Off-Topic: iTunes find

Hey all!

Completely off topic, but I was super excited when I figured this out about iTunes (how many of us use iTunes or our iPod/iPhone every day?!)

I was looking for a way to tag Pat and I's music as such.  We both like a lot of different types of music, but some of those just don't overlap.  Neither of us like having the other's music come up when we're in the middle of a jam sesh.

I knew that I wanted to change the genre (because we don't care about the actual official genre of music) to either "Pat," "Codi," or "both," for the music that we do both like.  I chose the genre over the grouping because the genre is something you can tell your iPod to choose from.  With over 1600 songs on my laptop and something ridiculous like 24,000 on his desktop, I couldn't stomach the idea of double clicking on each song in the correct spot and typing our name out.  I did multiple Google searches using both my computer-inept language and using terms that I found through said searches (no idea what an ID3 tag or AAC something or other is, but I thought it might get me to where I needed to be.)  The answer, according to many, was that there was no easy way to change these!

Since I had already gone through all of the artists on the laptop, making those correct, I knew that using the per each method would take me close to 10 years to get through (because it's just so boring that you stop after 10-20 songs, even on a motivated day).  Oh well.

Then, I figured it out!

First, highlight the songs you'd like to change info for:

 Next, right-click and go to "Get Info."  It's a little counter-intuitive if you ask me, which is why I never thought of it before:

Type in whatever fields you'd like to change, and make sure the corresponding check boxes are selected.  This would have been super convenient when I was trying to get all of my artist names spelled correctly.

Click ok!  You'll see that now, the rest of the Dashboard Confessional songs are categorized with the genre of "codi."  It may not be what Apple had in mind, but it works really well for us.

That's it, it's really easy!  What can you tell about my music taste from the pictures above?  I'm tagging Dashboard as just me (Pat doesn't appreciate Chris Carrabba; I don't appreciate the females in Chris' life), and while I was taking the screen shots, Chris Cagle (country) and then Deadmau5 (techno) played.  Now Kanye is on!  How's all that for diversity?

Anyway, hope I helped someone!  (And, for humility's sake, I hope I wasn't the only one who didn't know anything about this feature in iTunes).