Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, How-tos, Odds and ends, iTunes, Flickr Find
Flickr Find: iTunes genre icons
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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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jeremy said 5:40PM on 9-22-2008
Genre has been an essentially useless way of categorising music since the early 80's though. Unless you exclusively listen to "old-fashioned" categories and genres like "Jazz" and "Blues," you might as well make up your own self-made genres. Otherwise (like most people), you will have 80% of your music fall into the "alternative" or "indie" genres, and the other 20% in the "rock or electronic" category.
Genres just aren't helpful at all except perhaps in a old-timey historical way IMO.
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mark said 1:59AM on 9-23-2008
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.
Think Adrian said 4:31AM on 9-23-2008
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...
dandaman said 5:43PM on 9-22-2008
Many will be seen in the future. But some have been seen in the past. Specifically the Reggae genre is also used in Magic GarageBand.
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grull27 said 6:03PM on 9-22-2008
That is really cool. I didn't even see that before. It also helped me identify 2 tracks that had messed up genres because they were from a CD. One was under the "Miscellaneous" genre and the other in no genre. Both from CD's. Miscellaneous, WTF?!
Thanks TUAW for showing me this. I LOVE IT!
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nigel said 6:06PM on 9-22-2008
this also works for tv shows and movies which I find much more useful
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error said 6:32PM on 9-22-2008
When you 'skim' through your album artwork you can ctrl-click on the Genre-icon an select 'Set/Clear Default Grid Artwork. Also works with Composers and Artists in Grid View.
Silly fact: the general and standard iTunes genre 'Religious' shows some not so general 'Christian & Gospel' artwork. Bad Apple.
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Taylor said 4:42AM on 9-23-2008
Similar but not so likely to cause religious offense:
The Techno genre shows up as dance.
There are some who would take this as blasphemy... real hardcore techno is too fast to dance to, it's just energetic music.
SuperMac said 6:49PM on 9-22-2008
Thanks for showing us this. Awesome!!!!!!
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Adam Schoales said 6:53PM on 9-22-2008
Very nice... though that iGenre app doesn't work for me...
but doing it manually isn't that tough.
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Alan said 6:59PM on 9-22-2008
I was about to start this, but then thought about updates. I could sink a lot of time into this just to have iTunes 8.0.1 wipe it all out
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Jitaroo said 7:08PM on 9-22-2008
FREEZEPOP!!!
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Cory said 7:46PM on 9-22-2008
I love Freezepop!
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John Coxon said 8:48PM on 9-22-2008
That iGenre program is absolutely awful and it doesn't work. The icons on Flickr are neat though.
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shahin said 11:19PM on 9-22-2008
hi
i use itunes in windows, isn't there a windows version for this app ?
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Hermiod said 2:57AM on 9-23-2008
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 ?
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aygie said 3:50AM on 9-23-2008
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=567425
Here's mine for movies
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aygie said 3:53AM on 9-23-2008
PS. You can create as many Genres as you want, have a look in the link above. :)
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Billy Cape said 7:22AM on 9-23-2008
This is brilliant. Shocking that you hadn't seen the genre section before as it was possible the best section of the new itunes and makes genius a load better. But very useful app.
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Len Banks said 12:47PM on 9-23-2008
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.
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