Artist genre

[RasKafka]

1) This seems like it would be such a fundamental option, that I am guessing that I am missing something in the settings (there are a lot). If I go to an artist, I click on the "three dot" menu icon and what I would intuitively expect is the option to choose (or assign) a genre for the artist. A genre that would then override any inconsistencies down through their catalog of albums and songs (like when a band of one genre is the anomaly on a soundtrack dominated by another genre). 

2) while I figure that the above option is just flipping a switch in my settings, this second (and third) part(s) are me wondering how something related to artist genre would work. For an example, if I have all Bob Marley as reggae, what would happen if I imported Marley tracks from sources that have the songs/albums miscategorized as a different genre? Would they automatically be corrected when they are imported during the next rescan? Or would I have to go back and again assign reggae as the genre of Bob Marley?

3) Sticking with Marley, there are many "dub" versions of his songs and dub is a very distinct subgenre in reggae. So I would manually add a secondary (sub) genre, so it would be entered as:"reggae//dub" So let's say that I started with 2 Bob Marley albums and I set Marley's artist genre to reggae and then add dub to ~10% of the song genres on each album. What would happen to those 10% of songs that were reading as "reggae//dub" if a few months later I realized that I had imported Marley tracks from various sources that had incorrect genres assigned, which may (depending on the answer to question 2) require me to run the artist genre again? Would it change all reggae//dub tracks to simply "reggae," or would it recognize that these songs already have the correct genre (just with an additional genre added)? 

Sorry if this isn't clear, I can explain further, if needed. I have worked most of my life in music, which later evolved into integrity analysis of databases as the industry shifted on line. Poweramp seems like a perfect player for me, but I just need to figure out some of the nuances of it's various functions. 

Peace, 

Ras

[blaubär]

54 minutes ago, RasKafka said:

If I go to an artist, I click on the "three dot" menu icon and what I would intuitively expect is the option to choose (or assign) a genre for the artist. A genre that would then override any inconsistencies down through their catalog of albums and songs (like when a band of one genre is the anomaly on a soundtrack dominated by another genre).  

While there are surely artists whose whole opus can be described by a single genre, e.g. AC/DC's "simple rock and roll", this isn't true for all artists. I even think that most artists  use more than one genre. Take for example Marvin Gaye, the wikipedia attributes his music to the following genres :
R&B
soul
psychedelic soul
funk
jazz
pop

So I think it is a good idea to use the genre tag per song.

[w3wilkes]

I don't see this to be as fundamental as you suggest. I've not seen this type of functionality elsewhere. Admittedly I may be in the minority, but my main music library is maintained on my PC and the music on my phone is just copies from the PC. The Genre tag is a track level tag and is ultimately the responsibility of the user as is the case with all tags. How would you propose to handle artists that change Genre's like Steven Tyler who has both Rock and Country hits (and he's not the only artist that does multiple Genres)? There's also the issue of compilations that may include tracks of multiple Artists / Genres. In my case I verify tags on my PC when I rip or download music and if I need a mass change or change of a particular artists album that I have multiple albums by that artist I use MP3Tag for that purpose, it's great for mass changes as well as changes to individual tracks.

[andrewilley]

Genre is an embedded tag (or several tags) within a music file that applies to just that specific song, not to a whole album and definitely not to an entire artist's repertoire. For example, Meatloaf's poignant piano, strings & choral-backed ballad "Heaven Can Wait" would hardly have the same genre tag as "Bat Out of Hell", yet they are on the same album.

Andre

[RasKafka]

On 1/18/2019 at 12:52 PM, blaubär said:

While there are surely artists whose whole opus can be described by a single genre, e.g. AC/DC's "simple rock and roll", this isn't true for all artists. I even think that most artists  use more than one genre. Take for example Marvin Gaye, the wikipedia attributes his music to the following genres :
R&B
soul
psychedelic soul
funk
jazz
pop

So I think it is a good idea to use the genre tag per song.

Probably upwards of 95% of artists really do only belong in one genre. Very few are truly diverse catalogs that extend beyond a single genre. An obvious example of an artist who has excessively crossed genres would be John Zorn. In the music industry, even for people who had previously never heard of Zorn, eventually became aware of him simply because of the issues that came up about what genre he was. It was much more of an issue when dealing with physical product in record stores. 

But your Marvin Gaye example shows perfectly, the issue that crops up when trying to make a coherent database for the user. as amazing as Marvin Gaye was, he wasn't stylistically diverse. He fits only in one genre, but each person may use anyone of those terms to describe the overall genre that he would fit in; R&B or soul being the most commonly used terms. But the problem is, that where some level of uniformity is required in the end users database, to get the most out of the player, that may not be the case for those who created the various source databases that are being imported. 

So for Marvin Gaye, I would put him in the genre of soul. But if I also thought that "What's Going On" was a good album of his to get stoned to, I might put a secondary (sub) genre of "psychedelic soul," just as I mentioned the secondary genre of "dub" following only some songs (or albums) in the main genre of reggae. 

[blaubär]

11 minutes ago, RasKafka said:

Probably upwards of 95% of artists really do only belong in one genre. Very few are truly diverse catalogs that extend beyond a single genre. An obvious example of an artist who has excessively crossed genres would be John Zorn. In the music industry, even for people who had previously never heard of Zorn, eventually became aware of him simply because of the issues that came up about what genre he was. It was much more of an issue when dealing with physical product in record stores. 

But your Marvin Gaye example shows perfectly, the issue that crops up when trying to make a coherent database for the user. as amazing as Marvin Gaye was, he wasn't stylistically diverse. He fits only in one genre, but each person may use anyone of those terms to describe the overall genre that he would fit in; R&B or soul being the most commonly used terms. But the problem is, that where some level of uniformity is required in the end users database, to get the most out of the player, that may not be the case for those who created the various source databases that are being imported. 

So for Marvin Gaye, I would put him in the genre of soul. But if I also thought that "What's Going On" was a good album of his to get stoned to, I might put a secondary (sub) genre of "psychedelic soul," just as I mentioned the secondary genre of "dub" following only some songs (or albums) in the main genre of reggae. 

Ok, if you want to see / live / hear it that way, that's fine for me.

The tags a track-specific, and that's not PowerAmps's decision. So you need a tag editing tool to implement that.

The question is : is this something that could be expected of a music player ? I think not.

So I suggest you shift your proposal to "Feature Requests", say as "Add extended tag editing functionality to Poweramp"

[RasKafka]

On 1/18/2019 at 12:57 PM, w3wilkes said:

I don't see this to be as fundamental as you suggest. I've not seen this type of functionality elsewhere. Admittedly I may be in the minority, but my main music library is maintained on my PC and the music on my phone is just copies from the PC. The Genre tag is a track level tag and is ultimately the responsibility of the user as is the case with all tags. How would you propose to handle artists that change Genre's like Steven Tyler who has both Rock and Country hits (and he's not the only artist that does multiple Genres)? There's also the issue of compilations that may include tracks of multiple Artists / Genres. In my case I verify tags on my PC when I rip or download music and if I need a mass change or change of a particular artists album that I have multiple albums by that artist I use MP3Tag for that purpose, it's great for mass changes as well as changes to individual tracks.

I am guessing that my question wasn't clear enough, so I will bullet point the relevant stuff that relates to your points. 

1) Steven Tyler has only released one album and it was country. That is really no different than Darius Rucker's career as a country artist outside of Hootie & the Blowfish. The point that I think that you may have been trying to make was when an artist (band or individual) changes musical paths in their career (note: there was no previous path for a Steven Tyler solo career). A better example of that would be Ray Charles, who is generally concidered an R&B artist, but also released some country albums. But the fact that we are stretching ourselves to come up with anomalies, further proves that these are the exceptions that don't follow the general "rule," that most artists are really fit in one genre. 

2) those compilations that you mention are exactly what I was talking about when I referred to a soundtrack that may get classified in a particular genre, because the majority of the music featured may be in that one genre. Which is exactly why the ability to assign a predominant genre to an artist, that then fills in at the album and song level, is important. 

And you are going to have to trust me that in every "big boy" database, artists and albums are assigned a dominant genre. I worked in music for most of my life and on database development and integrity, specifically, for the last 25 years. As the transition to public facing databases came along in the mid 90's, I worked with the majority of distributors, importers, exporters, labels and even major retailers. My first major retail database job was Amazon, when they first expanded from being a book seller and added music as their second product line. And what I am asking about on the Poweramp player is almost identical to what retailers deal with, when they integrate databases from hundreds of suppliers, to have one coherent database for the end user. That is why I now refer to it as "fundamental." 25+ years ago, it was pretty far from fundamental, when we had to create it, but in 2019, anybody doing anything with a music database, this has to be in the first few discussions regarding "now how are we going to make this work." 

[blaubär]

7 minutes ago, RasKafka said:

And what I am asking about on the Poweramp player is almost identical to what retailers deal with, when they integrate databases from hundreds of suppliers, to have one coherent database for the end user. That is why I now refer to it as "fundamental."

So you want to add a new Tag, lets call it "Artist Genre", and edit all the tags of all your songs accordingly , and let Poweramp use it as a category ? Why would you want to do the editing with Poweramp ? A tag editor already can do that. Your request would be something like "enable Poweramp to use a customizable tag as category".

Or do you want to implement a database, let's say a relational one, that defines genres, artist's and albums with 1:n relationships and without the need to define a genre per track ? That would surely be outside of the scope of a music player.

[RasKafka]

On 1/18/2019 at 2:27 PM, andrewilley said:

Genre is an embedded tag (or several tags) within a music file that applies to just that specific song, not to a whole album and definitely not to an entire artist's repertoire. For example, Meatloaf's poignant piano, strings & choral-backed ballad "Heaven Can Wait" would hardly have the same genre tag as "Bat Out of Hell", yet they are on the same album.

Andre

Sorry, but no. I can't really go through it all again, so just look at my notes on the past two people who replied. 

And I appreciate everybody's opinions and personal understandings about how they think that databases work, but you have to trust me when I say that I probably have more years under my belt with databases within the music industry that may even exceed the average age of power amp users. And I am talking about databases as they progressed from "point of sale" packages in record stores, to ushering in databases to be used for on-line retail, to digital sales, etc. If anybody has experience with databases that do not have genre tags at the artist and album levels (as well as songs), they simply aren't very sophisticated databases. 

But I do know that when I pull tracks in from some databases, it is this exact lacking that the very simple genre assignments at the artist level, takes care of. If I call Sonic Youth "punk" and it then assigns "punk as the main genre for all Sonic Youth albums and songs, then what was lacking and/or grossly miscategorized in these sloppy databases that users can import music from. 

[RasKafka]

46 minutes ago, blaubär said:

Ok, if you want to see / live / hear it that way, that's fine for me.

The tags a track-specific, and that's not PowerAmps's decision. So you need a tag editing tool to implement that.

The question is : is this something that could be expected of a music player ? I think not.

So I suggest you shift your proposal to "Feature Requests", say as "Add extended tag editing functionality to Poweramp"

Which is fine, but my original question was to find out where the feature was, but this is the first reply from anybody that leads me to believe that the feature doesn't currently exist. At worst, all that I can be faulted with is seeing such a feature intensive player and pressuming that a fairly simple and rudimentary (in the database world) function was in there somewhere. 

Thanks for the redirect to feature suggestions. I would have gone there first, if I really didn't think that it had to already be in there. 

Think of it this way. Obviously, tag editing is a function within the player. So if I have a database of 100,000 songs, across 10,000 albums, by 1000 artists; what I am referring to is dealing with the tag editing on the artist level, to then trickle down automatically to the albums and songs of that artist. Then just clean up the handful of anomalies. What everybody else keeps saying is to do it manually across 100,000 songs, which still would leave the albums and artists to also be manually tagged. Personally, I would rather run through 1000 genre tags, than 111,000 genre tags. I don't really see that as a "six of one, a half dozen of the other" equivalence. 

[RasKafka]

33 minutes ago, blaubär said:

So you want to add a new Tag, lets call it "Artist Genre", and edit all the tags of all your songs accordingly , and let Poweramp use it as a category ? Why would you want to do the editing with Poweramp ? A tag editor already can do that. Your request would be something like "enable Poweramp to use a customizable tag as category".

Or do you want to implement a database, let's say a relational one, that defines genres, artist's and albums with 1:n relationships and without the need to define a genre per track ? That would surely be outside of the scope of a music player.

I don't think that anybody got the idea of my original post, at all. First, this isn't a "feature recommendation" post. It was just me asking how to find a function that I presumed was in there. I now realize that it isn't. It is something very much within the scope of functions that the player already allows (tag editing) and would be infinitely more efficient than the approach that everybody else seems to do (tag editing exclusively at song level). And of course, there are tag editors that can be used outside of Poweramp, but by that logic, Poweramp shouldn't have even bothered with any tag editing functionality. It is obvious that a lot of thought and effort was put into this player, seemingly to make it the end all app for any music lover. Fault me if you must, for pressuming that a more logical approach to tag editing had to have already existed in here, once I had seen how function heavy it already was. 

After answering a few people already, I am going to copy/paste a part of my previous reply, which I think better illustrates what I am saying. 

**Think of it this way. Obviously, tag editing is a function within the player. So if I have a database of 100,000 songs, across 10,000 albums, by 1000 artists; what I am referring to is dealing with the tag editing on the artist level, to then trickle down automatically to the albums and songs of that artist. Then just clean up the handful of anomalies. What everybody else keeps saying is to do it manually across 100,000 songs, which still would leave the albums and artists to also be manually tagged. Personally, I would rather run through 1000 genre tags, than 111,000 genre tags. I don't really see that as a "six of one, a half dozen of the other" equivalence. **

[RasKafka]

1 hour ago, blaubär said:

So you want to add a new Tag, lets call it "Artist Genre", and edit all the tags of all your songs accordingly , and let Poweramp use it as a category ? Why would you want to do the editing with Poweramp ? A tag editor already can do that. Your request would be something like "enable Poweramp to use a customizable tag as category".

Or do you want to implement a database, let's say a relational one, that defines genres, artist's and albums with 1:n relationships and without the need to define a genre per track ? That would surely be outside of the scope of a music player.

👀🤔🙄

Maybe because it is already half way done from what I did already see within the player and why would I want to deal with a separate tag editor if the player that I am using already does it? And I know that this is a user forum, but from the developer's perspective, that is exactly the way that they would be (or should be) thinking. From the little time that I have tooled around with this player, it is obvious that it wants to excel in every area and in most areas, it does. The goal, I would assume, is to create a player that is so compelling that people would want to choose it above a very crowded field of players, where even some good free ones like Musicolet (sp?) are ad free. I don't think that what I had presumed already existed in Poweramp is the "pink unicorn" of feature ideas that everybody in this forum wants to make it out to be. To me, it would appear to be a logical addition to a player that tries to excel. And while what I am suggesting would differentiate this player from all the free players that already have basic tag editing, it is still much more modest that the levels of other fearures, like the equalizer) were taken. Again, looking at this player, before reading these replies, there wasn't a doubt in my mind that Poweramp didn't already have this ability. 

I don't want to read to much into forum posts, but it really feels like everybody got hyper defensive, as if my original post was bashing Poweramp for not being able to to do this, but if you read it again, I posted this assuming that I was screwing up by not being able to find the function that I presumed to be in such an intensive player app. 

[blaubär]

41 minutes ago, RasKafka said:

Obviously, tag editing is a function within the player. So if I have a database of 100,000 songs, across 10,000 albums, by 1000 artists; what I am referring to is dealing with the tag editing on the artist level, to then trickle down automatically to the albums and songs of that artist. Then just clean up the handful of anomalies.

Ok, got it. You asked about the following Feature and, as it doesn't exist, suggest to add it:

- Implement an optionally editable designation "Artist Genre" per artist, to be stored in PowerAmps internal database

- If a user has edited this designation for an artist, he should be able to tell Poweramp to overwrite all the artist's song's genre-tags with this designation

Correct ?

[RasKafka]

34 minutes ago, blaubär said:

Ok, got it. You asked about the following Feature and, as it doesn't exist, suggest to add it:

- Implement an optional editable designation "Artist Genre" per artist

- If a user has edited this designation for an artist, he should be able to tell Poweramp to overwrite all the artist's song's genre-tags with this designation

Correct ?

Bingo. That is exactly it. Of course, there was a second part to my original post that nobody was able to talk about, because it also presumed that this already existed. That gets into how assignment from the artist level would work on additional tags (secondary genres). Going back to the example that I used, if I had my Bob Marley tracks were just how I wanted them, all with "reggae" as the main (trickled down) genre and some with a secondary genre tag of "dub," if at a later point I pulled in a bunch of other Marley tracks with genres that were screwed up, what would then happen then? Would the import during a rescan automatically assign them the genre of reggae? Or would the user need to assign genre at the artist level again to correct the newly imported tracks/albums? I am guessing that it would be the latter, which then brings the core question of, would future genre assignments at the artist level change every Marley track to the genre of just reggae or would it (preferably) just change the first genre fields and leave the "//dub" as the secondary genre where it had already been assigned? 

I know that the addition of genre at the artist and album levels, should be easy. The trickle from an artist genre assignment, down through albums and songs, shouldn't really be tricky. But with only a little bit of insight that I was able to gleen from playing around with Poweramp, I am not sure how difficult that last part might be. 

Thanks for your patience to get back to what I was originally asking about. I was getting worried for a while that I was going to have to relive every database anomaly that people were coming up with, which really had very little to do with my original post. Those anomalies are really the only thing that song level genre ragging should be used for, after much easier and more efficient steps have been taken that have already custom created a ~95% accurate user database. 

And who is to say that these edits have to be player exclusive? If something like this was done, why not include a binary option to choose if tag editing is for the player or on the device. 

[andrewilley]

I guess the problem here is that while you would like the ID3 Genre tag to be available for artists and albums, but the fact is that it isn't, it's a single track specific tag. This is nothing to do with Poweramp, it's in the ID3 spec. The old ID3v1 tag has a number of pre-defined fixed wording choices, while the newer and more universal ID3v2 tag (TCON, technically described as  'Content type') uses open-format (and thus user-editable) text, and allows for multiple genres in one tag. However both formats are still track-specific.

That said, it is of course entirely your own choice as to how you tag your own music collection. It's really easy to use a batch tag editor to make sure that every song by one particular artist (or album) has the same embedded genre tag if that's what you want. However on a personal note, I still think that trying to define every artist's entire catalogue of work into one single pigeon-holed category is a bit restrictive, but it's your music collection and your choice.

Andre