So, if you're like me, organizing a vast array of music and trying to have any kind of meaningful navigation and playback is a nightmare. Browsing by artist or album or genre just doesn't cut it. Genre is a ridiculously restrictive way to categorize music, and unless you're trying to get to something specific, artists and albums is also useless.

So, why on earth doesn't iTunes support tagging? No idea, but I can't be arsed to wait around for them to implement it. My music needs organization NOW. (Btw, I'm sure there are other programs that do it, but I can't be arsed to deal with them either!)

Taking advantage of one of the unused fields in the track info, and the iTunes smart playlist feature, we can hack together a pretty useful tagging system that vastly exceeds the pathetic genre categorization.

The basic premise: utilize the 'Grouping' field which is unused in 99% of all audio files I've seen to implement our tagging feature. By editing a track’s info (or a group of tracks) we simply enter a series of tags into the 'Grouping' field. I used commas to separate them just to make it more readable. (You can get to the ‘Get Info’ function by either right-clicking on PC or CTRL-clicking on Mac)

Now, since iTunes doesn't have support for this out of the box, we have to use the smart playlist feature to create some 'filters' for our music. And of course we can use these as convenient playlists, and build up some really sophisticated logic for choosing songs to play but that's another topic.

So, we fire up the "New Smart Playlist" feature and simply add a few conditions. In this example, I create a "Canadian Indie" filter that will display all my Canadian Indie music. I simply set the field to 'Grouping' and the condition to 'contains' and then enter the tag in the value field. Voila! Instant tagging in iTunes.

Now, this isn't a particularly interesting use of either tagging or the smart playlist feature but rather a basic example to show you how it works. What would be more interesting is the really detailed qualitative filters you can get going. For instance, if I created a filter for all "Long" songs. Or all "Horn" songs. Or if I felt that song reminded me of summer, and I tagged it "Summer", I could then create a playlist of all my "Summer" songs.

You can see how this very quickly exceeds the ability of your plain old Genre field.

And of course if you are really into it, you can chain those smart playlists together for some really interesting results.

So, anyway, I'm sure it's probably been done, or there's a plug-in, or something, but as someone who is constantly battling with a massive collection and am frustrated by restrictive organization methods, this little hack provided a vast improvement in my ability to both organize and listen to my music.

Enjoy!