Latest Monkey doesn't like genres I set-up in older Monkey

LilJoe · Post by **LilJoe** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 12:23 pm

Greetings all,

In the past, I was able to succesfully use a previous version of MediaMonkey. (I don't recall the version number, but it was Media Monkey circa 2003).

I just installed the latest version of MM, and re-scanned in my entire MP3 library.

It worked great, except the genres didn't come in properly.

For example, I had previously tagged MP3s from the band "13th Floor Elevators" as genre "Rock (Psychedelic)". Now, in my new MM, the songs only show genre "Rock" - in other words, the " (Psychedelic)" is gone.

This problem is widespread with all similiar genre tags I'd created in the previous version of MM - that is, what was "Jazz (Bop)" now shows only as "Jazz" in the new MM's library; "World (Brazil)" now shows only as "World"; and so forth.

It seems as if the latest version of MM is truncating my existing genres (perhaps whenever a space character appears?). These genres worked fine in the old MM.

Any idea how to fix this? I really prefer to keep my genres as they were (it was a lot of work!).

Best,
Joe

P.S. I have the preference for "Store MP3 file properties" set to "ID3v1 and v2". Scanning my MP3s with this set to "ID3v2" doesn't seem to fix this.

Post by **Lowlander** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 12:55 pm

It seems that () are the problem characters. MM has no problem with spaces. But you'll have to wait for a response from the developers to see if that is the case.

Post by **jiri** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 4:18 pm

Joe,

you are right, there's problem with reading genres that have '(' inside. It will be fixed in the next release.

Thanks,
Jiri

LilJoe · Post by **LilJoe** » Thu Mar 03, 2005 7:01 pm

Ok, thanks for the quick reply.... I figured it was something like that. Hadn't thought of the parenthesis being the problem though.

I really appreciate that you'll be fixing the problem in the next go-around. It was really bugging me. Wish Microsoft was this responsive

.

Actually, the "Rock (Hard rock)" genre style I use is really just a workaround I came up with to deal with the fact that there's no "second level" genre field in the MP3 spec. I *really* wish I could tag an MP3 with "Rock" *and* "Hard rock". (In my tag system I've got all sorts of 'sub-genres' under "Rock" - including Heavy Metal, Blues Rock, Soft Rock, Hard Rock, Punk Rock, Goth, and so forth. Works great, but it really should be a separate 'sub genre' - not part of the same genre tag, as in "Rock (Punk)".)

But of course that's not a MediaMonkey issue. (And I know there are other workarounds to this, such as using the custom tags, etc.)

Best,
Joe

P.S. FWIW, the best solution, I think, would be to be able to add as many genres as you want to single MP3. It would fix all sorts of data integrity issues. For example, a Bob Dylan song could be tagged as "Rock", "Singer/Songwriter," "Protest Songs" and even "Acoustic music" - and it would appear in all of those searches.

Post by **jiri** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:30 am

As for more genres assigned to a song, that would probably help some users, but also would make everything more complicated. That said, we might try to implement it somehow in the future.

You can look to Magic Nodes script, there were some suggestions here in forums about how to use it to create a structure like 'supre genre'-'genre' (e.g. 'Rock' - 'Hard Rock') in MM.

Jiri

qyasogk · Post by **qyasogk** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 3:51 pm

my workaround for this as a dj is using the comment tag. where i indicate with keywords what kind of track it is. the benefit of putting it in the comments track is then it's available anywhere you play your files, and is especially handy for iTunes-like smart playlists.