Genre tag enhancemet

[RasKafka]

I just had my balls busted in a different section of the forum pages for not putting this in feature requests, even though the point was that I thought that it had to have already been an existing feature. I am toast after those go 'rounds, so forgive me for just doing a copy/paste of my original post, even though it wasn't worded as a feature request. And if you want any justification for why, please just refer to the posts in that other section. Thanks. 

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 BobMarley 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

[andrewilley]

No one "busted your balls" in the other thread, they merely pointed out that the ID3 genre tag is defined as a per file tag, not a per-artist or per-album tag. Poweramp can't change that unilaterally.

You are of course completely free to edit all of your own music collection however you like, and change any of the already-embedded tags for each particular artist to the same value if you wish - even if a few of those songs may not really belong in the overall artist genre that you wish to assign. There are batch tag editors (such as my own preferred choice, TagScanner on PC) which can do that task quickly and easily for you.

Andre

[blaubär]

Let's put it shortly as follows:

- 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

The purpose would be that eg some users who like to associate the Stones with Rock would find their music in the Rock genre, even if some of their songs when treated individually might be classified otherwise, and all that without having to accustom themselves with another tool, tag editors , whatever.

[RasKafka]

12 hours ago, andrewilley said:

No one "busted your balls" in the other thread, they merely pointed out that the ID3 genre tag is defined as a per file tag, not a per-artist or per-album tag. Poweramp can't change that unilaterally.

You are of course completely free to edit all of your own music collection however you like, and change any of the already-embedded tags for each particular artist to the same value if you wish - even if a few of those songs may not really belong in the overall artist genre that you wish to assign. There are batch tag editors (such as my own preferred choice, TagScanner on PC) which can do that task quickly and easily for you.

Andre

Actually, what you claim that everyone was saying, is not true. It was a bunch of "why would you want to do that" and "what about Meatloaf and a bunch of other artists that were subjectively thought to be the ultimate wrench 8n what I has asked. Despite me repeatedly qualifying that there isn't a single database anomaly in music, that I haven't dealt with. The "ball busting" was that I never asked for people's opinions and I wasted an hour of my life discussing nothing but opinions, all of which did nothing for me. The "non-ball busting" version of how that should have gone was somebody at the start, just saying that the feature wasn't in power amp, then direct me to submit it in "feature suggestions." All the blah, blah, blah about "what about artisc x, y & z" or "Wikipedia says..." was a waste if time, because nobody was coming out and simply stating that it didn't exist, until one person did, half way through these back and forth with at least 4 different people. None of that discussion was necessary. All I needed to be told was something like "that feature isn't in there, you should post it in the suggestion forum." 

ID3, didn't come up until much later, even after I went to bed. But I am done with this now. If the powers that be, get it and want to do it, that is great. If they don't, that is fine as well. I have dealt with computer engineers for 30+ years, but don't remember a single instance  where I met that much resistance to an idea, simply based on "why would you wanna", "Steven Tyler made a country album", "the responsibility falls on the user," etc. Maybe I just have PTSD from years of programmers who would say "no, just no" to everything, until I wasted half a day for them to get to "yes, ok, I now see how we can do it. I wasn't even pitching an idea, but the whole thread ran as if I was. 

[blaubär]

9 hours ago, RasKafka said:

I have dealt with computer engineers for 30+ years, but don't remember a single instance  where I met that much resistance to an idea,

That wasn't resistance to your idea but the necessary work to find out what you wanted. As this wasn't totally clear, it involved questioning your motivation. If you've dealt with software development for decades and didn't encounter discussions like the one we had, your colleagues must have worked with telepathic powers. No offence meant.

[andrewilley]

This is a public forum, you need to expect discussion of any posts (surely your 30 years in IT have taught you that it's rare to get 100% agreement on anything- my similar time certainly has!). There were no personal attacks, so I let it run.

In fact, the third reply in that thread (mine as it happens) mentions both the technical fact that Genre tags are per-song, and also the perfectly relevant (IMHO) Meatloaf example that you just derided:

On 1/18/2019 at 8:27 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.

Anyway, enough banter on the subject, you have made a feature request for some way to additionally categorise Artists and/or Albums which does not rely on the existing ID3 (per-track) Genre tagging system, so we'll see if that is something that Max (the Poweramp dev) thinks has enough general appeal to consider creating for you. You did mention in your first post that you feel that "this seems like it would be such a fundamental option" but I have to confess that in 8+ years of monitoring these forums, this is the first time I recall it coming up.

Andre

[RasKafka]

On 1/20/2019 at 10:23 PM, blaubär said:

That wasn't resistance to your idea but the necessary work to find out what you wanted. As this wasn't totally clear, it involved questioning your motivation. If you've dealt with software development for decades and didn't encounter discussions like the one we had, your colleagues must have worked with telepathic powers. No offence meant.

I am over this thing, so the devs can do or not do whatever they want. But for about the 15th time, my original post was not a feature request. It is such a "no s#!t" function that is completely congruous with what I was already seeing implemented, that I presumed it was already there. I was not requesting it, I was asking where I could find it simply because the navigation isn't as intuitive as it could be for something so heavy in features and settings. 

So put yourself in the position of somebody searching for something that they thought probably existed, then look at the replies up until somebody said that I should have posted in "feature requests." Knowing what I know now, everyone was treating my post as a feature request anyways, even though I made no such request. How all of that read to me was ball busting. A bunch of "well, why would you want to do that" and "are you going to do with Meatloaf? (as if🙄), all before anybody even eluded to the feature not actually being there. It played out with me thinking "what a bunch of a**holes. They make are making me jump through these hoops to justify why they want to use a feature, before they will tell me how to access that feature." 

If you still don't get that, don't worry and don't continue to reply if all you are going to keep ignoring the fact that my post was not a feature request,but the replies came at me as if it was a feature request. So given that nobody was coming out and just saying "that feature doesn't actually exist," then with my belief that it already existed (which I even stated in that original post), the tone of those responses read quite differently. 

[RasKafka]

On 1/21/2019 at 3:11 AM, andrewilley said:

 

 

You did mention in your first post that you feel that "this seems like it would be such a fundamental option" but I have to confess that in 8+ years of monitoring these forums, this is the first time I recall it coming up.

Andre

I have made a career out of making "a-ha" observations out of things that nobody thought about before. That wasn't my intent in this case, because I figured that moment must have long passed, concidering the depth of so many other features. But hopefully it will become that for Poweramp, should the dev decide to do it. 

[w3wilkes]

@RasKafka - I owe you an apology. I did not mean to come across as "bustin' your balls". Thinking further about this it sounds like you're talking a database function vs a track tagging function. Reason for my original response was the "exception to the rule" that is presented by artists like Billy Joel, etc that have music in different distinct genres. Your function would add a database mapping for the main "Artist Genre" a given artist lives in. What leads me to this is currently there's no track tag that is something like "Artist Genre" that's along the same lines of the "Artist Album" tag. I believe the current Genre tag is considered to be track oriented vs Artist oriented to handle the exceptions like Billy Joel. If there were an "Artist Genre" tag, your "where is this function" question would have been spot on. Since there is no "Artist Genre" type tag I went off track interpreting what you asked as being a track tag function instead of being a database function. I would see this database function being similar to the current track rating where this is kept in the PA database. 

[maxmp]

(The next) Build 829 includes Library / Scanner / Symbols to Split Multiple Genres option - one or multiple strings can be used to split genres according user collection.
For example, it can be the default "// ;" or it can be just "/" or saying "// / l $", etc.

[andrewilley]

20 minutes ago, maxmp said:

(The next) Build 829 includes Library / Scanner / Symbols to Split Multiple Genres option

Thanks Max. Will that work with tracks that have multiple artist names in tags too, which is another long-requested option.

Andre

[maxmp]

No, but I guess I may add it in the next build too.

[andrewilley]

Thanks. Without the ability to define multiple names within an Artist tag, there end up being a whole ton of tracks which have dual/multiple artists that appear in the Artists list with names like "xxx feat. yyy" or "xxx & yyy" etc, whereas such tracks should ideally show in the music lists for both Artists "xxx" and "yyy". Might mean some re-tagging by users, but at least it would be possible.

Andre

[MotleyG]

😀

[maxmp]

What about album artist tag btw?

[invaderzim]

54 minutes ago, maxmp said:

What about album artist tag btw?

Hey Max. My long requested feature would be to also make the Artist tag appear in the Album Artist list of songs as well as in the main app. The Notification panel shows the Artist tag eg. Korn ft. Corey Taylor in the screenshots below.

[maxmp]

2 hours ago, maxmp said:

No, but I guess I may add it in the next build too.

Unfortunately, artists splitting is not going to the next build - while multiple genres are supported for track, multiple artists are not supported.

(Implementing this is breaking change for Library / APIs and lot of options, so this will be delayed).

[andrewilley]

3 hours ago, maxmp said:

What about album artist tag btw?

I must admit I personally would have expected Album Artist to be a single entity - as the whole point is to create a single name to group together multiple tracks where there are a lot of different artists - but if it doesn't add any extra work I guess it might be worth allowing for separators within that tag too. But as you said, in the longer term perhaps.

Andre

[MotleyG]

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

I must admit I personally would have expected Album Artist to be a single entity - as the whole point is to create a single name to group together multiple tracks where there are a lot of different artists - but if it doesn't add any extra work I guess it might be worth allowing for separators within that tag too. But as you said, in the longer term perhaps.

Andre

I agree with Andre's point about Album Artist, since this effectively is supposed to help group specific tracks from mixed Artists together on a single Album. However others may use their library sorting methods differently. So if the ability to include this is somewhat as straightforward as doing so for Artist, the flexibility could be appreciated by some.

Gord

[Absinthequ]

On 5/17/2019 at 5:12 PM, maxmp said:

Unfortunately, artists splitting is not going to the next build - while multiple genres are supported for track, multiple artists are not supported.

(Implementing this is breaking change for Library / APIs and lot of options, so this will be delayed).

 I really do want some kind of artist splitting, but I do think this is going to cause a huge mess if not separated something like how Spotify does.

For example: if you were a huge fan of Lil Wayne, The guy has like 400 songs featuring him and only about a dozen albums. So the list would end up 410+ albums and you have to sort through to find his actual albums

Spotify for example, separates albums and singles made by the artist,  then has below that a separator "Appears On" followed by an albums list including all of the "featuring" songs and compilations the artist appears on. 

I would prefer some kind of separator tag like genre uses or just use "feat" or "featuring" as the separator. Problem is depending on where you got the music,  it could be in the song, artist or album artist field.

 

[w3wilkes]

What will happen if you currently have Genres of "Pop/Rock", "Folk/Rock", etc? will these be split to 2 genres? These Genres are pretty standard and if you make "/" as a Genre splitter these genres will be split into 2. Or are you saying that the Genre splitter will be user definable? I think user definable would be superb! Currently ";" works perfectly as my genre splitter.

[andrewilley]

3 hours ago, w3wilkes said:

What will happen if you currently have Genres of "Pop/Rock", "Folk/Rock", etc? 

As Max said above, the default would be to use "//" and ";" as separators. I certainly wouldn't recommend editing the separator to just "/" or even "," for all of the reasons quoted, but you could if you so desired.

One way to use "/" if you really wanted to would be to allow testing for spaces as part of multi-character separators, so the required separator would be a three-character string " / " rather than just "/". That way "Rock/Pop"  and "AD/DC" would be safe, but you could force two genres to be detected by using "Rock / Pop"

Andre

[Seqularise]

Well, maybe its a time to support native multi value tags in id3v2.4 and vorbis comments, as in specification

No problems with separators, ideal world