I love iTunes. Not the store… I’m talking about the program. The main reason is because of this little trick I started doing right away when I got my computer…

When you transfer a disc into the iTunes library, the software grabs all the data on that disc from the internet so you have it all in the program. Blah blah, we all know about this. This data includes a pre-assigned “genre” for each record, and early on in the process of transferring my 2,000+ records onto my computer (that took a LONG time) I realized that I could rename that “genre” section to whatever I wanted it to be. I discovered this because I thought some of the automatic genre assignments were stupid… like calling a Flaming Lips records “Alternative and Punk.” I clicked on the genre field for the first track on the Soft Bulletin and it highlighted, so I erased “Alternative and Punk” in disgust. Then it hit me: maybe I should just put the name of the drummer on the track as the “genre.” So I typed “Steven Drozd”… and hit enter. It worked. I went up to the genre index and scrolled through it… “Country,” “Jazz,” “Rock/Pop”… “Steven Drozd.” Nice.

Now, I am kind of a geek about music trivia, such as knowing which drummers play on which records and so forth, so you can see why this idea was appealing to me. It definitely took a little extra time to not only upload all of my records, but also open up the liner notes, read who the drummer is, and notate that in the genre section for every track that I put into itunes. But it was worth it. Now I have this music library that I can cross-index by drummer. It totally rules. When I want to look up which records I have that Elvin Jones played on, I just go to the genre index and scroll down to Elvin. Awesome.

If you don’t get excited about that like I do then I think that means you’re just not as much of a geek as I am. If this idea does pump you up though, then you need to take the time to do it for your own iTunes library. You will love it.