Genre Strategies

[evilcartman]

I posted a wishlist describing my genre woes. In ther meantime I thought people with more experience might have some strategies for setting up my genres/group.

I would like to have about 25 main genres and any number of groups. I used Kodi and having nice recognizable posters for each genre and a manageable number of them is the goal. Tagging these seems to be an issue, having to do it manually as editing multiple genres is not easy. Single genres is easy as I could do global replacements.

Wishlist Post:

I made the mistake of allowing Discogs to go genre nuts on my collection.
Now I have as many genres as I have songs!

I gave me the idea of a genre normalizing function. Essentially an auto correct and downsizing of genres. . It would scan through all your genres and search and replace based on both standardized naming convention and broader genre category.

You would set the granularity of genre you desired reflected in the total number of genres (e.g. 5 10 25, 50, or 100 genres). The more specific genres would be changed to their broader category. So if you selected 5 or 10, all your rock-blues, album rock, hard rock would all be changed to “rock” As newer genres come into usage, the “translation” file can be edited to include them. Even a user defines list is possible.

I used to not care about genre at all, but the larger my collection gets, the more I have come to rely on genres.

Seems to me this could be a pretty awesome “pro” feature. I have found nothing out there specially geared to managing genres.

Another thought is to alphabetize multiple genres or use a predefined preferential sorting list so each genre of a multiple genres list will always appear in the same order :

Rock / Pop / Blues-Rock
Pop / Rock / Bluesrock
Blues/Rock/ / Pop/ Rock

would all be changed to the same:
Rock / Pop/ Blues-Rock
to make column sorting and editing easier
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[paultaylor]

I think we have the genre normalizing function in SongKong, and plan to add it in Jaikoz X

Here is description of the function in SongKong

When songs are matched to a Discogs album we check the genres provided by Discogs for that release against the genres listed below, if the Discogs album has multiple genres in this list then we use the genre that comes earliest in this list, so the order of the list is important - if you want to keep them you should put more specialist genres such as Power Pop before more general categories such as Pop. If no match is found no genres will be added to songs matched to that release. Having found a match SongKong uses that value if that is the only value on the line, but if there is a ‘;’ and then a second value it will use that second value, this is useful for mapping multiple similar genres to a single genre.

The Genre list is a text file that can be edited independently of SongKong if you wish.

Example:Map three genres to one

All three genres are mapped to a more generic genre when such specific genres are not required

              Black Metal;Metal
              Goth Metal;Metal
              Doom Metal;Metal

Example:Dealing with spelling variations

Maps Bossa nova to Bossanova, Bossanova is allowed through untouched

              Bossanova
              Bossa nova;Bossanova

[dkoh]

Not really an answer to your question, but I have also become reliant on genres.

I use allmusic’s genres, moods, and occasions. They have a lot of them, over 1000, but they’re nested. I play most of my music through Kodi, which also makes good use of genres, but it doesn’t cascade through Genre>Sub-Genre like I wish it would. If I could code, I would write something for Kodi that did what I want. I would like to select one of the ~14 main genres (Rap, Pop/Rock, R&B, Jazz, etc), then have it list out all the subs for the main genre selected (Metal, Hard Rock, Country Rock, etc).

I add these genres manually. I made an Excel formula so I can copy/paste from the allmusic page and Excel will remove spaces and add commas in one field, then I copy/paste that to Jaikoz. I would love if Jaikoz would do this automatically, and am willing to pay quite a bit more for it to do this, but it’s been shot down so far.

It’s time consuming, but I have found that allmusic is pretty accurate and very consistent, which is what matters with this kinds of thing. Especially with ~20,000 albums.

Actually, I paste genres manually from allmusic since Jaikoz uses the Genre dialog. The other fields I can paste in straight from Excel.