Cataloguing by genre is inadequate

[daved]

After an initial stab at cataloguing my material I'm finding MediaMonkey a little limited in one specific area; that of film music and soundtracks. The problem is this:

A vast amount of music used for films is not specially written but already exists. Where music is specially written, it often then becomes a popular piece in its own right. This applies to both popular and classically oriented music.

Currently the only way to tag a piece as belonging to more than one genre is to use one of the custom fields. Two would be better, so that the basic classification (genre) could be further qualified. There are other pairs of genre where this would be useful, too.

[rusty]

Good point. Lowlander raised a similar issue at:
http://www.songs-db.com/forum/viewtopic ... ight=genre

Someone else also suggested the need for subgenres as well.

My intuition says that something along the lines of Lowlander's proposal (based on MusicBrainz discussion forum on the subject) is best, though we'd need to investigate how this sits with the various tag formats.

[daved]

I read with interest jt004c's proposal for "proportional representation" of genres. However, I just can't get my head round the need for such a scary feature. The only use I can think of where it would be of benefit is to create a sorted list, based on genre, with the hits matching the criteria the most closely at the top.
However, wouldn't a simpler, two or three genre/sub-type[/sub-type] model work just as well if it were possible to sort on any selection of the two or three fields in any priority? Granted, it would be a less effective solution by the time you reached the bottom of the sorted list, probably missing out dozens, hundreds or maybe even thousands of tracks that a weighted search/sort would have captured. Honestly, though, how many people want anything other than the few most relevant matches to their search?
Also, think of the time and effort in cataloguing thousands of tracks like that - and you can bet your last dollar that your view wouldn't match someone elses!

[Lowlander]

It feels nice to be mentioned like that, except that I didn't write that.

I do have an opinion about this topic. There are I believe two scenarios in this case.

SUBGENRE
A song belongs to a subgenre of a main genre. In this case it would be nice to have the song show in both main and subgenres listings. This could be solved by a simple program logic. The user tells the program which genre's are in fact subgenres of a main genre. This would be done in the program (not in track info). This would mean that all songs of a subgenre are listed in the main genre.
The benefit of this system is that people don't have to regenre thousands of tracks. (Other problem exists with what's written to the track instead of DB only, when using multiple computers for same music on each the DB would need to be filled with all the possible subgenres each track has) Maybe an export/import utility for the list of genre's/subgenre's would make this all even easier.
MM has somewhat of a solution for this, allthough not my favorite. If you have a genre LATIN and other subgenre's LATIN JAZZ and LATIN POP you can use the search for anything in the genre latin and also the subgenre's would be included. So all that is required is including the full main genre name in each subgenre and using the search. A change in the genre tree would accomodate this even further. I'm thinking on something like clicking the genre item LATIN would both show all the songs in just the genre LATIN and display the subnode 'all' which displays all the songs that have the word LATIN in the genre (maybe all the subgenres can be listed as subnodes as well. All subgenre's would be listed in the main genre tree as their own genre (could also be listed as subnode under the main genre, but I don't like that). The part that should be remembered is that subgenre LATIN JAZZ could fall under main genre LATIN and main genre JAZZ.


MULTIPLE GENRE
A song belongs to multiple distinct genre's Rap/Rock. This would require multiple main genre fields for a song. Again the problem is that MP3 (what most home users probably have) standards don't include this (I believe). In other words with multiple PC's accessing same songs this probably requires each MM DB to be updated seperatly.
jt004c system would probably fit under this, just in a more extensive solution to the problem. I do agree with daved that this probably goes to far for most users, at least for me it does.


The problem that currently exists is the standards for each file type. Many request in the forums including this request are not possible with the current standards (I believe). As such any implementation would only store such information in the MM DB. This means that the information is only available for that PC, not other PC's in the network (or even a copy of certain songs to friends).
Exportability of the DB to other PC's in a network would solve this (problem is song location differs for PC with local songs and PC with network songs) for a network of PC's, not for outsiders.


As such I would plea for a better visibilty of information that is written to tracks and information that is only written to the MM DB. (I know the help explains it all, but that's too easily forgotten). Maybe gray out items that are written only to the DB. Or maybe an option to hide columns in all the displays that are not written to the track (problem exists with the different file types and what's written to them.


The question with all this is how many users really need all this genre classifications and how difficult does the program get to be for novices when its implemented. A good middle needs to be choosen.


I hope this helps in deciding on what to implement and also helps people in getting some form of subgenre's working right now!

[daved]

Lowlander makes some good points, now (s)he's joined the discussion for real! My main gripe with some of the solutions being bandied around is their complexity - I suspect that the sort of feature set that involves weighting genres is just too complicated for most people and unnecessary to boot. I also recognise that everyone has their own opinion about just what genre/class/category/type a song belongs to and often trip up because they can't decide which it should be. To my mind, that's a big vote for multiple genres rather than sub-genres. There are option fields that can be used to sub-divide if needed.
Anyways, to add a little practicality to this thread, how about colouring the embedded file data and the db data differently, possibly a nice pastel shade to the field background?

[Lowlander]

I myself am happy with the current genre system. It is only occasionally that I would like to list a song in two genre's. I was just hoping to help this discussion as well as other users.

My including main genre name in subgenre idea is to show a possible way of adding subgenre's with using only the MP3 standard tags. This genre classification would work on any system in a network. It of course could lead to nonstandard genres (no problem with the MP3 standard, just possibly less usable for user) or long genre names.
MM could of course facilitate this process with some of the mentioned ideas.

I hope this clarifies my position, no change needed and if change is made to MM I hope it is within tagging standards.

[Peke]

In my exp. The ID3v2 Version 2.4.x Support multiple genres

An Example is MP3Tag Studio 3.xx

http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts

I think that it can be implemented in MM, I think?

For now i'm also happy with genre functions in MM.

[Lowlander]

That's good news.

Another idea I have is actually for the explorer tree and not for tags.
It would allow for u user to create mainlevel (not in tags) genre's and add subgenre's to it (the ones in the tags).
For example:

Genre
> Rock
>>Rock
>>Metal
>>Punk

or
> Spanish
>>Latin
>>Latin Pop
>>Salsa
>>Merengue

The main level genre's could list the songs from all the genre's listed under it as subgenre's.

[mmckaibab]

I, for one, would love each folder to have its own organizational settings. For most genres, organizing by artist makes sense and works well. However, for things like soundtrack and cast albums, it really makes much more sense to organize by the film or show title (which in almost every case is the album title) rather than by the artist.

[velodoug1968]

Allow a delimited list in the genre field (i.e. Heavy Metal;Black Metal;Thrash). When browsing any of these 3 genres, the same file would show up in each of the genres.

[baker]

Multiple genres and sub-genres can be organized with autoplaylists. Simply use a custom field to store comma delimited sub-genres and then create an auto-playlist that finds the desired sub-genre.

For example, "Motley Crue - Smokin' In The Boy's Room" can be tagged as 'Hard Rock, Heavy Metal, Pop Metal, Hair Metal' in the Custom1 field. Then create a 'Hard Rock' playlist that listed all songs that contain 'Hard Rock' in the custom1 field. 'Pop Metal' playlist would contain this song as well, etc.

And since autoplaylists can be nested, you can create 'stacks' of genres that get more detailed the deeper you get into them. So that 'Hair Metal' can be nested under 'Heavy Metal' which is nested inside of 'Hard Rock' or whatever.

If you want to create a multiple genred playlist it becomes a bit more tedious. Since autoplaylists automatiically add each condition as a requirement you would need to tell it which sub-genres NOT to include.
Perhaps they will include OR condition for auto-playlists in the next release to make this easier.