I recently sucked down all the MP3's off my Empeg so I could do a massive re-tag and reorganization. I did a pretty bad job of how I filled out my tags originally (the FAQ didn't exist way back then ) and I wanted to do some housecleaning on titles, genres, etc. I also wanted to back up all my music in case of a hard drive failure.

So anyway, there have been many posts around here suggesting various ways of organizing one's music. Here's where I'm at right now... Typically my listening falls into one of two basic modes.. Either I want to listen to full albums, or I want to shuffle a bunch of singles of a given genre. So my basic folder organization for the "drag and drop" portion is going to be:

Root
---"Albums"
------Artists (alphabetical)
---------Each artist's albums in chronological order
---"Singles"
------Genres (?)
---------Sub-genres (?)
------------Songs in Artist / Title alphabetical order
---"Playlists"
------Various other mood playlists

So my deal right now is I have difficulty assigning genres to my tracks. I guess I can put songs into my own broad categories that make sense to me, but unless I break the genres down to sub-genres, I can't easily select a collection of songs to fit my mood... "Rock" for instance encompasses so many different types of music... But if I took it to the extreme of using the obscure genres found on the All Music Guide, I'd only have like 4 or 5 songs in each genre.. Right now I have Rock broken down into maybe 10 subcategories (Punk, New Wave, Metal, Glam Rock, Adult Alternative, etc.) but a lot of times songs will fit into two or more of them, or sometimes none at all... I guess I could use links to put songs into multiple genre playlists, but that doesn't help with genre *searches* which can only have one per song... Damn ID3 limitations!

So does anyone around here have any good strategies that work for them? Does everyone pretty much ignore the genre field? It'd be nice to be able to have a type of music in mind and do a quick search without having to set up dozens of meticulously created mood playlists... I'd rather just do most of this using my various MP3 tagging programs which can do this stuff en masse.

Just wondering how people categorize their tunes, if at all...

I say do whatever will make it easier for YOU to find what you want when you want it. If that means putting songs into multiple genre lists so be it. That doesn't have to be affected by what the player's search function can and can't do. Your list structure looks good to me.

Also, there's no limitation in ID3 preventing you from multiple genres per track. As a matter of fact, ID3Tag-It supports adding multiple genres. A lot (most) other software doesn't support this and will only show the first genre (so Tag-It has the ability to order the list).

I was going to make a multi-genre WISH in the forum, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. Thought I'd wait until after the next beta, because it might be more of a post-2.0 feature request.

As for choice of genres? For the reasons you mention, I would avoid the category "Rock" because nothing fits into it as well as it will fit into one of its sub-genres. Just don't make your sub-genres too specific that they will only fit a single artist or a couple of songs. Of course, try not lumping everything into "Alternative Rock" because then you're back at square one.

Bruno

Yeah... Multiple genres are only supported in ID3v2 though... The Genre frame in ID3v2 (TCON frame I believe) is a simple field, but I think the standard is that if you use this field and separate it by null characters, you can have multiple genres. I am now ID3v2-only on all my songs thanks to a quick and dirty Perl script I cooked up which deleted all my V1 tags. So multiple genres per track would be sweet.

Yeah "Alternative" means different things to different people. I never understood that term. This whole music sorting thing is tough! Even breaking down my Rock folder is tough... Then when I get to my Electronic folder it's almost impossible because there are real subtleties that separate some of the subgenres. Yet if I just lump them all together there's no cohesion... Sigh.

If MoodLogic actually did half of what it says it does that'd be great. I can't come up with good categories for half of these songs. Having "tones" or "moods" associated with each song would rule, but it'd take years to enter that kind of stuff manually, and would be too subjective to trust to some service like Moodlogic. Oh well.

Once this is done I'm sure it'll be worth it though. Having an 1100 song "Modern Rock" playlist just wasn't cutting it.

i was having this problem too: there are so many genres with id3 (alternative, alternative rock, classic rock, indie rock, etc.) i kind of gave up on the thing. eventually, i want to assign them the genre that allmusic.com uses. interestingly, they assign a genre, and a style. check them out. i am currently searching for a tool that would auto-retag all my music based on lookups into allmusic.com

good luck
-ted

Well I thought about allmusic and the problem is their genres (they call them styles) go by artist and not by song or even album.. So artists which change over the years or exhibit many styles on an album (most artists do to some extent) are hard to figure out. Plus they list six or seven different styles for many of them, and sometimes none of them really apply in my mind... Then some of them are really obscure styles like "Paisley Underground, " "Frat Rock," or "Bar Bands" which, while I understand the context of the name, I don't really consider genres. Too specific and too obscure, I guess.

But the biggest limitation for me is that they don't get down to the album or song level with their genres. So while allmusic was good for ideas on organizing, I couldn't really work with the way they broke them down.

In any event, I tried to write a little Perl script which gets genres from allmusic, and was relatively successful. Because allmusic's search algorithms *STINK* it depends on your artists being spelled exactly like theirs (including the word "The" is often required, for instance) but it seemed to work okay. Right now it just prints out the genres for each artist comma-separated but I could add a few lines and have it change the genre field... But as I said, allmusic is a little too limited for me at this point.

There's also the Ultimate Band List (http://www.ubl.com) but that's probably not much better than All Music.

rue

Yeah, I wouldn't make my genres too specific. For rock I just have:

-Rock
------------New Rock
------------Old Rock

And that's good enough for me. If I want to listen to rock I grew up listening to and new music just coming out, then I select New Rock. If I want to listen to rock that was before my time, then I select Old Rock.

I don't really care if my genres aren't 'official' or if certain artists don't officially fit into the catagory I've chosen. I just use what makes sense to me.

i am currently searching for a tool that would auto-retag all my music based on lookups into allmusic.com

There are two products which do this. The registered version of MusicMatch will do this in a fully integrated database interface, and Tag&Rename will do it by screen-scraping the Allmusic.com site.

re are two products which do this.

Yeah, but they both stink. Tag & Rename only lets you get information for an entire album and makes you find the info in IE anyway... And MusicMatch won't let you apply only certain fields, so if one of theirs is wrong (and the genre is *always* wrong) you can't help but accept their incorrect genres. Though I didn't know MusicMatch was based on allmusic.com's database... Funny how the search algorithm on allmusic.com stinks, yet it seems to be somewhat okay on MusicMatch. By the time you correct their errors, you're better off looking it up on Allmusic yourself.

The hardest field by far to fill out is the Year field. Genres you can figure out yourself from knowing the song, but the year has to be found online somewhere... Haven't found a real easy way to fill it out just yet, so a lot of my year fields are blank right now. Sometimes it's correct in CDDB/freedb, often it's not.

No magic bullet, it seems.