SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

How to reduce genres to only the 125 used by iTunes?

#1

I read in another post that iTunes uses a standard list of 125 genres.
Is it possible to somehow limit the genres Jaikoz assigns to this list of 125 despite what MB or Discogs genres are?
It would be nice to have a checkbox that says “Limit to iTunes genres”.

I’ve just discovered the “Filter/Non-standard-Genres/Non-standard Filters” option so I guess I could use that to show me which ones are non standard then update them manually however it would be great to have a fuzzy matching option that matches non standard to iTunes standard genres.

Jaikoz is a great program
Thanks
Nigel

#2

Your best bet it to use the filter non-iTunes filters, non-standardFIlters limits to 255 genres but only half of these are in the predefined list provided by iTunes.

However these options may be misleading you, although iTunes only recognises 125 genres by number you can still use any value to store a genre, it is just stored as text.

The Musicbrainz list is not limited in any sense so it would be rather difficult to map an arbitary Musicbrainz genre to an iTunes one.

#3

Is there anywhere in Jaikoz I can find the list of 255 genres that Jaikoz is using in this filter AND/OR the 125 iTunes genres so I can make sure that my collection only uses these “standard” ones?

Would be good to have a cross matching facility, for example several of my songs have a genre “Rock/Pop” (a single genre) these could be matched to two seperate genres ie “Rock” and “Pop” then for anything not found in Jaikoz’s cross matching genre database the User could enter a nominated genre ie “Unknown” so then you have a subset of your music (genre = “Unknown”) you know needs to be listened to and a genre manually assigned.

Nigel

#4

See Appendix 8.1 at the end of http://id3.org/id3v2.3.0 for a list of genres

So the the 125 genres listed are the one iTunes understands by genre number.

Then the following are additional genres where the number is not recognised by iTunes ( sorry doesnt go up to 255, just 147)

126, Goa
127, Drum & Bass
128, Club-House
129, Hardcore
130, Terror
131, Indie
132, BritPop
133, Negerpunk
134, Polsk Punk
135, Beat
136, Christian Gangsta Rap
137, Heavy Metal
138, Black Metal
139, Crossover
140, Contemporary Christian
141, Christian Rock
142, Merengue
143, Salsa
144, Thrash Metal
145, Anime
146, JPop
147, SynthPop

#5

Paul how about this …if we got 50 people to each donate $10 OR reach $500 of donations (whichever comes first) would you add a genre cross matching function (as explained above) to Jaikoz? We could keep track by each person posting how much they have donated in this thread.

Nigel

#6

I would rather see something like what mediamonkey has in some of their plugins. The ability to do white lists, black lists, and grey lists.

That way one would have far more control. For your example, you could use the white list and put in the allowed genres you have listed below. Or one could do a blacklist, which allows everything except for certain tags. This is useful for when you tag from other sources and don’t want particular tags to show up. Say I tag from last.fm and don’t want the tag “seen live” to be used. Lastly, the grey list would allow for tag replacement. So I could say anytime you run across the tag “rock n roll” replace it with “rock and roll” or “rnb” to “r&b”, etc.

#7

[quote=Nigeltag]Paul how about this …if we got 50 people to each donate $10 OR reach $500 of donations (whichever comes first) would you add a genre cross matching function (as explained above) to Jaikoz? We could keep track by each person posting how much they have donated in this thread.

Nigel[/quote]
Thx Nigel but firstly I dont think you’d find 50 people willing to do this, but more importantly

1: I don’t see how we can map from an unlimited continually growing list to a limited list
2:The limited set of genres is incomplete and doesnt include newer genres , I dont see that this list should be seen as the definitive list.

In September I went to the yearly Musicbrainz Summit and genres were discussed there, see page 12 of https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ihe2nAatrLHfgPOvXWn_VJQVUVQ36iFy5MY03lTBhMM/edit?pli=1, hopefully a solution will emerge if you are interested in this it would be worth your while posting on the musicbrainz mailing list.

#8

[quote=greengeek]I would rather see something like what mediamonkey has in some of their plugins. The ability to do white lists, black lists, and grey lists.
[/quote]
Jaikoz does already have a blacklist Preferences:Remote Correct:Correct Genres that supports wildcards, but not a whitelist or greylist, I can see these being useful additions.

Created http://jthink.net:8081/browse/JAIKOZ-512

#9

Re Blacklist:
Yes was already aware of this and although very helpful in stopping unwanted genres is not useful in correcting anything not on this list.

Re unlimited continually growing list of genres & the iTunes genres not being a definitive list:
I see limiting the list to the iTunes this to be a major advantage not a disadvantage even if its not a definitive list. Reason being is that people will always disagree on the exact genre of a song so its better to at least have a standard (the 125 iTunes genres) that people must stay within that way genres become a usable way (currently they are not due to so many genres) to sort, listen and create playlists since you know that when you select “Rock & Roll” genre you’re getting all your Rock & Roll songs and don’t also have to also look under “Rock n Roll”, “Rock and Roll”, “Rock/Roll” etc.
As its stands there are currently so many permutations of genres it makes them unusable so it would be good to have an option in Jaikoz to “force” the use of only “standard” genres regardless of what MB or Discogs has assigned to them. Of course this wouldn’t prevent people NOT enabling this option and still going with MB, Discogs or their own preferred genres.

White List:
I think greengeek’s idea of a white lists is a good way of implementing this ie the white list would be initially populated with only the 125 iTunes genres (however Users could edit this list).
In preferences you could “enable” the whitelist which tells Jaikoz to enforce the use of these genres only. You would nominate a genre (eg “Unknown”) that Jaikoz would assign to any songs for genres not found on this whitelist.

Grey List:
Again greengeek’s idea of a grey list is a good way of enabling Jaikoz to use this list to fuzzy match non standard genres to the iTunes standard genres (or whatever the User decides they want to cross match to) eg “Rock n Roll”, “Rock and Roll”, “Rock/Roll” would all be in the grey list and be assigned to the iTunes standard “Rock & Roll” OR a genre of the User’s choice if they don’t want to use iTunes standard ones.

Hope that makes sense
Nigel

#10

Yes I like this idea of a grey list, although there is a complication. If the user decides to use both Discogs genres and styles, do we need multiple greylists ?

#11

Re Two vs. One Greylists
I can’t think of a scenario where you’d need two greylists as this list is really what the User wants Jaikoz to use to cross match to their “standard” genres regardless of where the currently assigned genre came from ie was already assigned to song or came from MB or Discogs lookup.

Re Unmatched Genres
As previously mentioned, by having a checkbox for “Replace unmatched genres with:” [User entered genre ie “Unknown”] the User would also have an option of either leaving unmatched genres as is OR replacing them with their chosen genre which enables them to seperate out these songs for manual review at a latter date.

Nigel