[Nicolai P. Zwar]

I’d like to keep the categories as few as possible.

That would be one (or even none) obviously. 🙂

I have reduced it to very few genres myself, but multiple genres would enable a lot more playback options. I should add that I don’t listen to music on iTunes or my computer at all, that’s just for curating the collection.

For example, all my “classical” recordings have the genre tag “classical”, which is obviously correct. But that includes operas, piano sonatas, symphonies, choral works, solo flute recitals, experimental electronics, etc…. Now the genre tag “classical” is great, but sometimes I might want to focus on a different “group”, like, say “piano music”.

And preferably, I would be able to tag all solo piano music as such, not just Beethoven sonatas, but also Keith Jarred albums, Soundtracks like THE FIRM, Thelonious Monk albums, etc. Just have a genre tag for “piano”, and I can shuffle and browse through all solo piano pieces in the collection, regardless of what “genre” they belong to, be it film, classical, jazz, or whatever.

There are a number of cases where I would like to group on focus on a set and clearly defined pieces of music, and these may vary. Now, I use MinimServer to “serve” the music, and that handles multiple genres without issues, and I could use MusicBee to add them, but then in indeed, since iTunes does not support multiple genres, it would create NEW genres out of every new combination, which of course is counterproductive and would indeed make the genre tag messier rather than more useful.

So at this point, the genre tag is of little practical use for me, but I’m sure one day I’ll get more mileage out of it.