Improved genre support

[Tim Curtis]

Does your secondary genre tag show up in Audio info for a track?

[fred9000]

yes all my track in my the discography  on my foobar2k are tag with discog   with album artist / album/  genres/ style    , it make   thing so easy to  separate  or find a song  , i must admit i am a little bit over maniac        i have  a lot of track   lol  

what i mean  is if there is a way i can do this in moode also   it would be great  ,   maybe i just did not find it

[Tim Curtis]

Currently you can swap between Genre and Composer for the Genre list This was done quite a while ago to provide a bit more support for Classical collections.

Another tag could be added for example "Style" but the challenge is that the coding is not trivial and so generally there needs to be multiple requests for something like this. I'll add it to the TODO list anyway though and eventually it may get some priority.

Another option is that another dev becomes interested and does the coding :-)

[fred9000]

it would be great , in my collection , i have multiple sub genre ( that i call style like in discog ) for rock , electronic, jazz , for classical composer is great i give you that
i know only 2 program in windows that is support style metadata : foobar2k and jriver also i think musicbee but i never try it

i hope like you say there was a dev that is interested , i can test it

[Tim Curtis]

Actually I might be interested in taking this on myself but I'd need some test data. Zip up 3 albums that contain style tags and PM me a download link.

[TheOldPresbyope]

This current discussion feels like "deja vu all over again" to me. See previous posts scattered throughout the forum by Al, me, et al. At this point, I guess I'll wait to see what is actually on offer.

Generic questions though: what file types (MP3, FLAC, etc.) are being used? What tagging schemes (ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, VORBIS_COMMENT, etc.)? What MPD tags are in play (genre, mood, etc.) and how well do the MPD input plugins map what's in different music-file types to the chosen MPD tags?

Regards,
Kent

[Tim Curtis]

This current discussion feels like "deja vu all over again" to me. See previous posts scattered throughout the forum by Al, me, et al. At this point, I guess I'll wait to see what is actually on offer.

Generic questions though: what file types (MP3, FLAC, etc.) are being used? What tagging schemes (ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, VORBIS_COMMENT, etc.)? What MPD tags are in play (genre, mood, etc.) and how well do the MPD input plugins map what's in different music-file types to the chosen MPD tags?

Regards,
Kent

It's basically just extending the option for which tag to use to populate the Genre list in Tag view. Currently either Genre or Composer can be used but I think the code might allow any tag to be used. I'll have to take a look.

One thing thats a bit puzzling is that MPD has the following list of supported tags https://mpd.readthedocs.io/en/latest/protocol.html#tags yet tags that aren't on the list for example the "style" tag in @fred9000's collection still get indexed.

[TheOldPresbyope]

@Tim Curtis

It's basically just extending the option for which tag to use to populate the Genre list in Tag view. Currently either Genre or Composer can be used but I think the code might allow any tag to be used. I'll have to take a look.

That's what I thought you might have in mind.

The trouble with what we call "tags" (they're actually individual fields in a tag that is stuck one way or another onto an audio file) is that they weren't developed by musicologists. That's particularly obvious with, say, FLAC files, where everything we want is contained in a COMMENT block.

So, problem one: how do we encode desired semantic information in the available tagging schemes such as ID3v2.x, VORBIS_COMMENT, etc.?

Problem two: how do the various MPD plugins which deal with the different music file formats extract the information we encoded?

Problem three: how does MPD crunch the information into its set of "supported" tags?

There is no sense of hierarchical genre representation in any of the tagging schemes AFAIK. One can encode as many GENRE=... tags into a VORBIS_COMMENT as desired, but they are just a bunch of words. Similarly, in ID3v2.3, particular software devs have chosen to honor, say, a forward solidus ("/") as a separator of genre values in the single genre string. Trouble is, different devs have chosen to use different separators. For FLAC files, MPD will return as many GENRE values as are present. For MP3 files, MPD will return the composite GENRE value. (I won't go through the other common schemes. I think some are even more confining.)

There is no sense of "style" tag at all in the schemes I know. One can easily encode STYLE= in a VORBIS_COMMENT but MPD plugins won't know what it is. Similarly, one can encode a user-defined tag for this use in ID3v2.x but MPD plugins won't know what it is. @fred9000 said he was using a sub-genre to be "style".

I haven't bothered to crawl the MPD sources to see what gets mapped to the MPD "mood" tag. I was thinking last night that it might useful. In the files, it could be dealt with as I described above for style.

Just random thoughts. I'm about to leave town for a week. It'll be interesting to see what y'all get up to while I'm away

Regards,
Kent

ETA - Most of the semantics we ascribe to the information in our files is actually imposed by  the software we used. I'll be curious to see what @fred9000''s software has encoded in his files (and whether he uses different formats or if they are all the same format).

[Tim Curtis]

For getting the value of a text tag (as opposed to an image tag) the audio file format only matters to MPD since it's doing the tag/value extraction. Moode only sees what MPD has written to its database.

[fred9000]

almost all my music are in flac , wv   , when you say zip 3 album   ,  it is going to make a big zip file   even   if i chose  16/44.1
you do not mind ?

i don't mp3