, and now I'm up to 74 unique genres. A bit pretentious. I thought it was a good idea to use smart playlists instead, guess I'll have to see how it works out.

Space separated tags and smart playlists, does that not achieve more or less what you want?

hm. can't seem to beat that. i'm also trying to correct release dates so i could listen by time period. plus that doesn't hurt my brain as much as trying to come up with the correct genre.

i take it album by album. sometimes it's simple and i can just tag something "pop/rock" or "madchester/baggy". sometimes it's not simple and i have to use tags like "dream pop & shoegaze" or "ambient house + ambient techno" to cover things from the cocteaus to mbv, or klf to aphex twin, respectively. i have about 1000 albums in my itunes library right now, and i think my way works well.

remember you can customize the genre tag to whatever you feel appropriate. i used to be into some crappy u.s. pac nw 'electronica' like the blow and yacht. that shit's labeled "stupid hipsters with electronics" now (i can't bring myself to delete those things yet, for nostalgia).

oh, and i've also found that it's good to be as pigeonholing about it as you can be. when i first went through my library and labeled everything and found that i only had one album i could call "paisley underground", the rain parade, i realised it might be a good idea to look more into that kind of thing.

i also have some things which i'm not sure what genre fall into tagged "(unsure)", which works for now.

hm, i dont care much at all for that category tbh.

i just realised that my posts on this thread probably don't exactly make sense. oh well. so scrambled, these days.

i never liked bothering with the genre tag before, but now, without it, i'd never be able to sift through my itunes library and find things that i'd like to listen to. i guess this might sound funny, but when i load up itunes and know that i just want to hear music but have no idea what, i usually scroll down the genre tag column and through my mind i'm going "sunny ambient pop? no. something brash and britpop? no. glam rock? bowie? yeah!".
also, it just helps me really realise the more types of things that i'd like to seek out.

I cover/listen to a lot of local music, so I have seperate tags for "Baltimore club music," "Baltimore hip hop," etc. But 90% of everything else is either "hip hop/rap" or "rock'n'roll" (so that I can search the tag without getting a bunch of rap/club songs with "rock" in the title). I want to start tagging stuff by year like Whiney has, but so far I've just thrown every 2007 album into one playlist.

i used to be really anal about that and have personal compilations of my favorite 1978 art-punk etc. but at some point you get diminishing returns when you just want to listen to roy ayers and burial and the associates so you're trying to make a category which brings them all together. btw i liked your newest mix alot, paperdolls = +++

xxpost

I do pretty much the same as someone above - just one genre, "album", for all the albums I've ripped into my library. It's served me fine for the last two years and I can't see that changing. I've never searched for a song or created a playlist based on genres. I've got 2 smart playlists - one that gets all the albums for a given year, or range of years, and another that takes every song by a new band that I want to check out - it just takes all songs that aren't on albums, with the year of 2007, and that have been played less than 2 times. After they've been played twice I'll know that I either want to get the album, or delete them. I find rating songs far more useful than assigning genres. Plus I know that I'm exactly the type of person who would be incredibly anal about assigning genres, and I'd spend more time doing that than actually listening to music.

you dont have to tag stuff by year in the "genre" box--there's a field for "year". unless youre all talking about something different.

I use the genre heading pretty regularly when I'm trying to find something to listen to, so when one genre gets cluttered with too many bands (over 30 in one genre is too many), I try to break it down further. That's how Alternative became Alternative, Britpop and Indie. And how Punk became Punk, Emo, Ska, Hardcore, etc. Those are getting too filled, though, so I'll probably end up with skate-punk, emo-rap, whiny-hipsters and other crap like that.

Don't label anything

lablz r teh devil

i delete all genre info

Yeah never saw the point of them. It's true that floating tages would be more appropriate

"tags" even

Yeah never saw the point of them. It's true that floating tages would be more appropriate

If you stick songs you might like to have in the same playlist in the same genre, then you can use that in making "smart" playlists according to genre. If this is too restrictive (and it probably is), then you can do a similar trick by putting (multiple) tags in the description field and making smart playlists with the "contains" verb. Multiple genre support would be better, however.

i delete all genre info

Me too, with the exception of some stuff I've downloaded that has been labeled in ways that seem comically inappropriate...f'rinstance I didn't touch the "pop" label that had been affixed to some Jandek stuff.

I don't use the genre tags but I have been obsessively correcting all of the years for every song on my iTunes. Lots of reissues and greatest hits include the year the new package was created (i.e., Lust for Life is 2002, Sinatra's greatest hits is 1988, etc.), and plenty of tracks--especially random downloads--don't have any year at all.

So I've spent the last couple weeks attaching the correct year to every single song. It's been tedious but I'm down to about 50 songs left to label. I made smart playlists by decade and those have been a lot of fun to shuffle through. When the very different genres bump up against each other, it's somehow not as jarring due to the fact that everything is equally dated.

Inspired by this thread, I went into itunes with the intention of meticulously labeling my genres. "Oh Boy! I'll finally be able to find things that are Minimal Techno and not just Electronica. Psychedelic and not just Rock." Then I realized that the Genre column was hidden. When I opened it up, I discovered that about six months ago, someone had universally changed every genre on my list to Comedy. Nice one.

genre labels give me the fucking shits. i usually replace it with the record label

I use genre tags because sometimes i don't want to shuffle from Frank Sinatra to Battles to Jorge Ben to Boards of Canada. Yeah, stuff gets questionable on the margins, but who cares. I also use the Grouping, Comment, and Year fields along with smart playlists so that I can do things like listen to insrumentals only, or stuff from fluxblog, or music from Scotland or whatever. Totally anal but sometimes poring over metadata is a good way to relax after a long day at work.