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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Genre started out useful. Five or six categories. Classical made sense. Pop made sense.

Now, I have to decide if this is West Coast electro skiffle or its Canadian folk influenced digital beats.

We wind up needing another tag, to do classical/pop/folk in.

Also, players don't agree on artist/composer/orchestra or on movement numbering, you can't even rely on BWV. I've had multiple CD sets split by the amazing variance of back catalogue mining meaning an 11 part cd set of Chopin can match a 9 or 10 part set and a single release cd or two.

The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare, matched only by how hard approximation of date is in EXIF

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Genre has always been a mess. For a while Primus was a ID3Tag genre in unto themselves. In general, that type of inherently fuzzy categorical will always be a mess. I’m old enough to remember the great alt.music.industrial wars over whether Nine Inch Nails was industrial or not.[0]

The problem with ID3 back when I was ripping and encoding stuff back at the turn of the century was that they were fixed length fields. Using CDDB better as a source of truth, but even it had serious inconsistency issues. Not from a data quality perspective, but from a data format perspective. It quickly became a pile of inconsistencies, particularly around artists and multiple artist albums. In the end, I ended up extending it with a better format I called eCDDB. Of course there was no one interested in fixing the format, because CDDB got sold some megacorp, and FreeDB simply ignored the obvious problems.

[0] Reznor won a Country Music Award in 2019, so that settles it. He’s country.

But "old town road" by Lil Nas and Billy Ray Cyrus gets kicked off the country playlist.

That’s because it’s industrial

You win. It's not going in my folk or classical playlist. For at least another 50 years, anyway.

About 10 years ago I went on a massive retagging of my library and decided to use the "Grouping" tag as a high level genre tag, while the actual "Genre" would contain all the messy/impossible to normalize subgenres. This was a suggestion I picked up from some article I read back then and seemed like a good idea, plus it was supported by a tagging plugin in MusicBrainz Picard. There were problems with mp3s that used older tagging formats and it was ultimately resolved by upgrading those to a newer version of id3. But what ultimately broke the deal was that most players had spotty or no support at all for the "Grouping" tag. Pretty much nothing wants to use the "Grouping" tag as a genre filter, if they even acknowledge its existence at all.

What made it even more frustrating was that I already had to restrict (and still do) to players that properly support "Album artist" tags if I want sensible filtering/searching/listing of albums that have multiple artists credited or is a compilation of songs from different artists. So I was left with a paltry selection of players that properly supported everything I wanted (and didn't suck), couldn't even setup a subsonic server (although that had other issues too..), and NO SINGLE android app could deal with it.

I eventually had to revert all this nonsense and use the "Genre" tag as god (apparently) intended.

So moral of the day, (or TL;DR) don't do weird shit with tags.

Gold response. Plex basically says "stick to an artist/album directory hierarchy and do composer somehow which doesn't conflict and Album-Artist sort tag reading is your friend but if you fuck it up I AM COMING AT YOU LIKE AN ANGRY GOOSE WITH A KNIFE" and so I dropped into line.

When I do smart search on original album issue year like "60s" I find I get hit by amazing truths about what was contemporaneous music.

"Switched on Bach" alongside "the Beatles" and "the song of the green berets" as well as Charles' Aznavour and Mingus, Terry Riley, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Keith Jarret, the Hollies, and Rogers & Hammertime (sorry -stein) It was a mixed up musical period. Thank God the fab four split up before the 70s.

Len Deighton's spy hero listens to Stockhausen and Miles.

> It was a mixed up musical period

eg: Pierre Henry - Psyché Rock (1967): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDmqyjiF_NA

I manage my collection as physical CDs. My current format for files and folder is "{album artist} - {year} - {album}/[Disc {disc #}/]{track #} {title}.ext". I mostly listen as albums, not playlists. This gave me enough information to locate music both using the filesystem and a library manager. I do have extra tags (I'm using beets to manage the collection), but I don't really bother with them.

I don't bother with genre tags. And if my main collection grows enough to require them (currently ~500 albums), I think I will just be creating playlists.

As for album artist, every player I came across could support it (except Rhythmbox I think). I currently have Navidrome, MPD, and Doppler (Mac) pointed at the same collection. Swinsian (Mac) does support the grouping tag.

"The taggers are fine. The information model is a nightmare"

*Truth*. I find it really frustrating to only be able to assign one genre and one grouping to a song or album. Rating is another one. A 0-5 system is woefully insufficient to rate music. (If I had my way, it would adopt Robert Christgau's grading system[1] that runs from "Dud" to "A+"...)

[1] https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-cg90/grades-90s.php

Some of the better media players and library management tools will allow a delimiter in the Genre field to allow multiple genre tags. Personally, I'm using Roon which lets you set such a delimiter to look for in the genre tag.

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