Subsonic Forum

Is there any way that MY genre tag fields can be read and used instead of the oftentimes weird genre tags from Last.Fm?

I've worked very hard in Music Monkey to get my tag fields all dialed-in (aprox. 30,000 tracks). The folks I share my library with and I would really like to use the genre tags we expect to see!

That's not possible without changing the code. Your genres from your library have been read and stored in the PostgreSQL database, but there's no way to make use of them right now.

The problems I see are:
- genre tags are set per file, while MusicCabinet is very much built around tags per artist. How should the genre cloud behave if genres are picked from files? Where should the link "disco" for example go? How should the "artist genre filter" in the left column behave?

- multiple genres per file. I like to to have the possibility to tag an artist as "100% disco, 70% pop". how do you express that in the tags of a file? there's no standard to support it and I don't want to invent my own standard for it.

I understand the request to use tags that you've spent a lot of time working on, but I think it has to be elaborated more exactly how it should work.

As far as your first point goes . . . I don't know enough about how MC'net works to see why tags were built around genres per artist vs. building it to read the genres in the individual files.

I have a VERY basic understanding of how Dbases work, but I'm going to put my next thought out there . .

The database has the genres per file . . . The link for Disco should essentially generate a query that comes back with all of the files with that genre tag???? - yes/no . . . maybe??

Your second point:
As far as multiple genres per artist and/or track goes, I envision the following: The app can read the users dbase and make a master table of all of the genres. The user selects a track, opens the "tagging chart". Then the UI could produce a circle chart for each file selected and a drop down list of all of the genres in the master table. (Perhaps the App could populate the circle chart on it's own based on the genre tags in the table?) The user selects Pop and Disco which then appear in the circle chart as a 50% - 50% split with two different corresponding colors. The user can click and drag the divider around the circle like a clock-hand to change the weight of the split. If the user picks more than two genres, then the circle is split is evenly divided between them at first etc. The UI always would keep the total equaling 100% too.

These weights would have to be additional tags that point to the genre tags . . . if possible.

If so then . . .
Now we have these percentage-weights for the tracks or artists . . . Which would be used as a "relevance" score. E-Commerce can sort like this already, yet I don't really know how they do it . . . Nevertheless I'll give it a shot!: When the user selects "Disco" all of the files that are tagged with 100% (relevance to) Disco are listed first. Then the files that are less than 100% disco are listed next in descending order. I would hope that the user could set a "cut-off" so I could filter out Relevance scores of, perhaps 30% or less.

Am I crazy??

I do think that it would be useful to have a possibility to search for file tags, and an interface for changing artist tags. But I think that browsing by genre -> artist -> album -> song makes for a much better overview than browsing by genre -> songs. It's not a technical decision, it's more of a usability decision. The disco page is now sorted by (1) how much disco an artist is said to be and then (2) how popular the artist is. I think that gives a quick and easy way of finding good disco music from your own library.

The chart could surely be made to look good, but I don't think it reflects that an artist can be 100% of a few different non-overlapping genres. Female vocalists is a good example. An artist can definitely be 100% rock and 100% female vocalists at the same time. And maybe 30% synth, too. And then the big question is.. how would you store that in a way that made it possible for Media Monkey to read it too? I simply think that genres found in file tags aren't powerful enough. That's why I don't use them.

Maybe it would be useful to have an import functionality that used your file genres as a starting point for what tags to use for the artist tags. If I came across 50k perfectly tagged super rare tracks, with incomplete tags on last.fm, that's what I'd be interested in, at least.

Thinking about this . . . I still would love to see an option to either use last.fm's genre tags or mine.

Thanks!

(fingers crossed)

I'd like to see this option too.
A lot of lastfms tags are not specific enough. electronic for example can be split up in many genres.
with mp3tag i've tagged all the files with the correct genre, if those tags were used MC radio should play the correct songs

At least you can now use the advanced search to achieve this. Search for files tagged with the genre you feel like listening to, add top track rank about five or so to the search, add all and shuffle. It should give you a fairly good radio based on your own tags.

I would really like this too

I think we could have an option before first scan to specify to use only ID3 genre.
During scan An artist would be associated with all the genres that were found in the tracks pointing to this artist instead of the one returned bu LastFM. MC behavior can then stay the same genre>artist>song.
It still possible with that behavior to retrieve genre description from lastFM.

In version 0.7.24, you can now browse your library by genres taken from file tags, instead of from last.fm. viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9777&p=54573#p54573

Yay... but... where is that option hidden? I can't find it... I must be stupid?