Posted by seani on 12/16/05 23:56

On Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:30:40 +0000, dadiOH wrote:

> Mike Archer wrote:
>
>> My biggest gripe with the genre tag is that I can only assign one genre
>> to each MP3.
>
> Man, do *I* agree. Tags are a wonderful thing - and I'm grateful to the
> creators of same - but those creators screwed up big time with genres.
> Take v1 tags for example...
>
> One byte for a genre number. That gives the potentiality of 256 genres.
> They didn't use all (thankfully!) but among them they included such
> useful genres as "Porn Groove" and "Polsk Punk". I have no idea what
> those are but I guarantee I'll never use them; yet, I have to wade
> through them.
>
> How much better it could have been...keep the chintzy one byte but use 4
> bits for a main genre (there could be 16) and 4 bits for a sub-genre.
> That way each of the 16 main genres could have 16 sub-catagories.
>
> Too late now <sigh>
>
>
I'd have to say that I think even that approach is unlikely to keep many
people happy.

Genre is such a subjective matter that any attempt to pin them down is
doomed to failure: one man's hardcore is another man's easy listening.

Rather than a fixed set of genres, I'd just love to see more support in
portable devices for variable length fields with user-defined keywords.
That way we can get exactly the breakdown we want.

You'd keep the standard Artist/Album/Year tags and these can, in the
majority of cases, be stated in an unambiguous manner; More or less
*objective* information about a track.

A set of user defined searchable keywords would allow the purely
*subjective* information to be stored. The fact that these keywords may be
"genres" would be neither here nor there: they're simply a method by which
we can randomly classify music according to our own needs and opinions.

There are plenty of PC based players that allow this sort of search
(Amarok on Linux excels for instance), but no support as far as I can tell
for portable keyboardless devices. Not actually as difficult as it sounds
providing the user-defined keyword list can be suitably processed.


One example method I tried to push for on the Karma before Rio went pop
goes as follows:


Take the following lists of keywords. Each list may be attached to one
or more tracks:

"jazz"
"modern jazz"
"electronic jazz"
"electronic ambient"
"dark ambient"
"dark metal"

My navigation would be through a set of nested choices:


1) Present a list of unique keywords, split by initial letter.

a
ambient
(tracks where keyword "ambient" is present)
d
dark
(tracks where keyword "dark" is present)
e
electronic
(tracks where keyword "electronic" is present)
j
jazz
(tracks where keyword "jazz" is present)
m
modern
(tracks where keyword "modern" is present)


2) At each level you have two choices: browse the list of tracks matching
that keyword set, or continue to filter by other keywords.


3) When a further keyword is selected, repeat the step at 1).

As an
example, if further keywords for "jazz" is selected, the second level
selection looks like this:

[jazz]
e
electronic
(tracks where keywords "jazz" and "electronic" are present)
m
modern
(tracks where keywords "jazz" and "modern" are present)


or if "ambient" is selected

[ambient]
d
dark
(tracks where keywords "ambient" and "dark" are present)

e
electronic
(tracks where keywords "ambient" and "electronic" are present)


4) Repeat for as many levels as necessary.


This would allow classification in any style anyone felt necessary.
Numeric fields such as BPM would need a bit of thought, perhaps just
looking for any keyword that begins with numeric characters, and treating
the numeric portion as a range value

Given
30bpm
200bpm

allow sorting and classification based on the "30" and "200" portions,
perhaps with a "bpm" to level selection.


Pretty trivial to implement PC side, probably a bit of preprocessing
required to support on a portable device.

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