I was so completely frustrated by this that when I found an absolutely fantastic solution, I felt I had to share it with the world!

So if you’ve used iTunes for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve noticed that each song can only have a single genre associated with it.  The problem is, so many songs these days fail to fit neatly into a single obvious genre!  Is that song progressive house or techno?  Is that 80’s pop or new wave?  Modern or Alternative rock?  Dubstep or Drumstep?  Etc. etc. etc.  There are many frustrated threads about this limitation all over the Google – especially on Apple’s own forums.  But nobody seemed to have a really elegant solution, at least not that I saw.

Until I found this instructable.

HOLY $#!* how did I not notice this before?!?!?

Check out the link but basically, there’s a second category called “grouping” that you can arbitrarily define as anything you want – just like genre.  You can even enable it in the column browser and sort it, filter by it, create smart playlists from it, etc. just like the genre field.  This means it can act as a sub-genre or sub-category!  Combine this if you wish with the ability to add multiple genres/labels in the comments field, and you’re pretty damn well covered.

Personally my current approach is going to be to use genre as the “primary category” since it’s already set for a large number of my tracks, and most of the time will fit “well enough”.  And I’m going to be adding the grouping label as a sub-category in order to more accurately niche it down.

This is an absolute godsend for those of us who are a bit more obsessed with organizing our music/files.  Let me know if this is helpful to you or better yet – if you have an even better or more clever-er approach to using it (or anything else in iTunes)!

JVC