What is a standard genre and where is the list? Also, is there a way to easily convert non-standard genres to standard ones.
Standard Genre
When ID3v1 was created, genres were represented by a single byte, so the numbers had to be mapped to the actual genre, originally there were just 80 genres than Winamp extended it to 125, then later on it was extended to 148
http://www.multimediasoft.com/amp3dj/help/index.html?amp3dj_00003e.htm
iTunes only recognises the codes for the first 125.
So within Jaikoz the Filter/Non-standard-Genres/Non-standard Filters refers to any genres not within the list of 148 whereas non-iTunes Genres refers to any genres not within the the list of 125.
However although iTunes only understands the codes for the first 80 if the genre is saved to the file as text rather than as a code then it will be dispalyed in iTunes. This is the purpose of Preferences:Save:Compatability:Saves Genres in an iTunes friendly format
There is no mapping from non-standard to standard, of course you could enter any value as a genre so it would be impossible to automtically map these.
Understood. I never realized there were codes. I always thought it was a free form text field only. I do like the idea of standard genre names though and have started trying to standardize my genres it is very hard because as metadata goes the values can be so subjective. I usually give up on this process because it feels like an overwhelming problem that can’t really be solved properly using the tools available.
For example, I find that so many songs don’t fit into any one genre well or cross genres from track to track in a single album. I’ve tried using multiple genres but that just seems to muddy the waters.
To me, in a perfect world, genres should be applied per track and automatically, but only if it is accurate and even more important is that it be consistent. Perhaps the degree to which a track fits within a given genre should be more of a gradient than a fixed point, a floating point number between 0 and 1, and maybe the overall track value should be a weighted value derived from summing the degree of correlation between all of the other genre values. I don’t know, something mathematical, an algorithm, specifically not subjective.
I’m not the kind of person that likes subjective. I want everything to fit into a proper category and so genres have always been a problem for me.
I had thought that maybe I’d hit upon a solution (or at least partial solution) to a particularly annoying problem that has bothered me for as long as I’ve had music in a digital format.
This may not be for you, but a few of us are using the genres from allmusic.com. This allows genre searches to be very predictable and consistent. However, the process is excruciating.
I’ve been manually tagging these and saving off lists here:
http://www.jaikoz.com/jaikozforum/posts/list/4558.page
The way allmusic handles them is with a set of predefined genres/styles. You can see the main genre list at http://www.allmusic.com/genres, click on one of these, scroll down a bit and you’ll see “subgenres and styles”. If you look at an album, on the left you can see how these genres & styles are applied, along with moods and themes.
Thanks, I’ll look at this.