Genre tagging support

[msw141]

Not sure how feasible it would be to add some functionality to PerfectTunes to scan & identify albums and add missing ID3 fields like Genre and Year, etc. I use MusicBrainz Picard for tagging MP3s but support for genres is oddly horrendous. A plugin that works good in theory is unusable due to slowdowns and constant crashes. The folksonomy tag method is also a mess.

I'd really like just one genre assigned to each album. I think you have Gracenote integration in the CD Ripper, wondering if something like that would be easy to adapt for this.

I've tried MP3 Taggers that claim to do this or can query Discogs but I have not liked using their program as a whole--too complicated and ends up making changes I don't want, if I can get it to work at all. I love how usable your tools are.

[mville]

Re: Genre tagging support

Not sure how feasible it would be to add some functionality to PerfectTunes to scan & identify albums and add missing ID3 fields like Genre and Year, etc...

Do you mean add missing tags, automatically?

[schmidj]

Re: Genre tagging support

Genre tagging is a very personal thing. Just browse through some of the threads here on the subject. Whether to microdivide genre or use a few broad categories. Genre by album or by individual track. How much, if at all to use the style tag. If people can't even decide on their own what genre to call a song, there is no hope for a program to tag the way YOU want your genres tagged. And actually I've changed my outlook towards genres several times over the years, and might consider yet a different model if more players supported style.

If I depended on the popular databases for my genre tags, 90 percent would be tagged "reggae" which most of it isn't, it is soca or calypso, and if you study the history of Caribbean music, you'll understand the difference. Worse than that, sources might call all of it "world" which negates the use of the tag altogether.

Also dBpoweramp does not use Gracenote, it uses several other metadata sources. Gracenote will not license their database for use with any software that also references any other metadata source, as I understand it.

[msw141]

Re: Genre tagging support

Do you mean add missing tags, automatically?

yes, add missing genre automatically.

[msw141]

Re: Genre tagging support

Genre tagging is a very personal thing.

yeah I get that, but this search for the unicorn of a perfect all-encompassing articulated genre tagging system is also why there's not even a basic solution for people that don't care about micro-accuracy. I have blank fields I want filled in and I don't want them to have to be done manually. I don't care so much if it tags Beastie Boys as "East Coast Rap" vs. "New York Rap" vs. "Hip Hop", a lot of the existing solutions don't even accomplish this or cause other changes you don't want if you are only targeting genre. If it checks wikipedia or discogs and applies that genre--I'm happy.

obviously isn't something that will appeal to you and that's fine.

[mville]

Re: Genre tagging support

Metedata retrieval, post rip, similar to that available in CD Ripper, has been requested many times for PerfectTUNES, but has yet to be implemented.

Regarding Genre/Style, the data available from the online metadata providers and wiki is IMO, next to useless, due to the reasons schmidj has already alluded to.

… also, there does need to be some accuracy in the Genre/Style data, otherwise the tags become redundant/pointless.

[SurveyorSteve]

Re: Genre tagging support

I just ran into this thread in a search where I am reconsidering my ripping procedures, trying to refine it midstream. That in itself could lead to an interesting discussion. What is on my mind is the Styles field. I know in the end it is just personal choice but think it offers some utility for a more fine grained categorization from a single Genre. I have always used just one Genre tag and tried to keep those in check to aid in playback across all the ways we can consume our tune now. It seems to be pretty universal in playback software.

I envision using the Styles field as a sub Genre, to be able to filter out all of my Bebop tracks (Genre) to just those featuring Trombone (Style). Does anyone use it that way? Is there any support in software or playback devices for such a scheme? I am expecting in general No, but maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised. Otherwise I can see myself adding another task at ripping time that will not pay off. I try to avoid those.

Any thoughts on the use of Style would be great.

[garym]

Re: Genre tagging support

I suspect most users of style follow your approach (style as a sub-genre). Some players/servers can use style. I use Logitech Media Server (LMS), i.e., squeezebox players, foobar2000, and Roon, and all can make use of style tag.

[SurveyorSteve]

Re: Genre tagging support

Are there any rules or guidelines on the use of the Style field? I see that the Style info dBpa imports has a lot of ;s. They seem to replace slashes. Is the field space delimited or are the ;s delimiters? I am intrigued by your mention of LMS which I have not given enough study to. I use it to feed my Squeezebox and see that I may need to rethink that system also.

Cheers

[garym]

Re: Genre tagging support

Are there any rules or guidelines on the use of the Style field? I see that the Style info dBpa imports has a lot of ;s. They seem to replace slashes. Is the field space delimited or are the ;s delimiters? I am intrigued by your mention of LMS which I have not given enough study to. I use it to feed my Squeezebox and see that I may need to rethink that system also.

Cheers

not sure. I don't use the style tag. In fact earlier this year I even modified my about 115,000 files to significantly reduce the number of genres I use. I found that simplification was better for me personally. And very active and useful LMS forum for users at:
forums.slimdevices.com

[garym]

Re: Genre tagging support

not sure. I don't use the style tag. In fact earlier this year I even modified my about 115,000 files to significantly reduce the number of genres I use. I found that simplification was better for me personally. And very active and useful LMS forum for users at:
forums.slimdevices.com

and for normal multi-value tags (not sure if style is one), in dbpa, the ";" is what separates the multiple values. For example, with artist in a FLAC file, if you had "Miles Davis; Miles Davis Quintet" in an ARTIST tag, it actually writes TWO distinct artist tags:

ARTIST: Miles Davis
ARTIST: Miles Davis Quintet

[SurveyorSteve]

Re: Genre tagging support

Most enlightening. Thanks. You make my task with ~19,000 files seem doable.

[garym]

Re: Genre tagging support

Most enlightening. Thanks. You make my task with ~19,000 files seem doable.

With either 19k or 115k files, the batch processing power of dbpa, and PerfectTunes makes things like adding/deleting/modifying GENRE, STYLE, etc. pretty easy.

[schmidj]

Re: Genre tagging support

I've been ripping a lot of "popular" (as opposed to my usual Caribbean) music recently. I've noticed in some cases it appears that someone, probably someone from the record company, loads the "style" tag full of every style they can think of, I guess thinking that people who look for a certain style by sorting their library will find that track. But 25 (yes I've seen that many) styles, really?

Personally, I don't use style, and like Gary I've narrowed my selection of genres. I've run into a lot of CDs where the artist has tried several genres in the same CD, I guess looking to see what sticks. And I also run into artists that are kind of folk, kind of country and kind of rock. (or pick your combination of genres) One solution for me is to enter multiple genres, lets say "Rock; Country"

I usually, but not always use the same genre(s) for all the tracks of an album, mainly because I do really need some time to do other things besides ripping CDs and sorting out the metadata already often takes me longer than ripping the CD.

The different tagging schemes used by the different codecs use different delimiters (or generate entirely new tags) for multi-entry tags. In the GUI for Spoon's software, he uses the semicolon. mp3tag uses \\, the double backslash. Both those programs internally recognize entries with their delimiter for tags that allow multiple entries and internally replace the GUI delimiter with the appropriate delimiter (or multiple entry) for the tagging system used by the codec the file is using.

Again, I'll repeat, proper genre/style entries are in the eye of the beholder. If your collection is mainly jazz, you may well want to be able to separate bop from post bop from big band. But if you only have a dozen jazz albums, just Jazz is probably best. Likewise if your collection is mainly classical, you might want to separate Choral, Symphony, Opera, chamber music, etc. I have a lot of Caribbean music from Trinidad and other islands, so I have soca, calypso, parang, mento, ska, rapso. If you only have a few, you might dump them all in world or (historically incorrectly) in reggae. (Calypso is far, far older than reggae. Reggae in fact evolved from mento, a Jamaican variant of calypso.)

A couple of annoyances, I think I may have brought up before: I never use pop as a genre. A cop-out. Call it rock, call it easy listening or MOR, call it folk or country. Pop is something the person who entered the genre likes or listens to, nothing else in my mind. And then there is the relatively new "Americana", seems to lump country, folk, bluegrass, possibly gospel and similar. But really, this music or variants of it exist all over the world. I find the term 'americana' to be xenophobic and possibly driven by political situations here in the USA. We don't call reggae "Jamaicana..."

[garym]

Re: Genre tagging support

Agree! Although I have a lot of music some might call "Americana", I don't use this as a GENRE name.