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Wednesday 4 June 2008

Jaikoz roundtrip processing of genres

I now have Jaikoz retrieving tags as genres from Musicbrainz, but not only that it can submit genres back to Musicbrainz. This means you can easily help build the Musicbrainz folksonomy, and you can use Musicbrainz to backup genres for your tracks. With a little bit of fiddling around it to easily tag your tracks with non genre information - such as the 'owned' tag.

The retrieve genres algorithm is as follows:
Get all tags for track
If any exist strip out any one we dont want using configurable blacklist
Favour tags that match Winamps genre list
If there are multiple matches pick the most popular tag one
If there are no tags that match Winamps genre list pick the most popular
If there are no matching tags repeat at release level.
If there are no matching tags repeat at artist level.

Only one genre is picked at the moment because most media players and audio formats only support a single genre so adding multiple genres doesnt seem to help much, but if you disagree let me know.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So I presume "retrieve genres" will be a feature in an upcoming release.

Your implementation sounds logical, but it will be quite a bit of work to get anything useful out of it. First of all, MusicBrainz tags are very hit or miss. Most tracks and releases aren't tagged, and artist tags can be unrepresentative. The most popular tag for Neil Young is Canadian, for example. Even if the filters eliminate that, the rest of his albums aren't all country or folk or rock. Over time, I guess, tags should get more specific. Is MusicBrainz making a push to get more contributions in this area? Will there be any style guidance?

Personally, I use the grouping field to hold multiple styles/subgenres. You might consider letting Jaikoz use the most popular MB tag as a Genre, and dumping all of them to some other field.

Paul Taylor said...

At the moment MB tags is a bit sparse because the only way to add them is through the Web, but as people start submitting their collections from tools like Jaikoz the siuation should rapidly improve. There is little Style guidance from MB at the moment, but they are open to suggestions (but not rules).

Re:Grouping idea, yes i could do that do you know of any tools that currently grouping field in this way.

Anonymous said...

So that last bit is a little garbled. Good to see it's not just Americans who mangle the Queen's English! ;-)

I use grouping for music style, but the major (intended?) use seems to be for collection subtitles, e.g., Dick's Pick's vol. 32. I don't know of any tools that can or do parse titles or genres and put them there. Anything you come up with would beat manual cut & paste, my current method.

A good thing is that the Grouping field is searchable in itunes and can also be used as a criterion in contructing smart playlists.

Anonymous said...

yeah, and, about guidance on tags....

I just want to know if the preferred form is "Alt Punk", "Alt.Punk", "Alternative Punk", etc. Open submissions will give all of the above. MB have come up with fairly consistent rules on capitalization and the like.

Paul Taylor said...

Personally I prefer Alt Punk, because its concise - I don't see adding the . adds anything. MB Rules don't apply to tags and I think a consensus is only going to be reached over time.

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