If you use iTunes to burn MP3 CDs you are probably familiar with how to burn by Album order. Essentially, iTunes takes care of arranging MP3 tracks by Album in separate folders. These separate folders of tracks are burned to CD and the folders on the CD are recognized by the MP3 CD player as Albums.

Using an extremely simple AppleScript, you can take advantage of this ability in iTunes to organize and burn an MP3 CD by Genre instead. Simply copy the Genre field to the Album field and visa versa before burning. Then reverse the copy after the burn to restore the Album and Genre info. It only takes one script to make the flip-flop each time:

tell application "iTunes"

   copy (a reference to (get view of front window)) to thisPlaylist

   -- if no tracks are selected, use them all
   if selection is {} then
      copy every file track of thisPlaylist to allTracks
   else
      copy selection to allTracks
   end if

   repeat with aTrack in allTracks
      copy (get aTrack's genre) to temp1
      copy (get aTrack's album) to aTrack's genre
      copy temp1 to aTrack's album
   end repeat

end tell

Thanks to Jeremy Shepherd for verifying the trick. He wrote at the Apple boards: "As an experiment, I tried taking an iTunes playlist, manually changing all the Album tags to the Genre, sorted the playlist by Album, then burned a CD-RW, and it worked as expected."

You can copy-and-paste the script from here to your Script Editor, or download it from this page here.