Learning to love the Genre id3 tag...

zg

I've always secretly resented the genre tag. It's usually as if someone simply spins a dial to select how to fill them in.

One day, totally minding my own business, I stumbled across...

The solution(s):

iTunes Tagger - a free iTunes plugin which slurps 'top tag' data using the oh so wonderful last.fm API (same API my lfmseek.com project uses to give you guys better emusic search). Pretty good for iTunes users, nice options/works well.
Mp3tag - the best Mp3/id3 tag editor (and it's also free!). Apparently the author added scripting for tag sources and I never even noticed! Many cool/useful scripts including a last.fm genre offering.
aTunes - Last but not least, aTunes, which even as I type these words plays me sweet music in the background. This (free/multiplatform/open source) player might just become my primary and I'd tried it a year or so ago and I wasn't nearly as impressed. Like the others it too will update genre information, but it also includes a lot of additional integrated support of last.fm users (including song, art, track and similar artist data without firing up a browser!).

Of course the end result is that when I type 'dubstep' into Foobar (or ...aTunes) I get a LOAD of music that actually matches! I've got over 11K tracks (and I'm sure most of you have big collections too!). Useful tagging is teh AWESOMEnesses!

The only downside for me right now is that aTunes only imports a single genre tag (the #1 top tag) while to two other offer multiple genre tags so things like classical/ambient in the genre tag is possible, and multi genre tags are HAWT.

Get on with your bad selves!

Dr. Mutex

aTunes looks really nice. I may have to take it for a spin.

thomnottom

Thank you so much! I've been looking for some alternatives to my current setup and these look great. Mp3tag was one of my favorites until I switched to foobar fulltime and did all of my tagging in there. However it doesn't handle embedded album art (which I want to strip out) so mp3tag is necessary anyone. The last.fm stuff should be great!

aTunes looks like it could be what amarok2 wants to be. And for Windows!

I'm also spending a lot of time trying to properly genre-tag my music these days, so foobar will probably stay #1 for me until Songbird or aTunes finally recognize multiple genres

cafreema

I haven't investigated yet, but does anyone know if any of these options are Mac compatable?

Craig

zg

@cafreema - aTunes is Mac/Linux/Windows (Java).

@thom - agreed. I'm only on week 1 of my aTunes test and for quick stuff I still use Foobar (especially with it's context menu support). aTunes does still need work, specifically better/more configurable id3 support. I posted suggestions regarding the multi-tag support with references to the id3 spec (which allows this) so it probably depends on how much time and/or help the developer has (or interest!). But the Last.fm integration is pretty damn slick, better then any other play I've used. This player has LOTS of potential. :-)

zg

Heh. I should have mentioned aTunes also has last.fm 'loved' track support which includes loving tracks (F2) and importing loved tracks data. So loved (favorites) can be used to create local playlists and since the data is sent to or imported from last.fm this data is persistent across workstations (as long as you enter your user details).

I like the POPM and PCNT tags for preference data, but this addition is pretty sweet!

thomnottom

Wow, that Last.fm stuff sounds awesome. One of the best plugins for Songbird I found was called Vandelay Industries (hopefully everybody gets that reference) - it would import your playcounts from Last.fm. Great for someone like me who constantly blows out his music library every couple of months for some stupid reason or another.

zg

I haven't used songbird in a few months and definitely hadn't head of that plugin. I'd test things like jajuk or aTunes periodically out of curiosity. I wasn't expecting to be wowed this time, but I read it was doing last.fm genre stuff so I decided to give it a try. Songbird always left me with the impression that it was a good idea, but never seemed to be implemented in a way that I like (lots of behavior I didn't like or didn't work). It's ambitious though and if they got funding I bet they'd turn out an exciting project. aTunes seems to have a slightly more narrow focus, but right now it has a pretty sweet groundwork laid out and with a lot of the functionality already in place, if the author has the desire or time adding some really cool features wouldn't require a lot of new code, but simply to expose the existing functionality (for instance, I'd love to see smart playlists using genre/loved/similar features).

Anything that makes digesting all this new music simpler is a HUGE boon to me. :-)

Heh, even the lyrics view has got me interested in and read...song lyrics! Album views let me quickly verify I've got all the tracks (god bless eMusic for spotty track availability!).

Data power!

Dr. Mutex

Ouch. Lack of smart playlist support is a deal-breaker for me. I could still let aTunes overhaul my genre tags, though.

Germanprof

I am sure I have moaned about this before, but I am ascending another little pinnacle of frustration with genres and would appreciate anyone's insights.

For context, there is for me an inner battle occasionally waged between two impulses:

(a) I use genre a lot to select music on my ipod touch. That works best if the genres are few in number and high in capacity - otherwise if I want a particular artist I forget which subgenre I one day arbitrarily assigned them to. So my genres are "ambient" (but not "dark ambient", "drone", "isolationist", etc), "classical" (but not baroque, minimalist, etc.)

(b) While (a) really helps me with the day to day task of navigating it is clearly a slegehammer when it comes to actually curating the music. (I wish iTines/ID3 had a tagging equivalent of artist/album artist, or a prinary and secondary genre tag. Oh well.) So I periodically find myself fighting the urge to redivide the music among twenty more genres, though any moves in that direction typically create more furstration under (a).

Well the recurring puzzlement that I need to find a stable solution to concerns what to do with Nils Frahm, Deaf Center, Max Richter, Otto Totland (getting his recent release has sparked this again - I don't know where to file it), some Antonymes, etc. The macro-categories that my navigation system offers to choose from here are "ambient", "electronic", and "classical". Some would use "classical" for Frahm and certainly Richter - but it seems a baggy fit. "Neoclassical" has been re-appropriated from its historical use often enough to have a Wikipedia page for "Neoclassical (New Age)" - but it at best fits some of the recordings I have in mind. Nils Frahm uses electronics, as does Richter - but the music does not seem primarily "electronic". Some of it is definitely ambient in effect - but it feels like an odd bedfellow for, say, Tetsu Inoue or Oophoi. I feel like I need one more top level category for this pocket of people doing experimental things with classical instruments and electronics.

Take Deaf Center's Owl Splinters (soundcloud link) - its release notes speak of "haunted, cinematic ambience", which is sort of right. It mixes distressed, creaking strings and horn-like sounds with crystalline piano pieces. At one level, simplistically, it is a piano/cello duet. There is sound manipulation going on but the sound is too acoustic/organic for me to feel as if "electronic" is right (is music "electronic" if the sounds are electronically processed acoustic instruments?), though it also feels a bit too intense and active for "ambient". Dusted reviews drops "electroacoustic" - maybe, though that tag feels a little vacuous to me these days, when so many recordings involve the electronic and the acoustic working together. And now Otto Totland, half of Deaf Center, has released a solo album made up entirely of the same piano sketches as on Owl Splinters - and Amazon has it filed under "classical". Yet no one is putting Owl Splinters in Classical. (Amazon thinks it is "Dance & Electronic". Good grief.) All the genres seem wrong. Dusted again, on Owl Splinters: "ambient electronica, drone, contemporary classical, field recordings and melodic melancholy, all rolled into one". So where do I file the thing when iTunes only gives me one genre tag? I have the same debate with many recordings of this ilk - and there are many that are among my favorite recordings, so small as it may be in the grand scheme of things, it does bother me.

I know this is a problem with all genre taxonomies, and there is no clean solution, but has anyone else used any creative way of filing things that use pianos and strings but also bleeps and creaks and environmental sounds and have more affinity with current ambient/field recording/"electroacoustic scenes that with Mozart? It feels to me as if we need a new genre that honors all the current music being birthed out of the intersection of ambient, classical, electronic, environmental and electroacoustic. Where do you file any of these artists that you have: Nils Frahm, Max Richter, Deaf Center, Otto Totland, Nest, Olafur Arnalds, Heinali, 3epkano, Ten, Julia Kent, From the Mouth of the Sun, Oliveray, Greg Haines, ... ?

OK, I've moaned about it again.

kargatron

There's no "answer" to this kind of question - I think you just have to focus on functionality - what do you want out of whatever label you choose? For me, it's usually about if I want to shuffle a "genre", what do I want to hear come up with that kind of goal in mind? My own inclination with the types of artists involved in your quandary would perhaps be one of "ambient", "electronic", or "instrumental". The weirder stuff I lump under "Avantgarde", remembering it's nothing but a label. The key thing is to stop worrying about accuracy (an impossibility with "genre names"), and focus on personal functionality.

Germanprof

I agree to a degree; I agree that there is no "answer" - there is no objectively "correct" label. Labeling is an act of imagination. And my (a) above is based on functionality. But accuracy and functionality are not entirely separable either where part of the functionality desired is that the label designate a subset of music with enough common characteristics for it to function well as a means to identifying the subset. I am not after the correct answer; I am wondering if anyone has come up with any good labels that I have not thought of and that might be functionally appealing to me. I am looking for imaginative help.

"Avantgarde" is certainly a possibility. Though in my mind it connotes "difficult", and some of the music I have in mind is really quite tuneful. I have toyed with "instrumental", but the problem there is that more than 90% of my music collection is instrumental, I'd guess; I do not listen to much singing.

amclark2

Two ideas (from somebody who never sorts by genre so /grainofsalt):

1. A lot of what you're describing could maybe fit under EAI - which is I think Electronic Acoustic Improvisation, which is maybe a little better/closer than just electroacoustic.

2. What about "genre - subgenre". If you put some things under ambient and others under dark ambient, then you have to check D and A; if you tag some as "ambient - dark", then they're right next to ambient. Then you could do a bunch like "ambient - piano" etc.

cafreema

I do a lot of "genre - subgenre", particularly in my hip hop stuff. It's very useful in that arena because different eras and locations develop such different sounds. If I want to listen to some New York boom-bap, jazz sampling, West Coast gangsta, or Minnesota based, I can easily find it, and hear just the type I'm looking for. I would think might help your issues GP.

Full disclosure: I have 110 different genre tags.

Craig

amclark2

Full disclosure - some of my guvera files are still genre tagged with random numbers.

Germanprof

Hmm, I like the idea of EAI - not the most euphonic genre label ever, but it does describe something. Thanks for that, that's the kind of suggestion I was after.
The biggest thing that has kept me from genre-Subgenre is my point (a) above - the issue of creating lots more iPod scrolling and of remembering where I filed something. The latter is objectively a red herring since if I can't remember the genre assignment I should flip to searching by album to artist, but in the less objective real world I want to be able to find it quickly from wherever I started :-).
ETA, actually, come to think of it, the real issue is opening a genre and scanni for something to listen to and wanting all relevant choices to be there - the more sub genres, the more 'folders' I have to look through if I just want something ambient. That's why one of my biggest wished for iTunes and iPod would be being able to next genres, so that e.g. everying in ambient-dark also showed in ambient.

kargatron

Not that it necessarily matters, but "eai" already has a pretty established descriptive presence and history in the music community, focusing on the more experimental side of things (Erstwhile may be the most canonical label associated with the term). Heck, people even use "post-eai" in discussions these days.

Wikipedia
The Wire 300: Dan Warburton on the sound sorcerors of EAI

Of course, use it freely for your purposes, Gp - but I think there's not too much overlap between your collection and what usually pops up as associated with 'eai'.

Germanprof

Thanks for the links - my first quick google had informed me that "Enterprise application integration (EAI) is the use of software and computer systems architectural principles to integrate a set of enterprise computer applications."

Junodownload tags a lot of my experimental/ambient stuff as "leftfield", which is a genre tag I have never really taken the time to understand.

"post-classical" actually makes some kind of sense to me for some of this music.
And while I have never seen it used, "post-acoustic" would describe some things pertinently too.

ETA:

Left field being the loneliest position in baseball, things that "come from" or are "out of" left field are generally unusual and weird. On Discogs, this term tends to be applied to anything with a "quirky" component, or anything that's atypical of its genre, or to which no style really seems to apply. Sometimes it is used as a less-alienating alternative for the term Experimental.

(Wikipedia)

Germanprof

Hmmm. Actually, if you take "post-acoustic" in the same sense as (at least some understandings of) "postmodern" - i.e. that which comes after modernity and in one sense signals modernity's breakdown yet also includes and builds upon modernity and cannot be understood without its continued influence. Like how "post-war" is after the war but overshadowed by the war. I guess "post-rock" works pretty much that way too. "Post-acoustic" might then describe acoustic music that is no longer purely acoustic, but manipulated in various ways while still clearly grounded in the acoustic. It might also have the benefit of not saying anything about what kind of music is made with the manipulated acoustic sounds.

I see LastFM has a tag for it. And that it's a word for a kind of guitar.

cafreema

last.fm has a tag for everything.

Craig

Germanprof

Sorry, that tag could not be found.

It doesn't have a tag for Craig-hop.

cafreema

Give it time.

I hate when I'm investigating a band and the only tag is something dumb like 'seen live'. How exactly does that describe the music?

'Female vocalists' is another that bugs me. At least there does not appear to be a corresponding 'male vocalists' tag.

Craig

cafreema

What timing: P4K article ("The Out Door", so it explores more experimental music) that discusses genre.

Craig

choiceweb0pen0

I try to be consistent in tagging or changing tags so they're useful to me. I'm increasingly loathing genre tags Alternative and sometimes even Rock. Also missing album art. Is there any software left to help with either, especially for a Mac?

cafreema

I bit the bullet a few months ago and completely obliterated my Alternative tag. Everything got moved to something more descriptive. Haven't done the same with Rock yet.

As for album art, if a right click-Get Album Art doesn't work, I just download the art from Amazon and bulk add it to the album. I'm on a Mac too.

Craig

Germanprof

From the P4K piece:

“Can you imagine a world where we describe music more for its emotional context than its origin or instrumentation?”

Was discussing with my daughter last night, after starting this thread, the pros and cons of replacing music genres with mood genres, so that all the music would be tagged "serene" or "bouncy" or "disturbing", assigned across musical genre boundaries. It would actually have some utility.

MrV

I've been using the Grouping tag in iTunes for quite a while to refine Genre. I have all classical under that genre and then have groupings such as sacred, quiet, and weather. I then make playlists of the various groupings. I use the weather one quite a bit, enjoying solo harpsichord with a snowfall or Sibelius with a stormy day.

cafreema

I recently started using the Grouping tag a bit too, and in a similar way. Hadn't fully committed, though, because my iPod doesn't let me search by Group, and I hadn't thought of creating a playlist. May need to give that some consideration. Thanks, MrV!

Craig

kargatron

I use 'grouping' for marking mainstream jazz (using "mainstream" of all things), so I can easily access via playlist palatable "dinner jazz". I have thought of using it for my "ethnic"-tagged supergenre, but haven't gotten around to it yet, though I'd enjoy having it (e.g. "Indian", "Greek", etc).

I've pined for this before, but I SO WISH iTunes would introduce pure database-implemented open tagging, would make all these issues go away. The concept's been around for years now, it feels awfully dopey to be tied to fixed id3 tags. Grr.

('Grouping', btw, is a very poor substitute for proper tags, since it's just one open text field. Multi-tagging is very clunky.)

Germanprof

Open tagging - yes please! I've toyed with grouping too, but as Craig said, it does not help me at all with the function of navigating on the ipod touch since the latter does not know about groups.

I have begun using the comment field for some things. So for instance I use the comment field for a label tag - e.g. all my ECM purchases have "label:ECM" in the comment field. I can then use it for smart playlists. I also have an app on the ipod touch called SmartPlaylist that does just about everything playlist-related that the the ipod music app would do if it were any good , such as letting me search the ipod touch for every track that has "label:ECM" in the comment field; it's useful sometimes for pulling up a shortlist of things I might listen to. Trouble is, I play albums, not playlists, so the smart playlist thing is mainly a way of getting the music that I want onto the touch or finding out what I have there rather than a way of browsing directly to listen.

From one of kargatron's links about EAL, I rather like the idea of the genre "taomud" (The Area Of Music Under Discussion). Sort of like "kangaroo" or "manna".

I see Last FM also have a tag for "acoustronica". That would work well for, say, DoF or Tuung.

I have been thinking that a lot of the albums I am trying to place have a "chamber" feel about them, but that is still leaving me wondering "chamber what?"

Brighternow

Lastfm has a Unknown tag with artists such as:
They Might Be Giants, Patti Scialfa and Tina Dickow.

The unknown artists. Bornt uknown when, unknown where, in a family of unknown origin. Have studied uknown where, on uknown grades, entred uknown where and were learning there uknown what, but prefered to be occupied with uknown what.

- Hmmm ?

- And how about "Mysterious"

Music that is characterized by a puzzling, perplexing and haunting mood.