Wow, that is pretty neat. I'm usually trying to simplify my genres, but I've definitely thought about adding more detail, as you've done, from time to time.

The only problem with that is that you end up with a lot of 'spam' in the Genre pulldown menu, as every time you enter a new genre (or combination) it adds itself to the list. If you later change it, or remove the song in question, the modified genre stays. You'd likely be better off putting the genre info (if multiple) into the comments field.

Of course, that means you have to use smart playlists instead of the already existing genre lists on your iPod or iTunes.

Yeah, that is a problem, but you can always use the autocomplete to fill out the genre from you. I never actually pull down that menu.

Unseelie - True, but I don't use the Genre browser much. I suppose if you wanted to be very, very organized, you could arrange your genres by alphabetical order in the Genre tag, and then the Genre browser would make slightly more sense. Either way, I thnk more information is better than less, and I just can't see putting Genres in anywhere but the Genre tag. In my mind anyway, that's what it's for.

If Apple changes the way it reads the Genre tag, though, then the Genre browser would work perfectly. I suppose I should start a campaign for the Ethical Treatment Of Genre Tags...

Ooh, the ethics of genres. Have you ever looked at the level of detail on All Music Guide?

That, and I wish you could clear that information out of the genre pulldown without having to edit XML.

So you've actually been editing a plist file to change the menu?

David, yes, I am very well aware of All Music Guide, it is the Greatest website ever.

Anyway...I have gotten into the habit of copying the Style and Tone information from AllMusicGuide into the comments field of my songs and then creating smart playlists for each style. I have probably over 100 of them from "Southern Rap" to "Album Rock" to "Alt-Metal", "Swing" etc. It really is amazing.

It's taken some time, but I have several thousand songs categorized that way, and it makes my iPod sooo much more fun now.

You should submit this excellent hint as a separate smartplaylist!

I too have been using AMG for genre/tones. I spent a week or two trying to figure out how to handle this and settled on using the Genre field as a broad general category and then adding more specialized genre/info in the Comments field. This has proven to be very flexible (IMHO)

For instance:
Echo and the Bunnymen - Heaven Up Here
Genre: Alternative Pop/Rock
Comments: Post-Punk, Neo-Psychedelia, Dream Pop

Then on a song by song basis I add "tone" info to the Comments field. So using the above example for the song "Over the Wall" I would also add:
Comments: Brooding, Nocturnal

Yes it is a great deal of work (considering my CD collection is in the 900-1000 range) but one of the things that really turned me onto iTunes/iPod was the limitless possibilities of playlists and to me this is the best way to fully utilize it.

I use very broad genres suck as rock, rap, pop, reggae, and latin. And use the grouping field as a more specific genre like, Genre: Rock, Grouping: Alternative. I find this makes it a lot simpler while browsing through genres and allows you to still make specific playlists. Although I'm not really sure what the grouping feild actually is meant to be used for. I also use the comment field for certain moods of a song.

I have sort of the opposite problem.

What I want to do, is have all the sub-genres listed at allmusic.com, and be able to select based on those. I don't know how to do this. I'll describe the problem maybe someone can think of a way around the problem.

Say I rate music in the following categories:

Rock
Prog-rock
arena-rock
pop/rock
country-rock

These examples will demonstrate my problem.

Now I want to catch much that have only the genre "Rock". I don't consider pop/rock as real rock music, so I don't want to listen to that in my rock playlist. I can't use "IS" if it multi-genre because something might be "Rock;Prog-Rock".

I also can't use "contains", because it will return any of the above five genres, instead of just the one with Rock.

I used to use Media Player and it could do this, unfortunately it also had a bug that if a song matched on more than one of it's multi-genres the song would be added to your playlist for each match.

Anybody know a good way to do multi-genre selecting like this?

Sorry, I got a better example.

I originally thought I could solve this problem by mapping the Genre from allmusic.com to genre in iTunes. Then map the styles (sub-genres) to grouping.

That works for a lot of cases, but here is one that doesn't. There are more...

Artist: Alison Krauss
Genre: Country
Styles: Bluegrass
Progressive Bluegrass
Traditional Bluegrass
etc...

I have no way of making a list of any artists that has the bluegrass style. I can't use "grouping is bluegrass" because I'll have more than one style in the field. I can't use "grouping contains bluegrass" because I'll also get Progressive and Traditional bluegrass.

Although this example demonstrates my problem well, since I only have music from 2-3 bluegrass artists it's not really a problem for me. :-)

Basically it's a problem in any case where a word that defines a generic style is also part of a more specific style.