iTunes and Genres and painstaking labeling, oh my!

Dulcius_ex_asperis

So. I am trying to really organize my lovely iTunes for the first time. Is there a way to select a group or artist and apply a genre label to them all at once, as opposed to having to click through all 80 belle & sebastian songs, type in the genre, and then do that all over again for the next artist? I am using iTunes 7.0.2

The Everyman

1) Select the song you would like to modify.

2) Right click and select "Get info"

3) Modify the field you wish, and save.


Right?

Dulcius_ex_asperis

Yes, yes, but what I am asking is, can I label an entire album at once with a genre? Instead of song by song, that is.

The Everyman

Yes... When you right click and go to "Get Info", do you see the "Genre" field down near the bottom? You can type in whatever you want the selected songs' genre to be.

Dulcius_ex_asperis

Ahhhh I see. Beautiful. Thanks so much.

Penguin_Otaku

On this note, what is an easy way of figuring out what Genre something is? Painstakingly going through the iTunes Store and searching or is there something else?

Arikado

MediaMonkey allows you to label your music library via Amazon.com tags. Also grabs the album artwork for you.

I use MediaMonkey and iTunes together since I have multiple computers (home, work, sister's house) and whenever I download an album, burn it, and take it to another computer, some of the tags/artwork is missing.

EggyToast

You can edit a group of songs/artists by simply shift/control/command clicking (depending on the range and the OS) and then right-click>get info. It will prompt you saying "You are about to edit multiple songs, are you ok with that?" Then change the entries you want to alter -- you'll see a checkbox get filled in, which tells iTunes "change this element only."

Also, you can make up any Genre you want. If music has a person singing and a guitar, it's all "Rock" in my iTunes. If ALL of your music would qualify as rock, then using punk, alternative, etc., makes more sense.

Of course, the important thing to remember about genre is that it's a grouping mechanism, so having a ton of genres doesn't really accomplish anything if you never use it to sort artists. I use Genre as a way of sorting things for smart playlists, so I can exclude things like "classical." I don't really care what kind of classical it could potentially be classified as, all I know is that I don't want it to come up in my smart playlists.

Horus

Not sure how I got it but in Apple I just drag a complete compilation to the playlist and it will generate one buy Album title and Artist or what ever name you gave it. So you don't have to highlight>create playlist > Name it