How to Automatically Add Genres to Your Music Library Without Changing Other Tags
Managing a large music collection can quickly become overwhelming, especially when many tracks are missing genre information. Without genres, browsing, creating playlists, or discovering new favorites becomes much harder.
Fortunately, SongKong makes it easy to automatically add accurate genre tags to your entire music library. By scanning your tracks and matching them with trusted music databases, SongKong ensures your music is properly organized—so you can spend less time tagging and more time enjoying your music.
Although by default SongKong can update complete metadata, it can also be configured to only add genres , leaving the rest of your existing metadata unchanged.
What SongKong Does
SongKong is an automated music tagger and organizer. It analyzes your music files and uses multiple databases and matching algorithms to identify tracks, albums, and their associated metadata—including genres . This allows you to enrich your library with accurate genre information without manually editing every file.
SongKong is designed to process very large music libraries because its architecture is built around automated, batch-based processing rather than interactive manual tagging.
Tools like MusicBrainz Picard are primarily designed for users working with small groups of files at a time—typically dragging a few albums into the interface, reviewing matches, and manually confirming them. This interactive workflow works well for a handful of albums but does not scale to hundreds of thousands of files.
In contrast, SongKong is built as a high-throughput background processor . It scans the entire library, organizes files into album groups automatically, and processes them through a pipeline that performs identification, metadata lookup, and tagging without requiring user interaction.
The system uses multithreading, disk-efficient scanning, and resumable tasks so it can work through extremely large collections—hundreds of thousands or even millions of tracks—while maintaining stable resource usage. Because it is designed to run unattended and produce detailed reports afterward, SongKong scales to library sizes that interactive taggers were never designed to handle.
How SongKong Adds Genres
- SongKong scans your music collection, grouping songs into potential albums based on folder structure and/or existing metadata.
- It then identifies tracks and albums using acoustic fingerprinting and metadata matching.
- The primary database used is MusicBrainz, but albums are also matched to Discogs.
- Genre information is retrieved from Discogs, where genre and style metadata is generally more detailed than on MusicBrainz.
- SongKong can be configured to use Discogs Genres , Discogs Styles or both.
- Genres also pass through a Grey List , which filters Discogs genres and styles so that only approved genres are written to your files.
- Changes can either be applied as folders are processed, or the task can be run in Preview Only mode so that all changes can be reviewed in the report before being applied.
Workflow
- Point SongKong at your music library.
- Select the Fix Songs task.
- On the Basic tab enable the Preview Only option.
- On the Basic tab enable Update Genres .
- On the Genres tab choose how genres should be retrieved from Discogs.
- On the Format tab add all fields except Genre to Never modify or add these fields .
- Select Start to process your files.
- Once processing has completed, a report is generated where you can review the proposed changes.
- If you are happy with the results, run the Apply Preview task to apply the changes from the previous run.
Optional Extras
- The only other tag fields that SongKong may add are the SongKong Id field useful for the smooth processing of SongKong, and identifiers to show the matched MusicBrainz and/or Discogs Release.
- SongKong Id
- MusicBrainz Release Id
- Discogs Album Url
- MB Recording Id
- MB Release Group Id
- MB Release Id
- MB Track Id
- SongKong Id
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If you really don’t want them you can run the MetaGrater task afterwards to quickly remove them
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The Genre Grey list can be configured in Preferences:Genre to filter the genres.
Result
After running SongKong, the majority of your music files will have accurate genre tags added automatically , allowing you to browse your music library by genre and create genre-based playlists more easily. Because SongKong was configured to only update genres, the rest of your existing metadata remains unchanged.
FAQ
Can SongKong add genres to existing music files?
Yes. SongKong can scan your existing music collection and automatically add genres based on information from Discogs.
Will SongKong change my other metadata?
No. As shown above, SongKong can be configured to update only the Genre field while leaving all other textual metadata tags untouched. It will add a few identifier tags such as SongKong Id and MusicBrainz Release Id for smooth running of SongKong but you can remove them easily with MetaGrater task if you wish.
Can SongKong process very large music collections?
Yes. SongKong is designed to process entire libraries automatically, including collections containing hundreds of thousands or even millions of tracks.