I’ve been trying to use groupings in iTunes lately to help narrow down finding what I want to hear. coversrc.com has helped a little by consolidating the places I go to find genres/styles/artwork.

Groupings in iTunes can be used for anything you want. I’ve found them to be particularly useful for granulizing genres. So, for instance, a track can be tagged with the genre of “Rock”, but what kind of Rock? Prog Rock? Classic Rock? The list can go on. There are a lot of distinguishing qualities between genres/styles.

One thing I noticed when I was inputting the groupings is that 2 groupings can exist independently of each other, therefore creating duplicate entries. For example, I can have a grouping called “Experimental, Minimal” and “Experimental, Noise”. iTunes has no way of separating these groupings so needless to say, this results in a lot of groupings. To help consolidate the groupings, I realized I needed to sort them. Rather than go through each track and sort its groupings, why not utilize my programming prowess.

I made a gist, then wanted to run it in the command-line without making a file. So, with the help of the pipe command you can alphabetize your groupings like so:

curl -s http://gist.github.com/231031.txt | ruby

How do you organize your music?