Wierdy's last suggestion is my personal favorite. It's really a sliding slope between software and hardware anyway. Does putting a Linux ROM with your algorithm set to autoload as a startup daemon in an x86 machine count as hardware or software? Embedded applications often have something resembling an OS, if not a full blown OS, managing resources. Unless your algorithm is super simple, or this electronics manufacturer is a glutton for punishment, I'd put your algorithm on a ROM alongside some DSP or other processing core and call it a day. Another option to explore that's between the two (all gates and ROM/processor combo) is a PAL/GAL... but it will certainly take some mental gymnastics to get your genetic algorithm into a form appropriate for burning the PAL. Good Luck!

Out of curiosity, what do you use to manage your media library instead?

What about some form of Steganography... that is, embedding the data in a picture. You'd likely have one reference picture and then embed the data in a slew of modified pictures. You'd definitely want to include some error correction, but with a little creativity and some playing around with it, it might be pretty data dense. I imagine too, that picking a good background image would help you increase data density in each picture, but I don't know enough about this to provide advice on that... Good luck!