using itunes to semi-solve multiple genre angst

If you've ever been bored enough to try and organize your music library by cleaning up the "genre" fields, you may have at some point wished you could assign multiple genre's to a song. Sometimes you want a song to show up under "rock" and "alternative", etc. I'm not sure why the mp3 gods didn't implement this as a standard with the newest version of the mp3 tag. I've done my fair share of googling to try and find a solution. However, while messing around with playlists in itunes I stumbled upon a way to remedy one's desire for multiple genres.

If you click on file, you should see an option that says "new smart playlist". There are many powerful options available, probably the most important being the "live updating" option. This means that any changes you make to your library, whether you're importing new songs, changing tag information, or deleting songs, the playlist will automatically stay up to date for you, obviously. Clicking the plus or minus button allows you to add/remove rules.
Granted, in order to get multiple genres working you're going to have to do a little back-end work before you can actually use smart playlists to emulate mutiple genres. The method I use is this: If you want a song to contain mutiple genres, you could for example make this the genre of a song:

Rock Alternative Grunge

Each desired genre separated by a space. This will look kind of sloppy if you ever view you're library by genre, but once you've tagged all your music with whatever genre you want you can then create a smart playlist such as this:



As shown, this smart playlist will look at the genre of all songs and if they contain the word "Alternative" then they will be in this playlist. At this point you will have a playlist that is a perfect representation of all songs "Alternative". Now you just need to repeat this pattern for all genres you would like to have, and all of your genres can be accessed through these playlists. (you would no longer go to the genre section when wanting to search by genre) But trust me, it can be time consuming.

Pros:
-"solves" mutiple genre problem
-keeps playlist up-to-date
-unlocks the true power of your music library
-totally rocks

Cons:
-time consuming to set up
-ONLY native to itunes (if you take your music library to any other program then you lose this wonderness)
-depending on how meticulous you are, it can make browsing your music by genre a pain