Multiple Genre Tag Support

[terrence1019]

Is it possible to support multiple genres for songs,

EXAMPLE:

Song A could have for Genre: Electronic; House; Chillout

[karashata]

It would seem it is possible to list more than one genre in the genre tag, but it's not possible to have separate genre tags for each genre.

[bascule]

It would seem it is possible to list more than one genre in the genre tag...

That's possible in the file itself and, although I believe some applications support its use (Foobar?), I don't think Rockbox does.

this slighty old post refers: http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=5796.0

[seani]

Is it possible to support multiple genres for songs,

EXAMPLE:

Song A could have for Genre: Electronic; House; Chillout

What would you do with the genre when it's in there?

If you just wanted to pull out any tracks that you've categorised with a particular genre, you can write a custome filter line.

So for instance, if one tracks genre track contains "Electronic;Chillout" and another contains "Electronic;House" you can get both by searching for "Electronic;"

IIRC there are a couple of "spare" ID tag you could use for this. I had a go at suggesting something similar here a few posts in:

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=11010.msg83529#msg83529

[pabouk]

What would you do with the genre when it's in there?
...
So for instance, if one tracks genre track contains "Electronic;Chillout" and another contains "Electronic;House" you can get both by searching for "Electronic;"

In the list of genres I would like to see:
- Chillout
- Electronic
- House
Unfortunately your example is not the best one because Chillout and House are sub-genres of Electronic and I would consider listing Electronic as redundant. I think that more useful use will be for songs of mixed genres like World and Electronic etc.

[seani]

What would you do with the genre when it's in there?
...
So for instance, if one tracks genre track contains "Electronic;Chillout" and another contains "Electronic;House" you can get both by searching for "Electronic;"

In the list of genres I would like to see:
- Chillout
- Electronic
- House
Unfortunately your example is not the best one because Chillout and House are sub-genres of Electronic and I would consider listing Electronic as redundant. I think that more useful use will be for songs of mixed genres like World and Electronic etc.

Well the exact categorisation is up to you - personally I don't think in terms of sub-genres, more like attributes each song has - a bit electronic, a bit world etc.

You can do what you indicate here by creating three filters and these filters can be combined with the other "standard" tags, there are examples in the documentation for tagnavi syntax:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DataBase

The limitation is that you would have to manually add a menu entry for each sub-genre you wanted to search on, i.e. if you decided to add a "workout" sub-genre to the list, you'd need to cut-and-paste a line into your tagnavi file to filter on that value.

This is in contrast to the builtin tags where Rockbox will automatically present you with a list of possible values.

Also note that you can get a filter to prompt you for a specific value to filter on, but entering the value on most players is a slow process.

Still, adding new filter lines is a fairly rapid process and only needs to be done occasionally.

[pabouk]

You can do what you indicate here by creating three filters and these filters can be combined with the other "standard" tags, there are examples in the documentation for tagnavi syntax:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DataBase

The limitation is that you would have to manually add a menu entry for each sub-genre you wanted to search on, i.e. if you decided to add a "workout" sub-genre to the list, you'd need to cut-and-paste a line into your tagnavi file to filter on that value.

Yes, that is possible but I think that terrence1019 was not asking for a solution where you have to manually add every possible genre. Expected is an automatically created list of all genres actually contained it the tags. Also is not there a limitation on the tagnavi.conf size?

Still, adding new filter lines is a fairly rapid process and only needs to be done occasionally.

No, I do not agree. That is not always rapid and that is not what a normal user wants. We should not expect normal users to modify tagnavi.config.

I could imagine a workaround where the filters would be created automatically after database update. For this the kernel would need only a modification to run a plugin after the database update finishes but that is not easy as the DB update runs in the background.

[seani]

You can do what you indicate here by creating three filters and these filters can be combined with the other "standard" tags, there are examples in the documentation for tagnavi syntax:

http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DataBase

The limitation is that you would have to manually add a menu entry for each sub-genre you wanted to search on, i.e. if you decided to add a "workout" sub-genre to the list, you'd need to cut-and-paste a line into your tagnavi file to filter on that value.

Yes, that is possible but I think that terrence1019 was not asking for a solution where you have to manually add every possible genre. Expected is an automatically created list of all genres actually contained it the tags. Also is not there a limitation on the tagnavi.conf size?

Still, adding new filter lines is a fairly rapid process and only needs to be done occasionally.

No, I do not agree. That is not always rapid and that is not what a normal user wants. We should not expect normal users to modify tagnavi.config.

I could imagine a workaround where the filters would be created automatically after database update. For this the kernel would need only a modification to run a plugin after the database update finishes but that is not easy as the DB update runs in the background.

Yes I understand what the ideal is, and I say as much in the previous posts.

I think people opting out of the standard firmware and installing RockBox distinguishes them from "normal" users anyway, not that I'd claim to have a definitive handle on what a "normal" user is.

Personally I think cutting and pasting a line isn't difficult when there's an example. YMMV :-)

[venceremo]

I'd like to say that I'd really like to see this feature too!!!
For this reason I'd like to explain the advantages I see in the feature of multiple genres shortly...


I'm using the iPod classic 160 GB. In order to overview this relative big archive multiple genre tags would be a huge help. Imagine for instants:

Eric Clapon played in a lot of Bands / "Artists". Those Bans played quite different genres, so some of them could be named "Blues" some "Blues Rock" or "Unplugged".
Sorting all Bands Clapton played in by decade would be great as well ("60ties", "70ties", "80ties"...) !
Being able to add to those tracks the genre tag "Clapton", too, would make it very easy to have everything Clapton did in one genre where you could easily choose from actually different artists (such as "Cream" "Derek and the Dominos" John Mayalls Bluesbreakers" "Clapton, Eric", or Claptons features on various albums such as "Tribute to George Harrison"  ... ).

As terrence 1019 said, many artists could be subsorted in the way of: "Metal" and "British" at the same time. "electronic" at the same time as "Tripop" or Chillout".



Multiple genre tags would make it definitely easier to find the right music in the right time!!!

I would love it to see this feature!!!

[sideral]

I agree that having database views showing separately each tag occurring in multivalued tags would be nice.

I recently stumbled over the Rockbox Database Manager tool at http://rbdb.sourceforge.net/ which implements a kludge to get this behavior: It replicates each entry in the DB's master index for each combination of separate values (Track 1/Blues, Track 1/Blues Rock, Track 1/Unplugged…) and uses tagnavi.config magic to filter out the unwanted duplicates in each database view.

Caveats:
* I couldn't get this tool to run with my version of Python on Linux.
* The tool is unmaintained and would have to be ported to the current DB binary format.

[siggboy]

I'm trying to revive this.

This would be a very useful feature. In my humble opinion, single genres are not very useful, because in most cases specifying a single genre just does not adequately describe most songs.  It is then rather difficult to use genres for a search (or filter) in a meaningful way.  (Ex.: many songs qualify as "80s", and this would be a reasonable filter setting, but all of these songs would have other specific ways of describing themselves, maybe "pop" or "new wave", you name it.)  Music journalists very often also do not restrict themselves to give one specific genre for albums they review.

To put it another way: it is very powerful to tag the music, more or less freely; sites such as last.fm demonstrate how well this works. It is not very useful to try to shove titles into one specific category -- unless one already deals with a narrowed down selection, maybe classical music or audio books.

Anyways, having Rockbox using all tags (i.e. "genres") that it finds in a song would be very useful and it would make it possible to create playlists very similar to what happens when you give a "tag" as input on last.fm.

Mind you, MusicBrainz Picard (their cross-platform tagger) does have a plugin which can retrieve tags from last.fm and apply them to your music collection as multiple genres.  I would very much like to be able to use this nice feature with Rockbox.

So please, give us multi-genre support.

Or is it just too difficult to implement, maybe for database-related reasons?

(Oh, and no, I don't want to have to use, possibly ugly, workarounds or external database munging in order to emulate such a feature.  The DB indexer of Rockbox should support it out-of-the-box.)

[Matmat]

Trying to revive this.

Having Genres as tags was a big motivation for me for switching to RockBox, for the reasons aforementioned. I'm quite disappointed!

Is it technically too problematic to implement?

Also, this is mysterious: https://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/5035     Björn Stenberg (the founder, right?) closed this topic as "fixed" but it is not! Many people want this!

In any case, thanks to all the developers for making a great OS, despite this!

[Bilgus]

This lua script might be helpful for someone

TagNavCustomizer:
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,52362.0.html