Adding Genres

[03WhiteConv]

Is there any way to add a Genre to the album Edit Tags, Genre pull-down? I'd like to tag my Christmas music and I don't have any genres showing that are related to the holidays. I checked and at least one of these Christmas albums is tagged "Christmas" on Last.fm. I also queried the database and saw at least a few artists tagged with Christmas. Problem is that the Christmas tag does not show up anywhere in the gui to select.

Does that make sense??

[hakko]

Yeah, there is a catch 22 here. To add a new genre, it must be considered relevant, i.e enough artists must already be tagged with it (to filter out misspellings etc from last.fm). So right now, to be able to tag an artist as "christmas" you'd need to do:

Code: Select all

insert into library.toptag (tag_id) select id from music.tag where tag_name = 'christmas';

[03WhiteConv]

No Problem, I'll do that tonight!

[hakko]

.. I don't know how much Christmas music you have, but if you do have a couple of albums by artists who also made other albums, you might be better of creating a Christmas playlist from the albums and shuffle it. Genres are associated with artists and so are top tracks. So a Christmas "radio" might not come out super successful. But worth a try of course, it totally depends on what Christmas music you have.

[03WhiteConv]

Not a ton of Christmas music. Can there only be one genre associated with the artist in the DB?

[hakko]

No, you can have as many genres as you want per artist. I'm just thinking that if Whitney Houston made one Christmas album and tons of other albums and you say that she's 100% Christmas, then her other tracks will probably be used when you play "Christmas radio". The radio function works so that it favors artists with high genre match (you can say that an artist is 100% Christmas or 82% Christmas or whatever). Then it favors top tracks for those artists (but it also includes more rare tracks now and then). I'm just afraid that Whitney Houston's list of top tracks doesn't include her Christmas tracks, there's no connection between a specific genre and a specific list of top tracks.

Since Christmas is something you'd actually tag an album with, not an artist, it might not work so well since MusicCabinet is built around artist tagging.

[03WhiteConv]

Shouldn't genre be hooked to the album instead of the artist? This way when an artist does something different from the norm it could still be catergorized correctly. I know that in WMP the genre is tagged to the individual track. Anyway to use my WMP genre list that I already have?

[03WhiteConv]

I created the playlist and that of course will work for this issue a little cleaner than the genre route. Just seems that the genre should be associated with the individual track like in WMP.

I have albums from artists that contain music that could be considered different genres. I know that I can manually tag a track but that seems cumbersome.

[hakko]

Ideally, I'd like to identify tags per song (to identify and exclude intro's, interludes etc). It's on my TODO list but I haven't gotten there yet. There's a trade-off as information is fetched from last.fm - I looked into in the beginning and decided that albums tags weren't as accurate as artist tags, and they would take three times as long to fetch (if each artist has three albums or so in average). So I went for the combination of artist tags + top tracks and I think it gives a decent radio. (even though I definitely thinks there's room for improvement)

The idea of using genres from file tags has been up before and I'm not a big fan of it. See viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10610 for example

[03WhiteConv]

I see where you're coming from.

The issue really is a structual one from the DB perspective and thats not an easy nut to crack.

This is your product and it is designed around your ideas.

I wonder if this would be possible since the post from your link seemed to indicate that my genre info from the track itself is already in the DB. Instead of making structural changes to the DB, why not do two small things:
1. When building the genre dropdownlist in the db include the user genres in the table or at least display the users genre by concatenating those lists through a query that builds the dropdown. (although this might not really fit into your overall concept)
and/or
2. Provide an option to play music by strict track level genre. This way you don't have to reinvent your concept that the tool is built upon, just add a feature that draws from a different data to present the playlist. In this case if I wanted to play only tracks tagged as alternative and nothing else, I could.

[hakko]

1. The problem is that a lot of downloaded music has bad genre tags. So you only want to take them into account if somebody actually bothered to update their whole library to correct tags. And then you still have the problem of only having one genre per song, and no way to indicate genre weight.

2. I think that will be possible when I've implemented this: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=10955