[Empeg-general] Genres

[yn0t_@empegbbs-noreply.merlins.org]

I recently sucked down all the MP3's off my Empeg so I could do a massive re-tag and reorganization.  I did a pretty bad job of how I filled out my tags originally (the FAQ didn't exist way back then ) and I wanted to do some housecleaning on titles, genres, etc.  I also wanted to back up all my music in case of a hard drive failure.

So anyway, there have been many posts around here suggesting various ways of organizing one's music.  Here's where I'm at right now...  Typically my listening falls into one of two basic modes..  Either I want to listen to full albums, or I want to shuffle a bunch of singles of a given genre.  So my basic folder organization for the "drag and drop" portion is going to be:

Root
---"Albums"
------Artists (alphabetical)
---------Each artist's albums in chronological order
---"Singles"
------Genres (?)
---------Sub-genres (?)
------------Songs in Artist / Title alphabetical order
---"Playlists"
------Various other mood playlists

So my deal right now is I have difficulty assigning genres to my tracks.  I guess I can put songs into my own broad categories that make sense to me, but unless I break the genres down to sub-genres, I can't easily select a collection of songs to fit my mood...  "Rock" for instance encompasses so many different types of music...  But if I took it to the extreme of using the obscure genres found on the All Music Guide, I'd only have like 4 or 5 songs in each genre..  Right now I have Rock broken down into maybe 10 subcategories (Punk, New Wave, Metal, Glam Rock, Adult Alternative, etc.) but a lot of times songs will fit into two or more of them, or sometimes none at all...   I guess I could use links to put songs into multiple genre playlists, but that doesn't help with genre *searches* which can only have one per song...  Damn ID3 limitations!

So does anyone around here have any good strategies that work for them?  Does everyone pretty much ignore the genre field?  It'd be nice to be able to have a type of music in mind and do a quick search without having to set up dozens of meticulously created mood playlists...  I'd rather just do most of this using my various MP3 tagging programs which can do this stuff en masse.

Just wondering how people categorize their tunes, if at all...