In trying to deal with the problem in my last post, I came up with a solution partly inspired by Brandon Wu’s comment.

I’ve re-established the “Progressive Rock” genre tag, for symph, Canterbury, and more or less direct descendents of the ‘70s prog rock bands.

All Krautrock has spun-off to a “Krautrock” genre tag. That’s pretty easily maintained, and it’s easy to decide what’s Krautrock and what’s not.

The “Post-Rock” tag is back, this time strictly sticking to post-rock. Recently, it was becoming a catch-all for new “art rock” that wasn’t prog.

And for everything else, there’s the new “Experimental Rock” tag. It’s pretty much a catch-all for anything not strictly “prog”, post-rock, or Krautrock. Some stuff under that tag does tend to get lumped into prog by some, but I’m happy to separate it from the genre of Yes and ELP.

Now each category is much more manageable. Krautrock can be a little light on the ol' iPod (I’m not carrying around 30 different Krautrock artists, usually), but it’s OK.

I have also taken to re-tagging all of the Album tags of my MP3 collection. Instead of just “Album Name”, they will now read “(Year) Album Name”. The iPod doesn’t show the album years when browsing, and having them ordered chronologically makes more sense than the meaningless alphabetical ordering.

I’m also trying to put the record label and catelog number in the “Comment” field of each MP3, as well as adding the album artwork through iTunes into each MP3’s ID3v2 tag. Once these things are done, I will have quite the nice looking and orderly collection.