SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Treat Discogs 'Style' as Genre

#1

The really useful information in discogs is often in the ‘Style’ block, rather than the ‘Genre’ block, which often has meaningless generic tags such as ‘electronic’.

I’m finding that very often I am consulting discogs for Style when I want that populated in Genre. So, I have two suggestions for Discogs, one slightly more difficult than the other.

1 - Simple: Treat Discogs Style as Genre checkbox
2 - Better: Use Discogs Style as Genre if Genre is in blacklist

Discogs will often list multiple (comma delimited on the web ui, havent seen how they do it via REST) styles. stacking those into genre would be fine for my application.

I say #2 is better because it allows subspecialization as per user interest and knowledge in a branch of music. Ie, to me ‘rock’ is good enough, and the subgenres are meaningless to me, so i wouldn’t blacklist rock. To me ‘electronic’ is meaningless, and is not an acceptable categorization. Therefore, if i blacklist electronic, my tracks will be labeled appropriately as IDM, Dubstep, Psytrance, EBM, HappyHardCore, etc. If someone who doesn’t know or care much about electronic specialization doesnt blacklist ‘electronic’ but does ‘rock’, they might get their tracks labeled appropriately as Bad,Horrid,Ugly,Atonal,Yelling,Worse, or whatever rock people call their subgenres, which would make them happy.

but, i’ll take #1 too if thats all i can get.

thanks

#2

Something similar–I would like to be able to populate the groupings field with artist/release tags from MB and with style tags from Discogs

#3

[quote=chroma]The really useful information in discogs is often in the ‘Style’ block, rather than the ‘Genre’ block, which often has meaningless generic tags such as ‘electronic’.

I’m finding that very often I am consulting discogs for Style when I want that populated in Genre. So, I have two suggestions for Discogs, one slightly more difficult than the other.

1 - Simple: Treat Discogs Style as Genre checkbox
2 - Better: Use Discogs Style as Genre if Genre is in blacklist

Discogs will often list multiple (comma delimited on the web ui, havent seen how they do it via REST) styles. stacking those into genre would be fine for my application.

[/quote]
Hi#1 is already done in Jaikoz 2.7.0

Jaikoz will use Discog Styles in preference to Discogs Genres as long as the style is not in the Jaikoz blacklist. (If all the styles are in the blacklist , it then looks at Discogs genres to see if one is available that is not in the blacklist)

[quote=chroma]
I say #2 is better because it allows subspecialization as per user interest and knowledge in a branch of music. Ie, to me ‘rock’ is good enough, and the subgenres are meaningless to me, so i wouldn’t blacklist rock. To me ‘electronic’ is meaningless, and is not an acceptable categorization. Therefore, if i blacklist electronic, my tracks will be labeled appropriately as IDM, Dubstep, Psytrance, EBM, HappyHardCore, etc. If someone who doesn’t know or care much about electronic specialization doesnt blacklist ‘electronic’ but does ‘rock’, they might get their tracks labeled appropriately as Bad,Horrid,Ugly,Atonal,Yelling,Worse, or whatever rock people call their subgenres, which would make them happy.
but, i’ll take #1 too if thats all i can get.
thanks[/quote]
Because the blacklist is referred to by both syles and genres you could achieve what you want by blacklisting ‘electronic’,‘Bad’,‘Horrid’,‘Ugly’,‘Atonal’,‘Yelling’,‘Worse’, although this would take you some time.

But I think what you are asking for is so specialized, it may be better served by a seperate Genres Application. I would like to add support for last.fm genres, artist genres ecetera but i think this could very messy if I try to add to Jaikoz.

#4

Whilst I can see why you might want to put all the genres in grouping this isnt really what the field is for, isnt it more a level above genre e.g Soundtrack, RockPop, Classical. So if you just copied all the style and genres tags from Musicbrainz/Discogs into this field you would be unlikely to have any groupings, everything would be different.

But I would like to allow you to download all musicbrainz genres into one field so you can do what you like with them. Because Musicbrainz doesn’t actually have a genres it has folksonomies (that iclude) genres I am going to add a new field called folksonomy for holding this information but I am waiting on the Musicbrainz developers to agree the internal specification of this field so Jaikoz is comptaible with Picard.

Then using the various edit facilities within Jaikoz you can easily copy fields from folksonomy to grouping if you wish.

You can already get the (first) Style from Discogs if you set Discogs to always overwrite the genres field when you do ‘Update tags from Genres’ .

#5

I think the original intent of the Groupings field was not so much “higher” level categorization but to link items that are part of a collection or series (e.g., Mozart symphonies or This American Life podcasts).

I don’t think iTunes handles multiple genres very well, so I prefer to keep broad labels there (rock, reggae, r&b, etc.) and use groupings as a place to stash sub-genres (folk-rock, psychedelic, new wave). iTunes does let you search Groupings to make smart playlists–that’s where the utility of style & tag info would come into play. I like the fact that Groupings are a bit hidden and that iTunes doesn’t use it for anything else.

[quote=paultaylor] But I would like to allow you to download all musicbrainz genres into one field so you can do what you like with them. Because Musicbrainz doesn’t actually have a genres it has folksonomies (that include) genres I am going to add a new field called folksonomy for holding this information but I am waiting on the Musicbrainz developers to agree the internal specification of this field so Jaikoz is comptaible with Picard.

Then using the various edit facilities within Jaikoz you can easily copy fields from folksonomy to grouping if you wish.
[/quote]

So cool! The flexibility of Jaikoz is one thing that makes it great. Thanks Paul.