Gahh...music genres. So I got an iPod for Hannukah (the big 160gb one). I'm really enjoying it so far, having all of my music on one device is something I've been wanting since I started collecting mp3's years ago. Unfortunately, I've made the mistake of trying to set genres. The problem of course is picking one genre for a given album or artist (I ranted about this a few years ago). I tried to get around this with the smart playlists (very neat feature by the way) and setting multiple genres in the comments, but you can't browse by album (and take advantage of all the album covers I've spent time settting up).

First I had to fix all the one that had completely wrong genres (how the hell did Franz Ferdinand and Tori Amos get set to "Tribal" and the Red Violin Soundtrack get stuck with "Trip-Hop"?). But it's really the deciding between genres that gets me. What's funny is how subjective it is - for example, stuff that would probably get stuck in the same category differs in my view based on time period. For example, Indie and Alternative are mostly the same genre (if either can really considered a cohesive genre), but for me it really depends on whether they were mostly popular in the 90's or the 00's. But what if they were active in both decades...now there's a pickle. And don't get me start on the many genres of electronic music (or is it electronica - damn). In the end I suppose it boils down to just choosing I want to browse by, true categorization be damned (but...but...I gotta get it right...).

I also made the mistake of finding the ability to add lyrics, a neat feature that lets you view the lyrics of a song on the iPod while a song is playing. It's also a feature that would take an astronomical amount of time. I've currently got just over 19,000 songs, figure maybe half of them are instrumental, some I don't care to have lyrics, carry the 8, and you still have me adding lyrics well into next summer. That's supposing I don't spend too much of that time categorizing...