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Flickr Find: iTunes genre icons

by Mike Schramm Sep 22nd 2008 at 5:30PM


Maybe I'm not paying attention (likely), but Derek B. told us about something in iTunes 8 that I'd never seen before -- you can organize your music in Grid view by genre, and when you do, there are some pretty good-looking icons that show up for each genre. I especially like the Blues and Jazz icons (nice nod to the old Blue Note Records in there), but all of them have a pretty neat vibe, summing up each genre as best they can in a colorful little box.

Of course, there will always be more music out there than boxes to put it into, and so Derek B has started up a Flickr group to come up with icons for some of the more obscure genres out there. Replacing the icons is pretty easy to do, and there's even an app that will let you do it with ease -- just find the icon you want, and tie it to your genre. As you can see above, if you don't have an icon for the listed genre, it'll show off your album art (and just like iPhoto, mousing over the picture will let you flip through whatever albums are in there). It's kind of a weird thing to add into iTunes (and it's kind of tough to line them all up -- it's too bad iTunes won't pull down genres for music it recognizes from the iTunes store), but odds are we'll see these icons pop up more later, so getting them all lined up now is probably worth it.

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sean Carter

Yeah, i told you this the day iTunes 8 came out in the comments section. but whatever.

September 26 2008 at 10:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Len Banks

iGenre is a simple interface and has potential, but just doesn't work. I added multiple genres and they all end up with just the last picture added for all of them. Once this gets fixed it will work for me although doing it the other way is simple enough. There also seems to be no way to contact the developer to submit bugs.

September 23 2008 at 12:46 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Adrian vG

I use genres frequently! It's still a good way for me to categorize my music, and I usually have a good idea of what the difference is between, for instance, garage or house. When I'm not sure what genre something is, I get help from Last.fm and look for the most general tag. Sometimes you feel like blues, sometimes rock, n'est pas?

I think the default genre icons in iTunes 8 are horrible, though...

September 23 2008 at 4:31 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
A1

PS. You can create as many Genres as you want, have a look in the link above. :)

September 23 2008 at 3:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
A1

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=567425

Here's mine for movies

September 23 2008 at 3:49 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Hermiod

It would be nice if Apple sorted out the genres within their own store.

Can we please separate Metal from Rock and please get some of the pop music that infests the Rock section out ?

September 23 2008 at 2:57 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mark

Yes, but Genius playlists depend upon genres to work properly.

Because I want Genius playlists to work properly, I'm changing my custom genres to "standard" ones and am using the Grouping field for my custom genres.

September 23 2008 at 1:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
shahin

hi
i use itunes in windows, isn't there a windows version for this app ?

September 22 2008 at 11:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John Coxon

That iGenre program is absolutely awful and it doesn't work. The icons on Flickr are neat though.

September 22 2008 at 8:48 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Cory

I love Freezepop!

September 22 2008 at 7:29 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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