Genre / Style

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

Hi Oggy, I don't submit to freeb at present. It's something I have not configured. Cheers.

Hi Paul,

Don't believe that you can configure it, but simply click on submit changes to freedb, once you are happy with your alterations.

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

Paul,

In the various discussions regarding Genre / Style, I have come to the realisation that for 30 odd years I had absolutely no consideration towards Genre / Style. When I was younger I listened to a limited style of music, and then for a large proportion of my listening time, I was exposed to all kinds of different musical styles(!!) and simply listened, watched and performed, music.

In all honesty, it wasn't until I started ripping my CDs, that I started considering Genre / Style. Even though I have Steely Dan and Donald Fagen on vinyl, apart from a couple of Steely Dan compilations, I've not needed to categorise them, and 35 years ago, my only thoughts were that it was rock, with a clear jazz influence, but far more importantly; music I enjoyed.

Listening to and watching vast amounts of music, sometimes when I wasn't gigging myself, this could mean watching seven bands a week, plus watching jazz Sunday lunchtimes, I didn't read music papers, or watch television, so those genres such as Yacht Rock, which has been used in relation to Steely Dan, have simply passed me by.

I'm sure there must be many more music lovers in a similar position.

Now with the need to populate the Genre box with something so as not to get the dreaded, Unknown genre, some thought is clearly required. After your post regarding different genres of Symphonic / Prog. Rock, I read my wife's book, Marshall: The book of loud. The sub-genres of heavy rock / metal, were bewildering!

In retrospect, I agree with you, it is all about Style, we simply need manufacturers to offer this alongside, Genre, too.

Happy tagging!

[garym]

Re: Genre / Style

Excellent point Oggy. Somehow I managed to listen to lots of music for about 45 years before the concept of 'genre' came into my head. On visiting record stores, I had to look at the rock/pop section or the jazz section. Most stores had these two plus classical. At some point I started seeing "blues" sections and "soundtrack" sections.

[monsterjazzlick]

Re: Genre / Style

Oggy,

Thanks, that was very interesting.

Until I was in my 20s, I only thought of music as being either: Pop, Rock, Jazz or Classical. That was it really! But then, after getting deeper into Jazz, I learned of the different 'periods': eg. Blues, Traditional, Dixie, Big Band, and so on chronologically ...

Similarly, I agree that in the record stores of the 80s (eg. HMV, Andy's Records, Our Price, etc) Rock was Rock, Jazz was Jazz, and Classical was Classical.

I actually only intended to use the STYLE tag for Jazz exclusively; but upon completing my Jazz rips and starting upon other GENRES (eg. Country, Stage & Screen, Prog. Rock), I can see its usefulness. Had I have not had a top-heavy Jazz collection with many definitive STYLES, I probably would have done away with this tag altogether.

[monsterjazzlick]

Re: Genre / Style

Don't believe that you can configure it, but simply click on submit changes to freedb, once you are happy with your alterations.

OK, cheers Oggy. I will take a look this week.

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

Oggy,

Thanks, that was very interesting.

Until I was in my 20s, I only thought of music as being either: Pop, Rock, Jazz or Classical. That was it really! But then, after getting deeper into Jazz, I learned of the different 'periods': eg. Blues, Traditional, Dixie, Big Band, and so on chronologically ...

Similarly, I agree that in the record stores of the 80s (eg. HMV, Andy's Records, Our Price, etc) Rock was Rock, Jazz was Jazz, and Classical was Classical.

I actually only intended to use the STYLE tag for Jazz exclusively; but upon completing my Jazz rips and starting upon other GENRES (eg. Country, Stage & Screen, Prog. Rock), I can see its usefulness. Had I have not had a top-heavy Jazz collection with many definitive STYLES, I probably would have done away with this tag altogether.

I clearly recall Steeleye Span, which I guess is Folk-Rock being next to, or very close to Steely Dan, which is Jazz-Rock? Record shops clearly didn't have their Genre / Style tags sorted in those days: even R&B was a completely different style than it is now.

I actually see Brand X as far more Jazz-Rock, rather than Steely Dan, but that's simply because I was told as a 15 year old, that when I borrowed Unorthodox Behaviour and Moroccan Roll, that's what they were!

Yes, there were some great record shops, Parrott Records, another that comes to mind. I shudder to think just how much I spent in Andy's Records over the years.....

Back to Genre / Style, I noticed earlier that the Style for British Music on Lyrita by Quad, which I used in Don's thread, Set-Up for Ripping, shows as TIT1: Modern/Contemporary. I simply tagged it as Genre - Classical, and didn't uncheck Style.... KISS!

[monsterjazzlick]

Re: Genre / Style

... even R&B was a completely different style than it is now.

I had no idea what R&B was when I heard it this decade. It's nothing like the R&B of the 70s and 80s! You used to have a Friday night 'Rhythm And Blues Jam' down at the local, which consisted of a couple of guitars, bass and drums - with a lead singer who maybe doubled on harmonica. They played '12 Bar Blues', fundamentally.

Goodness knows what it's been turned into now!?

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

I had no idea what R&B was when I heard it this decade. It's nothing like the R&B of the 70s and 80s! You used to have a Friday night 'Rhythm And Blues Jam' down at the local, which consisted of a couple of guitars, bass and drums - with a lead singer who maybe doubled on harmonica. They played '12 Bar Blues', fundamentally.

Goodness knows what it's been turned into now!?

Rhythm and bass.

The fantastic Linda Ronstadt track, White Rhythm & Blues, just wouldn't sound the same.

[monsterjazzlick]

Re: Genre / Style

Rhythm and bass.

Are you serious?!

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

Are you serious?!

Yes.

[Jailhouse]

Re: Genre / Style

Now with the need to populate the Genre box with something so as not to get the dreaded, Unknown genre, some thought is clearly required.

Oggy, I've seen your Genre list; I think you think too much.

My Genre tags are overwhelmingly Pop/Rock and Jazz, with some Electronics, a few Progressive Rocks, a couple of Synths, and one Pop/Classical. The exception to this is EDM music, where I keep the Genre tags from the original files even though I generally can't tell the difference between them. I may end up re-tagging all of those with EDM someday.

When I start ripping my Classical CDs, they'll all be Genre tagged as Classical, of course. And I'll use a second installation of foobar2000 to play them so I can base that library on composers rather than artists/groups.

I'm probably Stupid, so I like to KIS.

[schmidj]

Re: Genre / Style

Of possible historical interest, in about 1967 the college radio station I was then involved with thought it would be useful to catalog all of the station's LP records on IBM cards (remember those) and use the computer center's new computer (and initially very old mechanical card sorter) to print out the catalog. As those of you who might remember the IBM cards, we had 80 columns of alphanumeric data available. We assigned one column to genre. (The records were also stored by genre.) I set up the initial card layout with some help from the then student Music Director.

The original genres were, as I recall, Rock (R) Male Vocal (M) Female Vocal (B) Group Vocal (G) Instrumental (I) (These last four would now all probably be lumped into Easy Listening today). Jazz (J) Folk (F) (Now you see why Female Vocal couldn't be F, and ended up as the not politically correct "B", use your imagination.) Christmas (X) Country & Western (C). Over the years other genres were added, I remember a "genre" soon added for "unknown" or something like that as we ran into records that defied being put in any genre that we could identify. Over the years we added genres for Blues, World, Reggae (We had a couple of Reggae shows and the host objected to having to fish through the other "World" music to find the reggae records.) Soul (now often called R&B), and various others.

The card images got made into a computer tape about 1970 when the computer operator said the cards were becoming so ragged he was having big issues getting the cards through the card reader. No longer limited to 80 columns, some of the fields were enlarged, but I don't think the Genre field ever grew beyond one character. By the time the station went off the air in 1995, most of the 26 alphabetic Genre codes had been used up. We also progressed from punching cards on a keypunch to using dial in terminals to enter new records, eventually using PC's networked to the mainframe. The software went from Fortran to Cobol (for a long time; the initial move to Cobol was precipitated by the move from mechanically sorted cards to card images on tape.) (The initial Cobol routines were written by a student in the station who soon graduated. Forced me to learn Cobol!) to a proprietary relational database that ran on the mainframe, eventually to an early version of Microsoft Access on a PC.

We never got to cataloging tracks, we also never cataloged singles, as I recall. When CDs came out, we used the same numbering scheme as the LPs, we added a media field in the database to differentiate between LPs and CDs.

There were about 4000 albums in the collection in 1967, I recall it had grown to about 18,000 by 1995. The record filing system, the equivalent to today's directory tree of folders, was first character for Genre, second (alphabetic) for Artist First Letter, third and fourth (numeric) for which artist first letter within that Genre, in order received (not alphabetical, which would have required constant renumbering of records) (soon expanded to three digits after we got more than 99 albums starting with the same letter in the same Genre.) And 5th field, alphabetical of album by that artist , first album received ended in "A", second "B"etc. Soon also expanded to two characters, after we got more than 26 albums from the same artist, so blank,A was first album, blank, B second, blank, Z 26th, AA the 27th AB 28th etc. We used a special character, the asterisk as I recalled for the artist first letter for compilations; that put them first in the alphanumeric sort.

We printed two versions of the catalog, one alphabetically sorted by artist (which were last name, first name) and album title, and one by the catalog number in our filing system We reprinted about every 4 to 6 months. In later years, I recall we printed updates of new additions monthly or so, and only printed the (by then several hundred page) whole catalog about once a year.

So a typical record number for let us say the Moody Blues might have been RM025 C, the 25th rock artist with name beginning with M, third record we got from the record company. The Monkees might have been RM034AC, 34th rock artist name beginning with M (in order received) 29th record by the Monkees, in order received. Each record got a stick-on label with the record number on it, so the DJs would know where to locate, and after their show, file the records. Biggest problem, student DJs who were lazy and would stick all their records somewhere in one of the cabinets without sorting and correctly filing them. Penalty for getting caught, sort out one or more of the collections and put them all back in order.

So that's how we handled a filing system and metadata starting in the 1960's

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

Oggy, I've seen your Genre list; I think you think too much.

My Genre tags are overwhelmingly Pop/Rock and Jazz, with some Electronics, a few Progressive Rocks, a couple of Synths, and one Pop/Classical. The exception to this is EDM music, where I keep the Genre tags from the original files even though I generally can't tell the difference between them. I may end up re-tagging all of those with EDM someday.

When I start ripping my Classical CDs, they'll all be Genre tagged as Classical, of course. And I'll use a second installation of foobar2000 to play them so I can base that library on composers rather than artists/groups.

I'm probably Stupid, so I like to KIS.

Hi Jailhouse,

I read your comments, digested them, re-read them, slept on it, discussed them with colleagues, before concluding that possibly you are right: I think too much.

More seriously, my first encounter with Genres for tagging, was seeing colleagues libraries, and seeing 80-150 genres, which was simply too many, for me.

Yes, I could use Pop / Rock for 75% of my library and this would be accurate. However, it would simply be a tag which I wouldn't ever look at, and which tells me nothing that I don't already know. To me, this is barely more useful than leaving the Genre box empty.

As my wife has so many compilations, I simply use Genre search to my benefit, to create instant playlists. It didn't take much thought to come up with 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s! The Christmas Genre was useful recently.

I like EDM, and will use it to replace genres I cannot differentiate! Many thanks for that.

Regards,

Oggy

[Oggy]

Re: Genre / Style

Of possible historical interest, in about 1967 the college radio station I was then involved with thought it would be useful to catalog all of the station's LP records on IBM cards (remember those) and use the computer center's new computer (and initially very old mechanical card sorter) to print out the catalog. As those of you who might remember the IBM cards, we had 80 columns of alphanumeric data available. We assigned one column to genre. (The records were also stored by genre.) I set up the initial card layout with some help from the then student Music Director.

The original genres were, as I recall, Rock (R) Male Vocal (M) Female Vocal (B) Group Vocal (G) Instrumental (I) (These last four would now all probably be lumped into Easy Listening today). Jazz (J) Folk (F) (Now you see why Female Vocal couldn't be F, and ended up as the not politically correct "B", use your imagination.) Christmas (X) Country & Western (C). Over the years other genres were added, I remember a "genre" soon added for "unknown" or something like that as we ran into records that defied being put in any genre that we could identify. Over the years we added genres for Blues, World, Reggae (We had a couple of Reggae shows and the host objected to having to fish through the other "World" music to find the reggae records.) Soul (now often called R&B), and various others.

The card images got made into a computer tape about 1970 when the computer operator said the cards were becoming so ragged he was having big issues getting the cards through the card reader. No longer limited to 80 columns, some of the fields were enlarged, but I don't think the Genre field ever grew beyond one character. By the time the station went off the air in 1995, most of the 26 alphabetic Genre codes had been used up. We also progressed from punching cards on a keypunch to using dial in terminals to enter new records, eventually using PC's networked to the mainframe. The software went from Fortran to Cobol (for a long time; the initial move to Cobol was precipitated by the move from mechanically sorted cards to card images on tape.) (The initial Cobol routines were written by a student in the station who soon graduated. Forced me to learn Cobol!) to a proprietary relational database that ran on the mainframe, eventually to an early version of Microsoft Access on a PC.

We never got to cataloging tracks, we also never cataloged singles, as I recall. When CDs came out, we used the same numbering scheme as the LPs, we added a media field in the database to differentiate between LPs and CDs.

There were about 4000 albums in the collection in 1967, I recall it had grown to about 18,000 by 1995. The record filing system, the equivalent to today's directory tree of folders, was first character for Genre, second (alphabetic) for Artist First Letter, third and fourth (numeric) for which artist first letter within that Genre, in order received (not alphabetical, which would have required constant renumbering of records) (soon expanded to three digits after we got more than 99 albums starting with the same letter in the same Genre.) And 5th field, alphabetical of album by that artist , first album received ended in "A", second "B"etc. Soon also expanded to two characters, after we got more than 26 albums from the same artist, so blank,A was first album, blank, B second, blank, Z 26th, AA the 27th AB 28th etc. We used a special character, the asterisk as I recalled for the artist first letter for compilations; that put them first in the alphanumeric sort.

We printed two versions of the catalog, one alphabetically sorted by artist (which were last name, first name) and album title, and one by the catalog number in our filing system We reprinted about every 4 to 6 months. In later years, I recall we printed updates of new additions monthly or so, and only printed the (by then several hundred page) whole catalog about once a year.

So a typical record number for let us say the Moody Blues might have been RM025 C, the 25th rock artist with name beginning with M, third record we got from the record company. The Monkees might have been RM034AC, 34th rock artist name beginning with M (in order received) 29th record by the Monkees, in order received. Each record got a stick-on label with the record number on it, so the DJs would know where to locate, and after their show, file the records. Biggest problem, student DJs who were lazy and would stick all their records somewhere in one of the cabinets without sorting and correctly filing them. Penalty for getting caught, sort out one or more of the collections and put them all back in order.

So that's how we handled a filing system and metadata starting in the 1960's

Great story and Genre names that are still valid.

[garym]

Re: Genre / Style

Of possible historical interest, in about 1967 the college radio station I was then involved with thought it would be useful to catalog all of the station's LP records on IBM cards (remember those) and use the computer center's new computer (and initially very old mechanical card sorter) to print out the catalog. [...]

Very interesting! I recall too well 80 column cards and COBOL.