Economy of Effort

In trying to deal with the problem in my last post, I came up with a solution partly inspired by Brandon Wu’s comment.

I’ve re-established the “Progressive Rock” genre tag, for symph, Canterbury, and more or less direct descendents of the ’70s prog rock bands.

All Krautrock has spun-off to a “Krautrock” genre tag. That’s pretty easily maintained, and it’s easy to decide what’s Krautrock and what’s not.

The “Post-Rock” tag is back, this time strictly sticking to post-rock. Recently, it was becoming a catch-all for new “art rock” that wasn’t prog.

And for everything else, there’s the new “Experimental Rock” tag. It’s pretty much a catch-all for anything not strictly “prog”, post-rock, or Krautrock. Some stuff under that tag does tend to get lumped into prog by some, but I’m happy to separate it from the genre of Yes and ELP.

Now each category is much more manageable. Krautrock can be a little light on the ol’ iPod (I’m not carrying around 30 different Krautrock artists, usually), but it’s OK.

I have also taken to re-tagging all of the Album tags of my MP3 collection. Instead of just “Album Name”, they will now read “(Year) Album Name”. The iPod doesn’t show the album years when browsing, and having them ordered chronologically makes more sense than the meaningless alphabetical ordering.

I’m also trying to put the record label and catelog number in the “Comment” field of each MP3, as well as adding the album artwork through iTunes into each MP3′s ID3v2 tag. Once these things are done, I will have quite the nice looking and orderly collection.

I’m having a difficult time categorizing my digital music library into genres.

Why does this matter? Because browsing by genre is the easiest way on the iPod to browse through stuff without having to scroll through EVERY artist/album on the device. On a 60GB device, that adds up a lot.

Some categorizations are easy. My “Jazz” collection is relatively small enough to fit together under a single “Jazz” genre. Ambient, IDM, techno, and anything else electronic all fits nicely in “Electronic”.

It’s rock music that’s harder. I’ve got commercial rock music from the 50s through 80s as “Classic Rock”. Commercial rock from the 90s on forward as “Modern Rock”. Indie rock also goes into “Modern Rock”. Anything suitably heavy goes under “Metal”. Right now, my progressive rock, post-rock, and any other experimental rock is under an “Art Rock” heading, which helps sidestep the messy blurry boundaries of experimental rock music, but also creates for a single giant category that almost defeats the whole purpose.

I would like to break up the “Art Rock” a bit more again, but that seems hard. “Post-Rock” is a genre label that seems to be dying out, and there’s a lot of modern experimental rock that just doesn’t seem to fit nicely under “Progressive Rock”. And sometimes “Post-Rock” seems to have very fuzzy borders with “Progressive Rock”. And some of the experimental modern rock often gets associated with more traditional indie rock, even though it probably has more in common with the other stuff I have under “Art Rock”.

Any ideas? I don’t really care to be overly precise (actually, I’ve been heading in the opposite direction with a catch-all like “Art Rock”), but damn if it’s not annoying to have so much stuff under one genre heading when trying to browse on the ol’ iPod.