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Topic: how do you categorise your music collection? (Read 14870 times) previous topic - next topic
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how do you categorise your music collection?

I have a varied CD collection. They range from Beatles, Frank sinatra, u2, patti austin, diana krall, lee ritenour, madonna, eminem, black eyed peas, james taylor and etc.

I suppose I can categorise beatles, u2 and james taylor (which I believe would fall under folk rock) into just "Rock".

but what about the others? how about frank sinatra? how do you differentiate between a pop vs R&B?

I want to categorize them because I want my media center (J River media center) to initially display genre as the top-level option. using artists as the top-level selection makes it very tedious because there would be too many to choose from.

I could use Amazon's categories but that would mean there would be plenty to choose from in the top-level selection.

any ideas?

thank you very much

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #1 –
The way I solved the "some albums fall under multiple genres" issue is such:
1st - Create a list of every genre (and sub genre) you personally would use to describe your albums.
2nd - Assign a unique prime number to each genre.
3rd - Tag every album's genre field with the product of all applicable genres.
  Example:  Skinny Puppy's 1990 classic 'Too Dark Park' has a genre tag value of "353356145", which a quick glance will tell you is 5 * 227 * 433 * 719, ie Rock, Industrial Rock, Industrial Dance, and Nightmare.
4th - Learn to factor large numbers in your head. 
Creature of habit.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #2 –
@Soap

I think you just invented a new genre: Crypto.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #3 –
He, I used that exact prime number system for a photo categorization application some years ago.

As for the initial problem: I'd simply use multiple genre tags for such albums.
Nothing is impossible if you don't need to do it yourself.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Soap on
The way I solved the "some albums fall under multiple genres" issue is such:
1st - Create a list of every genre (and sub genre) you personally would use to describe your albums.
2nd - Assign a unique prime number to each genre.
3rd - Tag every album's genre field with the product of all applicable genres.
  Example:  Skinny Puppy's 1990 classic 'Too Dark Park' has a genre tag value of "353356145", which a quick glance will tell you is 5 * 227 * 433 * 719, ie Rock, Industrial Rock, Industrial Dance, and Nightmare.
4th - Learn to factor large numbers in your head. 
Why not just use Binary? An 8 character binary string would allow 8 personal genre.

Or alternatively, why not use smaller prime numbers, i.e. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, etc....

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #5 –
I don't use genres at all, people get so fussy and cliquey about them it gets tiring and annoying.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #6 –
Quote from: Nick.C on
Or alternatively, why not use smaller prime numbers, i.e. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, etc....

Those are already used.  Of the smaller primes, only 5 is applicable for the example album.

And not binary because in my example I'm apparently already using 128 genres (719 is the 128th prime).



Quote
As for the initial problem: I'd simply use multiple genre tags for such albums.

I don't think that is going to work for the questioner.  Using multiple genre tags is a good solution for many problems, but not this one because it doesn't solve the fundimental problem the OP has:  namely how to create a Goldilocks sorting system.  Not too fine and not to coarse.

Quote
I want to categorize them because I want my media center (J River media center) to initially display genre as the top-level option. using artists as the top-level selection makes it very tedious because there would be too many to choose from.

I could use Amazon's categories but that would mean there would be plenty to choose from in the top-level selection.

So he wants us to demonstrate a genre system which is more fine grained than Amazon's category system (so less entries per genre are visible) yet not as fine grained as the existing Artist tag gives him.

The first solution I see to the OPs wants, and I say this in all seriousness, is for him to decide how many entries he wants in J River Media Center's "top-level selection".
Let us say, for sake of argument, the answer the OP comes up with is "15".  Ok, now you know you have 15 genres to play with, take all your music and try to distribute it evenly into those 15 genres.  I know it sounds silly, but I do not know how else you are going to accomplish your goal of putting the cart before the horse.

The second solution I see is to use the sort tags to break his collection up much like a grade-school encyclopedia set.  'Sting', 'Skinny Puppy', and 'Selena' would all get the "S" sort tag, while 'X-Ray Specs', 'Yellowbeard', and 'Zarniwoop' might all get the "XYZ" sort tag.
Creature of habit.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #7 –
Quote from: probedb on
I don't use genres at all, people get so fussy and cliquey about them it gets tiring and annoying.

I agree (pretty much). I got down to 3 genres: Classical, Jazz and Pop (Pop being everything that isn't Classical or Jazz) -- but even then someone like Nina Simone ... is she Jazz or is she Pop (or rather Soul-Pop-Jazz-Blues-with-occasional-Classical-lilt. I agree it's an impossible task and gets more and more silly with every additional categorisation and subdivision).

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #8 –
What carpman said. I'm retagging a lot of albums, and faced the question with Peggy Lee; I think she's great, but she doesn't fit in my "Pop" category, and some people would be outraged, I guess, to find her under "Jazz."

To OP:

maybe you'd be better to make up some entirely arbitrary categories, that make sense to you, but don't necessarily map onto anyone else's genres. You could do it like, you know, quarks: up, down, strange. Or decades.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #9 –
It depends entirely on how you use genres. I actually do use them: Sometimes I'm in the mood for baroque music, sometimes in the mood for some serialism, or some prog rock, or whatever. My collection's big enough that having those gross levels of categorization does make a difference in how fast I can access stuff.

My usual categorization is <genre> <subgenre>. <genre> is categorized primarily by performing group, not by musical style. So "Rock" is typically "Rock" (because rock is almost always performed in a trio/quartet/quinete/etc and the basics of the instrumentation largely do not change), and "Electronic" obviously makes sense, but in classical, I have "Orchestra", "Chamber", "Keyboard" for solo piano/harpsichord, "Violin" for solo violin, "Choral" for cantatas/oratorios/etc, "Opera", etc.

<subgenre> picks out the specific musical style. For rock this is "Indie" (bleh), "Alternative" for the usual 90s altrock form, "Punk", "Post Punk", "Prog", etc. Beatles would be "British Invasion", "Britpop", "Psychedelic", etc, depending on the album and your particular classification of their early material.

The Chairman should be "Male Vocal Big Band" or something vaguely like that. U2 would be Rock Arena most of the time.

Clearly this level of detail is useless unless you have a few dozen other artists that operate in a similar style in your collection. That's certainly applicable for rock, but not so much for Sinatra.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #10 –
I generally adhere to iTunes genres. My current library contains about 55 albums divided into 12 genres, so the granularity is fairly broad, but still very decent. These genres are Rock, Industrial, Country, Hip-hop and so forth.

My advice would be to come up with a fixed number of genres you'd like to see displayed. If that number is ten, choose ten genres, as broad as you need them to be, but no finer than you need them to be, and get to work tagging (or re-tagging) your library to suit. The idea is to form a "system" based upon your specific needs.

I'm not familiar with J-River Media Center, but would it be possible to sub-sort using a custom tag or another tag, such as the comment tag? This could allow you to sub-sort genres into a "parent" and "child" type relationship (rock genre; punk rock sub-genre) so you get two different levels of granularity. If you can sort via custom tags, the potential options are practically limitless.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #11 –
In all seriousness, my system is similar to Axon's, except I think <mood> is also needed.  I also only subgenre by album, because I only listen to full albums, but I can easily see the justification for labeling track 1 "driving rock" and track 6 "ballad".
Creature of habit.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #12 –
Quote from: Soap on
The second solution I see is to use the sort tags to break his collection up much like a grade-school encyclopedia set.  'Sting', 'Skinny Puppy', and 'Selena' would all get the "S" sort tag, while 'X-Ray Specs', 'Yellowbeard', and 'Zarniwoop' might all get the "XYZ" sort tag.


I'm beginning to see the wisdom in this suggestion. makes it very easy to classify stuff! even my wife can work that out!

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #13 –
I basically agree with Axon and MichaelW ("maybe you'd be better to make up some entirely arbitrary categories, that make sense to you").

Genre to me is a very basic "blunt instrument" filter. My system of music management may well not correspond to other people's but it suits me and I think that is the key. People are more varied and peculiar than any prescribed system of categorisation can cater for.

I will add only that folder names can be another useful way of subcategorisation. For example, in foobar2000 I can do a search like:

classical keyboard -chopin

classical is picked up from the GENRE TAG
keyboard is picked up from the FILE PATH [as it appears in the FOLDER NAME and acts as a sub-genre filter] .. e.g.  "...\bachjs_keyboard_9littlepreludes_bwv0924-0932_gould\*.tak"
-chopin [leaving out Chopin] is picked up from the ARTIST TAG

I think the main question is: "generally by what criteria do I select what I feel like listening to?".
Once you've sorted that out, I think you can create a system that will suit you.

C.
PC = TAK + LossyWAV  ::  Portable = Opus (130)

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #14 –
I only use:

Electronic
Hip-Hop
Industrial
Metal
Pop
Punk
Reggae
Rock
Ska
Soundtrack

with most of "mainstream" music falling into Rock or Pop.
Pop includes all the "soft" genres like R&B, Soul, etc...and Rock the harder, more guitar-based ones.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #15 –
I use a mix of multigenre and words describing the sound of tracks (piano, synth).

In both cases, i try to not use a hierachical system (genres and subgenres and infragenres) but instead an inclusive parallel system. In short, i try to identify "basic influences" of music. For example, i have no psytrance genre and instead give such tracks both, the "psychedelic" and "trance" genre.

Then i give every SINGLE track every matching genre (yes, i do not tag-album specific, but track-specific).

So, my genre fields are a mishmash of various ways to describe the "form" of music tracks.

Then in addition to that, i have an "energy" rating for each track. I intentionally ignore the "speed" (i.e. bpm) of music because it often cannot be determined in a meaningful way with my music. Instead, i only determine how energetic a track is (and with some variable tracks, even that is difficult and results in plain averages). The point of this field is that i can just check if i'm for example in a more laidback mood, and restrict the DB lookup to such tracks.

Personally, i'm aware that regarding mood, i would need at least one additional rating. In laymans terms, how "emotional" or "cold" a track is. But since right now my collection doesn't even have fully complete energy-tagging, i'm saving that work up for when i actually have the time to do that.

The purpose of all this is that i can build playlists with a fb2k facets lookup startrek style, by just telling the machine the characteristics of the music i want.

- Lyx
I am arrogant and I can afford it because I deliver.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #16 –
I'm looking forward to personally analyzing and tagging each of my >30.000 songs individually.

I'm pretty mainstream, but I generally like electronic, dance, trance etc. but also electrorock, rock, metal, r&b, soul... etc. Maybe it's just me, but how would I tag a mainstream dancepop track? In pop, electronic or create a category for dance?

Aqua's (annoying) "Barbie Girl", is tagged as "pop" in last.fm, but really I would think it as more of "dance" or "eurodance" to be fair. So is it it's success that has made it a "pop"-track, because I definitely don't think it would fit along most R&B stuff like Goratrix suggests.

That said, I really think that last.fm's tags are the most appropriate (at least for my collection) when they are used with say the top 3 tags for each song, or maybe based on their ranking with a threshold between the top ranked tags.
Can't wait for a HD-AAC encoder :P

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #17 –
How do you have your CD organized right now on your shelf?  Use that as your starting point and fine tune from there.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #18 –
Quote from: maggior on
How do you have your CD organized right now on your shelf?  Use that as your starting point and fine tune from there.


Brilliant! I wish everybody who computerised systems started from that point (licks wounds, hides scars).

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #19 –
Quote from: probedb on
I don't use genres at all, people get so fussy and cliquey about them it gets tiring and annoying.


seconded
and i have my cds alphabetical by artist    i usually just use album artist\album\track# name
My $.02, may not be in the right currency

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #20 –
Quote from: maggior on
How do you have your CD organized right now on your shelf?  Use that as your starting point and fine tune from there.

Except that CDs can only be physically arranged in three dimensions, two if you confine them to a shelf.
Why, since we have released the shackles of physical media, would we want to continue to use a two dimensional array to sort our collections?

EDIT:  Really only one - but who is counting? 
Creature of habit.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #21 –
> I want to categorize them because I want my media center (J River media center) to initially display
> genre as the top-level option.

I use J River media center too.

You can view tags as places to store descriptive information.  However, if you have a large music collection, it may be more important to first define tags that help you browse your collection and select what you want to play.

I have view schemes by Genre for Classical music, Jazz, Pop, Rock, Musicals and Soundtracks and Folk. 

My view scheme for classical music uses 5 panes with these tags: sub-genre, Composer, Work, Artist and Version.  The Sub_Genre tag has values like Concerto, Piano, Orchestral and Sonata, Piano.  That lets me shorten lists of works by Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven.  I didn't have a pressing need to classify music by period or nationality or intrument in detail.  You might.

My View schemes for other Genres fit my needs for that music.  I spent about 3 months selecting tools for ripping CDs, editing tags and playing music.  (J. River for all 3 needs in the end.)  I created a small library and experimented with tools and with ways to use tags.  I'd suggest that you do the same.

J. River Media Center allows you create whatever tags and custom database fields you like.  It's up to you to think out what fits for you.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #22 –
Quote from: Soap on
SNIP
Except that CDs can only be physically arranged in three dimensions, two if you confine them to a shelf.
Why, since we have released the shackles of physical media, would we want to continue to use a two dimensional array to sort our collections?
SNIP


Actually, I think that is a real question. It depends on whether we make choices on what sort of music we want to listen to by locating a point in a multidimensional space, or by working down (? up) a decision tree. I think I do a bit of both, but most probably do the linear branching thing mostly. Probably, other people do it differently. But given that 7 plus or minus 2 is a magic number in psychology, OP is pretty certainly sound in desiring a limited number of top-level choices.

So, while you wouldn't want to *replicate* a physical organisation in the logical organisation of your collection, it is quite likely a good starting point to define how an individual actually thinks.

Perhaps the only rule is that you always need a Miscellaneous category.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #23 –
Quote from: MichaelW on
So, while you wouldn't want to *replicate* a physical organisation in the logical organisation of your collection, it is quite likely a good starting point to define how an individual actually thinks.


Exactly - a starting point.  Yeah, you can get really fancy with the organization, but you have to start someplace.  Otherwise, you end up in "analysis paralysis" and will never get to listen to your digitized music.  As with any design - you usually end up throwing the first one (usually a prototype) away.

how do you categorise your music collection?

Reply #24 –
Quote from: Soap on
Example:  Skinny Puppy's 1990 classic 'Too Dark Park' has a genre tag value of "353356145", which a quick glance will tell you is 5 * 227 * 433 * 719, ie Rock, Industrial Rock, Industrial Dance, and Nightmare.
4th - Learn to factor large numbers in your head. 

How this system is different from just a long string of concatenated genres in alphabetical order with leading and trailing separator, i.e. something like
'Industrial Dance','Industrial Rock','Nightmare','Rock'
?
You can sort on that genre string and filter on it's substrings (with 's) then.