Re: Categorizing music by genre
Reply #5 – 2021-12-06 20:02:51
Genre is a nightmare. This. Either follow Porcus' advice and live with what external taggers and artists throw at you, or: develop your very own taxonomy. I have both experimented with hierarchical (10 broad genres à la allmusic [Classical, Pop, Rock, ...] + 60-70 fine style tags, most of them just more granular genres [Vocal Pop, Hard Rock, Opera] but also special notifiers [Instrumental, Orchestral, Vocal] that span genres) and broad taxonomies. The hierarchical model was reasonable to maintain, as I only hand-sanitized the 10 broad categories, whereas the style taxonomy could grow a little untidy at times. All in all the cost-benefit ratio of maintaining such a tree did not cut it. My current iteration on the genre tag aims to allow for directory browsing and consists of over 60 handcrafted genres that fit my library, so that each folder has <100 albums in each. I manually clustered similar albums and only then determined the label. Finally I tagged all files according to those clusters. To give you an idea what those labels look for me (containing between 2 and 60 albums each): Acid Jazz Dubstep Indie Rock Progressive Rock Alternative Rock Easy Listening Industrial Punk Ambiance Electro Instrumental Experimental R&B Ambient Electro Acoustic Instrumental Hip Hop Rap Big Beat Euro House Instrumental Rock Reggae Blues Exotic Jazz Rock Chanson Folk Metal Ska Chiptune Folk Metal Metalcore Soul Cinematic Funk Minimal Techno Swing Classic Rock Garage Rock Mix Symphonic Metal Classical Glitch Modern Classical Synthpop Country Glockenspiel Nu Metal Synthwave Dance Hard Rock Pop Tech House Darkwave Hip Hop Pop Rock Techno Disco House Post Hardcore Traditional Downtempo IDM Post Pop Trance Drum'n Bass Indie Acoustic Post Rock Trip Hop Dub Indie Pop Progressive Metal Vocal Pop
With that, the file name pattern genre/album artist - album [year]/d.nn. title.ext becomes pretty browsable, even when I have only file system access.