The iPod classic on its main menu page has a menu on the left hand side (the right hand side allows for illustrations such as the cover of the CD in question) which reads, in descending order: Music, Videos, Photos, Podcasts, Extras, Settings and Shuffle Songs. If I am honest, I will concede that I have never ever used, or opened, or even looked at, most of them. My iPod classic is used solely for music.
Click on the top setting, the one which reads 'Music' and you will arrive in another menu on the right hand side, which reads, in descending order: Cover Flow, Playlists, Artists, Albums, Compilations, Songs, Genres, Composers, Audiobooks and, finally, and helpfully, the verb Search.
The sub-menu called Songs will be enormous once you have downloaded, bought, ripped or otherwise acquired or transferred your library of music - it can number in thousands, listed alphabetically, which is why you have the other settings to put some order in the library.
Playlists are lists that you create yourself; your computer will allow you to do this. You decide what songs, or artists, should go into a 'Playlist' - you simply name it as you would any file, and 'drag' the songs from the other menus into the new (named) Playlist file.
The others are what about what the device decides should fall into each category, and, for the most part, they are self-explanatory.
Number Seven, in the Music sub-menu on my classic iPod, reads 'Genres'. When clicked on, this, in turn, takes one into a further sub-menu which reads, (on my iPod) again, in descending but alphabetical order: All Artists (and gives the number of albums that these artists have between them on your iPod), Alternative (which tells the number of artists and the number of albums found under this heading - determined by the internal index of the device), Alternative & Punk (which again, helpfully, breaks matters down into numbers of artists found in that heading in that sub-menu and the total number of albums they have between them), Classical, (ditto), Country & Folk, (same again), Easy Listening, Electronic (again, ditto), Electronica, (again, ditto - but I myself am not quite certain how the device distinguishes between this form and the earlier one), Electronica & Dance, Folk, Indie Rock, Jazz, Latin, New Age, Other, Pop, Punk, R & B, Reggae, Rock, Rock/Pop, Soundtrack, Traditional, Unclassifiable, World.
Now, these are the titles that one finds under 'Genres' on my own iPod, but, again, these are the songs and pieces of music in my iTunes Library.
I suspect that the sub-menu called 'Genres' might look somewhat different on somebody else's iPod and iTunes library, simply because they have different musical preferences, a fact which would be noted by the classification and indexing undertaken by the iPod when your music is first downloaded (it checks with the iTunes Library and - if you allow it to do so - will automatically classify and index it for you).
I hope that this may be of some assistance to you.
