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Using Genre or Comments to divide "his and hers" tracks

My wife and I use the same computer (and log-in) at our home and have some similar and some differing musical tastes. We initially used Star Rating to divide each of our favorites (three for her, two for me), but that was cumbersome and did not allow for using the star-rating as intended.

Then, I found with a comma a song can have multiple genres! So, we could each add ",HisFavorites" or ",HerFavorites" to a genre and use this smart playlist:

Genre - Contains - HisFavorites

What's really cool is that you can then make a smart playlist consisting of the two playlists common songs (good for that road trip!):

Genre - Contains - HisFavorites Genre - Contains - HerFavorites

Nate adds: Or if you like to preserve your Genre tags, try simple and cleaner approach by adding a unique Comment Tag.

Comment - Contains - HisFavorites

or the compromise 'road trip' mix...

Comment - Contains - HisFavorites Comment - Contains - HerFavorites

by StoneMtn on Oct 14 | 12:05 pm

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Did you know that by going into System Preferences and creating another user for your wife, she gets a separate iTunes library with none of your music in it? This is what I did for my dad, who has an iPod but no Mac (as of yet).
Then, go into your existing iTunes library, burn all of the HerFavorites songs onto a data cd, log out, log in as your wife, copy the songs into her iTunes, log out again, log back in as yourself, and delete the HerFavorites songs.
Viola! No shared music!
Keep in mind, if you only have one iPod for both of you, you'll have to do cumbersome manual iPod management. Oh, and this sort of makes your playlists pointless...

by fastthumbs on Oct 15 | 4:01 pm

Also, how do you make a song have multiple genres? When browsing, does the genre appear on its own, as "Rock ,HisFavorites" or does the song get listed seperately in Rock and in HisFavorites?

by fastthumbs on Oct 15 | 4:08 pm

Yes I considered making my wife a user, but we don't use it as a multi-person machine otherwise, so it wasn't worth it (now she's getting her own iMac and it really doesn't matter!). :-)

As for the multiple genres, I just add ",His Favorites", so the genre would read "Rock,HisFavorites" and appears in both the genres -- does that answer your question?

by StoneMtn on Oct 15 | 4:33 pm

yeah, it does. thanks. my next question - when will Apple allow for true multiple genre ID3 tagging???

by fastthumbs on Oct 15 | 4:35 pm

I still don't understand why you would both use the same user account. The whole design of the Mac OS and even Windows is to keep people separate. It's a security and organisational thing.

I have all my music (about 20Gb) worth on an external drive because my internal drive is only 13Gb. You can specify an alternate location to one's user folder in iTunes preferences. You probably could have put your music somewhere like the root level of the computer or an external drive like I did and both accessed it, as it wouldn't be in your user folder.

by japester on Dec 07 | 6:43 am

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