Genres

[Keith (BB)]

Hi All,

Having now set up my squeezebox and scanned in all my music, I've
started to look a bit closer at the tags on my music, specifically the
genre. I'm a bit new to this so it may sound daft, but is this field
freeform or is there an "official" list of genres. Looking at some of my
music I have "brit pop", "alternRock","sixties","new age" but to mention
a few. If there is an "official" list how do I find out what genre my
album should be?

Thanks,

Keith

[Simon Still]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 21:22:24 -0000, Keith (BB) <keith (AT) brandybear (DOT) co.uk> wrote:
If there is an
> "official" list how do I find out what genre my album should be?

As i understand it V1 of MP3 tag spec had a pretty restricted list of
genres. V2 made the field freeform and genre tags are generally a
mess. Genre is very much a matter of opinion anyway - do you want,
say, The Velvet Underground, in Rock, Alternative or something like
Sixties?

Do it however you want.

[Pat Farrell]

On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 21:22 +0000, Keith (BB) wrote:
> freeform or is there an "official" list of genres. Looking at some of
> my music I have "brit pop", "alternRock","sixties","new age" but to
> mention a few. If there is an "official" list how do I find out what
> genre my album should be?

As others have said, genre is at best a comment.


And the history is a bit convoluted. For some, check
out http://www.id3.org/ Most important, ID3 tags are really
only applicable to MP3 files. Flag and Ogg get a similar
function from a much more robustly specified set of metatags
see http://flac.sourceforge.net/

The initial ID3 tags were invented by the folks at Winamp
(or some other early MP3 player) and reflected two critical
biases: first, the developers were young and liked rock and rock-like
music and second: there was only room for 64 options.
As a result, the initial WinAmp had about 40 genres, which
had 30 or more selections of rock, grunge, techo, industrial, jungle,
etc and only one classification for all of "classical"

There have been revisions to the id3 format, with more types, and
finally a free form field so you can enter what you want.

As far as I have been able tell, there is no official standards
body for ID3 tags (i.e. no IEEE or IETF, etc.). There are
ID3 "version 2" format specs, with two separate sub-versions
that are only partially interoperable. See
http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt for 2.4 and
http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0.txt for 2.3
There are assorted notes about ID3 v 3 and even some claims of
a version 4, but while I can have google point to
people talking about these versions, I can't find any
site that actually defines them.

Having a single genre on a song is simplistic idea.
It is too subjective to be generally useful.
One of the reasons driving the SlimServer 6.*
effort is to allow more generalized data structure
so you can call a song "rock" and 'classic"
and "head banging" all at once.

Pat


--
Pat pfarrell (AT) pfarrell (DOT) com
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimse...msoftware.html

[Aaron Zinck]

> Having a single genre on a song is simplistic idea.
> It is too subjective to be generally useful.
> One of the reasons driving the SlimServer 6.*
> effort is to allow more generalized data structure
> so you can call a song "rock" and 'classic"
> and "head banging" all at once.


This capability is already available in slimserver (and has been for a long
time). Simply list all the genres you wish using a standard delimiter to
separate them. For example, if you want to use a semicolon as a delimiter
then "classical; romantic" would assign a song to both the classical and
romantic genres. Then just define the delimiter character in Slimserver
under Server Settings -> Behavior.