Let Sanity Rain

Computer users sometimes have too much control and time, and not enough up-front thinking. Over the past few weeks, I have seen several tips (being the type of person who is always reading tip websites) for how to be more productive with iTunes. Many of these discussion centered around the idea of "tagging" your music.

I was amazed at the number of bad suggestions out there. People hijacking the rating field to use some bizarre translation between number of songs to genre or category. Hey, isn't there a genre meta field that might solve that problem? Then, there were the people who stored their star value in the comments field, because apparently they lose their iTunes library on a consistent basis. Do these people live under power lines, or perhaps on a nuclear disposal facility? Backup your library, or better yet, don't lose it. I haven't yet.

Well today, I finally saw a good tip. Lifehacker posted a great tip from someone pointing out the grouping field. I also had pretty much just ignored this field entirely. However, you can do really good tagging with this. Add a multitude of attributes to this field that classify it to your heart's content. Perhaps AC/DC thunderstruck for example, could contain the following in the grouping field: "driving pregame Australian great_guitar". This could be continued infinitely. I can still make smart playlists based on all of the standard fields such as artist, album, date, genre, etc. However, I can now add this song to multiple other smart playlists based on labels. Very slick.