Cleaning up Genres on iTunes

[borderdog]

I'm trying to clean up the "genre" categorization of my library. When you "get info" on a song or album, there's a pop-up menu for genre where you can select the genre or you create your own genre. Okay, everybody knows this part.

Over the course of ripping CD's to the library, you're at the mercy of Gracenote, or whoever supplies the metadata for that CD. Often the genre is lacking or they mislabel so you have the option of creating your own or choosing one from the menu. Oftentimes the genres are misspelled or they are the same genre, but presented in a different way. Once they are misspelled or presented they are there forever (or are they?).For instance, I now have Avant Garde and Avantegarde; or Folk - Rock, Folk-Rock, Folk Rock, (Folk,rock), and Folk/Rock. Vocal, Vocals. Okay, you get my point. By the way, I didn't put those there. Plus, that menu has many genres that are useless (for my purposes, anyways).

Is there a way to delete unneeded genres from that pop-up menu? This is one intricacy of iTunes I have not solved. I understand how to batch convert, so once I decide on one of the Folk/Rocks, I can convert all my Folk-Rocks (or is it Folk Rock?) to the same.

The only reason this even comes up is sometimes I'm in a particular mood and I'll choose a genre and hit shuffle, or I'll pick an album by genre. The other night I felt like some Folk and all these Folk Rock combinations were staring at me. WTF. So I decided to clean up the mess, but to no avail.

Any help out there. Thanks

 

 

[Audio_ELF]

The genre list in iTunes actually manages itself.

 

The list containts the iTunes / GraceNote defaults plus any "inuse" custom genres.

 

e.g. if it currently contains "Folk Rock"; "Folk-Rock" and "Folk (Rock)" and you batch convert them all to Folk-Rock then the others should disappear.

 

Eloise

 

[borderdog]

Thanks Eloise. It worked. I was able to clean things up a bit. There are still some genres in the pop-up menu I can't delete, but I guess those are defaults that will always remain. No harm though, as I won't use them. I am finished ripping, other than new material as I acquire it, so I'll just be more watchful.