Song Genre's

[Minwah]

[rant]
Why are these nearly always wrong from the info providers used in Media Player etc.?

And why are the tracknames wrong a good percentage of the time?

It really annoys me!! 
[/rant]

[darthbane2k]

[rant]
Why are these nearly always wrong from the info providers used in Media Player etc.?

And why are the tracknames wrong a good percentage of the time?

It really annoys me!!

[Barry Barcrest]

I tend to find that genres are a little bit subjective. Take OASIS for instance, these are often refered to Rock, Indie or Britpop. Whilst by no stretch could they be folk there are a few genre overlaps and it appears to make things easy they tend to just label most things using 1 or 2 of the common genres.

It is actually so bad i gave up using genres all together as it was so tough to decide what actually should be the correct genre. I have seen this on a popular pub jukebox where it sorts them by genre, 9 times out of 10 they will not be where you expect them to be and this is compounded by it only using up to about 10 genres. The real fix would be to have multiple genres as music does tend to cover 1 or 2 genres after all nu metal for example is also rock. Maybe the sub genres should be in a second ID3 frame?

[Chris]

Maybe the sub genres should be in a second ID3 frame?

If I remember right, the spec says that the genre tag can have multiple entries separated by semicolons.  I'll have to look it up to be sure about the separator...

[Silver]

I find anything apart from Track number/title/artist/Album title to be unreliable. Album artist is handy if correct.

When I've asked for/looked for software that can sort by genre, or have a genre menu, its actually nothing to do with the genre that are in the tags, but the genre I would place them in. Ie basically its just a way of splitting up my database in managable chunks.

For example if I have loads of Dance tracks which to be honest I don't really want coming out at home, I could stick them all in a genre (or just mass tag them easily) so they only come up when I want.

Of course the same effect could be achieved by managing the database, or having mulitple databases, but I figure its much easier just using tags already present that would be no hassle to read. I hope....