Trouble finding a program that can read and sort all my track metadata

[Cronoc]

I've been meaning to make this post for some time now. I finished ripping a nearly 6000 disc collection toward the end of last year using dbPoweramp. While I edited and fixed plenty of metadata manually/by hand, I didn't pay as much attention to "genre," because I saw always saw the "style" category filled up with the right sorts of genre terms. So what I have now is almost 2TB of music in FLAC with many generic genre labels like Pop, Pop/Rock, Rock, Jazz, etc.. What I didn't realize as I was doing all this is that apparently music library organizing (and playing) software like Mediamonkey and others only see the metadata they've been programmed to look for, and they don't look for metadata under the label of "style," leaving me unable to search my library by these more specific genre descriptors. There are other metadata categories I also can't see in Mediamonkey or other music library programs, but they aren't quite as important, though it'd be nice to see them also (accurate rip metadata, "source" and others)

I'm sure I'm not the first to have this problem, so I'd be very interested in what solutions other people have found. The people at the Mediamonkey support forums were unhelpful (see my discussion on this topic there), and I'm not sure what the next step is. Is there a program that other dbPoweramp users use for library organization that can see every piece of metadata in every file? Did I just miss a recommendation for using a certain program somewhere?

Any help would be appreciated. I'd really love to search my library using the "style" metadata...

[Spoon]

Re: Trouble finding a program that can read and sort all my track metadata

You could move the style metadata automatically into Genre then it would be compatible with all players, dBpoweramp has a utility codec called 'ID Tag processing' which can do this. Note you will lose all the existing genre tags.

[Cronoc]

Re: Trouble finding a program that can read and sort all my track metadata

Hmm, I take it that there isn't any current player that will read the Style metadata then. Which I figured, I checked all the current ones I could think of and didn't find any. Bulk moving Style into Genre would probably be ok, but there are some that I did add genres to. And I also like Pop/Rock/Jazz/R&B descriptors in there, because for example, in an album by the band "The Action," the genre is "Rock/R&B," while the styles category says "Soul; British Invasion; Psychedelic; Blue-Eyed Soul; Mod; British Psychedelia; Freakbeat." Is there any way to add the Styles info to the already existing genres (ie "Rock/R&B; Soul; British Invasion; Psychedelic; Blue-Eyed Soul; Mod; British Psychedelia; Freakbeat")? I suspect you'd have mentioned a way if that existed currently, but thought I'd ask.

It's tough because I feel like I didn't make a mistake here, but nonstandard metadata is apparently something the mainstream players don't want to deal with. I'm tempted to get someone to write the "script" (maybe a bit more complicated than that) I was told I should write to make MediaMonkey see it in that thread I linked... but I'm not currently in a place where I can pay someone for this.

[garym]

Re: Trouble finding a program that can read and sort all my track metadata

try foobar2000. It is completely flexible, and I show both genre and style in my browsing window. And foobarr2000 seems quite popular among dbpa users. I use the basic probram with the facets component. Get it here:

http://www.foobar2000.org/download

http://www.foobar2000.org/components