About Audio Metadata (ID3-Tags & co.)

[exhuma.twn]

Just a quick thought on this subject.
I like having clean metadata for my audio files in order to make life easier for software/hardware parsing/reading that data (Media Libraries, MP3-Players, semantic web(?), etc etc)
But in my opinion tags which are usually out there are useless in one point. And that is "Genre"! I personally like to click on a button in my library to load all "Rock" songs or whatever I feel like at that moment. But as it seems nobody seems able to put sensible data into that field. You generally end up having one genre per band, which is pretty useless. Yes, you could simply fix that for your own taste. But that would not really help, as generally the field "genre" is simply too vague.
Having a look on AMG one can see that they only have a handful of genres on their site. Keeping to that scheme, you are faced with one obvious problem. Not everybody has the same perception of rock. And if you have a look into the rock category you actually get an overwhelming choice of styles (to get access to that you unfortunately have to register. spamgourmet is your friend ).
When tagging my music-collection, I used Tag&Rename (on windows) which get all infos from AMG. So it also updated the genre with AMG's genre field, which in my case was nearly _always_ "Rock". So now I have everything nicely categorized in an overviewable set of genres, but my genre "Rock" is a mess.
When selecting to play "Rock" music, and then shuffle my playlist I usually ending up having "Alanis Morisette" coming right after "Blind Guardian" and then maybe after that "Cat Power" and somewhere in between I might get some "Eels" as well.
If you know those bands, You see that having that kind of mixed-up playlist is not really nice to listen to. Especially if you feel like listening to a particular style of music, let's say "Progressive Rock" or so.

Having said all that, my point is, would it not be nice having more than one field for genre? Or even one "genre" field, and one or more "style" fields. And as afaik ID3v2 appends the tags to the audio-file (instead of prepending as with ID3v1), MP3's now have the possibility to add as many tags as wanted to files as well. This opens up the opportunity to do such things. I even had the idea to write some kind of tagger that does just that (by maybe getting infos from wikipedia about the different styles, but as my studies are becoming quite tough these days, I simply don't have the time to do that.

Am I the only one having that opinion, or are there people out there sharing my thoughts ?

[khiloa]

Any kind of tags that actually tell you something about the music are pretty good. So, a yes from me.

[NME]

No, it is virtually impossible to keep a consistent genre-index because there are no clear definitions.
_________________
f# that.

[Lovechild]

Genre is an unneeded field anyways, if we add more and more what do we prove - that no two pieces of music are identical, nor are all albums really clasifiable as one genre.

No I think we should remove the genre field.

[Duty]

There's a "Progressive Rock" genre in the standard... not the format's fault if Tag&Rename isn't intelligent enough to file things there.

[exhuma.twn]