Ryan Boswell [dot] com
Custom iTunes Genres
One of the features that iTunes has had for a while now is the genre view. I haven’t used it a whole lot since I get to most of my media directly by searching for it, not by browsing. But in the last week I’ve taken it upon myself to clean up my movie and tv show collection (largely ripped from DVDs, hence why some meta data is missing in the first place), and I’ve found that my genres are a mess. I’ve got about 300 genres of music, no genres for my movies (ouch, that’s going to take some time to fill out), and most of my TV shows were uncategorized as well.
Since my TV show collection was the smallest, I started with that today. It took me about three hours to label everything correctly (mainly because it took forever for iTunes to finish processing each batch of seasons once I applied the changes). I then noticed that some of my genres didn’t have custom artwork provided by iTunes (for those that don’t know, iTunes comes with a few artwork clippings for major genres like Comedy, Drama, and Sci-Fi). It also didn’t help that a lot of my genres are sub-genres of larger ones (ie. Crime Drama, Medical Drama, and Political Drama), and so it wasn’t quite enough to just lump them all together, but it annoyed me that the appearance wasn’t uniform. Also, because of the way iTunes matches genres, some sub-genres were given the same artwork as its’ parent (see the screenshot to the right).
But I remembered a few years ago when iTunes first started using these genre artwork clippings that there was a way to customize the existing ones and add new ones. A quick Google search brought me to an article on just how to do this from candescence.org. I won’t duplicate the instructions here, just pop on over there and take a look for yourself.
The next part would be choosing the artwork to add or replace. The first comment on that article solved this problem, there is a Flickr group just for iTunes Genres. As of right now there are almost 1000 of them, mostly music genres (this trick works for all genres of media, whether it’s music, movies, tv shows, etc…), but if you look there are plenty for movies and TV shows. I pulled out a few of my favorites, which I’ll be using myself, and here they are below (click through for the full sizes):
Oh, and something worth noting, for Books and Podcasts, instead of genres they’re called categories, not really sure why, but it’s the same thing.