MPG wrote:I keep my genre's very generic:
Blues
Christmas
Classical
Country
Easy Listening
Electronica
Jazz
Pop
Rap
Rock

I categorize artists by their main genre. Many artists span different genres, but they have a main stay, and that is where I classify them, except for when they release a christmas CD...for obvious reasons. The above seems to work really well for me, and has made it easy for my family to locate what they are looking for.

I use the same system pretty much as MPG for main genre's except I have pop as a sub genre to rock. I try to use sub genre's as a second identifier if I wanted to break it down further.

I use the group field for the main genre's and the genre field for the subgenre's.
Based on this field I let MM create directories.
For example: Group field: Hip Hop, genre fields: Contemporary R&B, Gangsta Rap, Neo-Soul, Southern Hip Hop ,...
Directories are formed like this: \Hip Hop, \Hip Hop\Contemporary R&B,\Hip Hop\Gangsta Rap,\Hip Hop\Neo-Soul,..

It works fine for me right now ! The genre's are high adjustable ! and MM does the Work

I keep mine even MORE general than that.
I simply have:

Pop
Jazz
RnB
Classical
Sountrack

and thats it. I think its WAY too time consuming to break down artists or albums into anything futher than this. I would love to try, but I honestly wouldnt have the time, given the number of albums I have. And in the end, I think genre can often come down to a personal preference.

The only other breakdown of my tracks is that I apply a "Party" classification to all of my "Pop", "Jazz" and "RnB" tracks, so that I can put it on random and only get a mix of songs (as opposed to my scores and classical music).

I keep my genre's very generic:
Blues
Christmas
Classical
Country
Easy Listening
Electronica
Jazz
Pop
Rap
Rock

I categorize artists by their main genre. Many artists span different genres, but they have a main stay, and that is where I classify them, except for when they release a christmas CD...for obvious reasons. The above seems to work really well for me, and has made it easy for my family to locate what they are looking for.

I generally tend to tag Genres by how the songs sound to me...as well as the era...etc. Sometimes I try to be specific, but other times, I have no other choice but to give it an all-encompassing genre such as "Alternative Rock".

For example, I classify The Sex Pistols as "Punk Rock". But the Misfits might be considered "Punk".

But Public Image Ltd. (Johnny Rotten/Lydon's post-Pitols band) is "Post-Punk"...As is Killing Joke.

Early U2, The Smiths, The Cure, would be considered "Alternative Rock". But then again...so would Green Day and Offspring (I don't necessarily consider them "Punk").

Bauhaus falls into the "Goth Rock" genre. But some of the gloomier, Germanic numbers would simply be "Goth".

Bananarama, Duran Duran, early Depeche Mode are "New Wave".

Van Halen is "Hard Rock", while Iron Maiden is "Heavy Metal".

But I run into trouble for sure, when artists straddle multiple genres (as has been previously mentioned): Siouxsie & The Banshees ("Punk Rock"/"Post-Punk"/"Alternative Rock"/"Goth Rock"), depending on the song.

Does this "CD Universe" thing have an MM Plug-In?

Honestly the best option that would suit everyone's needs, would be something similar to a tag explorer on popular sites like flickr. If there were a section in which you could explore by tag, where names applied to many tracks were large, and others included in less tracks were smaller, all in a graphical interface allowing us to search dynamically and visually. I'm sure there are no intellectual properties on this technology, and it is intuitive and would be relatively easy to incorporate using a CSV in the genre tag field to measure different tags for the explorer. Just sayin'.....

i guess i am a throwback?
i just don't really care to have more then the defalut genera's.

if it is country who really cares what country it is from ? same thing with rock, or folk, or chants?

just don't make anymore sense to me to add in country of orgin that the songs came from.

of course i only listen to english spanish french and itlaian and irish and some german and some russian but i only understand the english. so i put the rest under classical since they are wanger, bach, trigoskvie, ? cant spell that name now? and wolfgang, the spanish , french and itlaian is IL Divo so i list it under pop opra as they do on their web site.

but as said many times already to each his own way?

Great thread. I've been battling the Genre thing for years - I've got over 100,000 songs in my library. What it comes down to, like many have said, is it's personal and basically for me, became a way to find similar artists that I wanted to listen to together. The only "real" solution I've come up with is just to have a bunch (way too many) Genres (I've got 95) and put other terms in other fields which I can call up with a search. Like I've got World Music broken down into 4 genres - World/Americas, World/Europe, World/Eastern & World/African Arab... Then I put more specific info: Brazil, Mexico, Singer Songwriter... into the Grouping field in Itunes - which MM does read even though it doesn't show up in any visible field (I can't figure that one out)

I can't even begin to imagine putting my songs into categories like mood, theme, style - it would kill me - although I would love to! I'd probably do it with Allmusic if there was a way to link.. which would be great, but using Allmusic for Genre doesn't seem very smart to me (personal observation), they've got Artists like Regina Spektor and Feist listed under Rock along with The Allman Brothers??? If you did this you'd have to have subgenres.

In the end it's so personal and subjective and just depends what you want to use genre for...

Just some random thoughts... by the way that Wikipedia list of Genres is Mind boggling!

Dawter wrote:Is that supposed to be a joke?

No, just didn't read the previous posts correctly.

If you wanna delete genres you created (above and beyond the standard ones), you delete them from the genre node in MM.

If you want to delete some of the defaults you could do it in MS Access I guess, but I don't know if that's advisable though. In any case, ensure that you back up your db first

Do not delete the standard list of genre's. You can delete any unused genre's with an ID of above 10000 by opening My Music/MediaMonkey/MediaMonkey.mdb with MS Access, but don't delete/modify the standard genre's.

These genre's are the genre's from ID3v1 (which doesn't support custom genre's) and can't be modified. ID3v2 does support custom genre's.

Dawter wrote:What program do I open the file with?

Microsoft Access.

Is that supposed to be a joke?

MediaMonkey

What program do I open the file with?

Dawter wrote: Can someone please tell me where it is so I can cut back on the genre list and add a few of my own?

To add your own genre, just type it right in the genre box (right-click on a track > properties > genre field). As far as the genres that MM provides automatically, they are found in the Access database file (My Documents\My Music\MediaMonkey\MediaMonkey.mdb). I've never done it, but I guess you could try deleting them from there... do back up the database first, though.