Kodi Community Forum

(2017-03-29, 21:39)thedeadman Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks Meowmoo - good tip.

I would however strongly argue that this isn't something that should need the installation of external plugins to achieve.

try telling this the Musicbrainz staff ;P

Music Genre is a "Sensitive thing" if its Rock for me, its Indi Rock or Alternativ Rock for you, and the next one think its Industrial Rock or Hard Rock. So I kinda understand the MB staff to not add genre to the Database :>

best solution for me would be a Picard Plugin that Pulls Genre from theaudiodb, but its hart to find some Python Coder nowdays

So for 'Genre's' (and other items like 'Mood', 'Theme', etc) there are two MusicBrainz Picard plugin's that I use:
https://picard.musicbrainz.org/plugins/

1. Last.fm - Use tags from Last.fm as genre.
(this plugin is broken, but a newer version that is fixed is located here: https://github.com/fdemmer/Picard-Last.fm.ng-Plugin

2. Last.fm.plus - Uses folksonomy tags from Last.fm to
* Sort music into major and minor genres based on configurable genre "whitelists"
* Add "mood", "occasion" and other custom categories
* Add "original release year" and "decade" tags, as well as populate blank dates.

Now I believe to see some of the above show up in Kodi you need Skin support (I use Aeon MQ7 which does use a lot of this data).

As for adjusting or fixing weird Genre's, I use the MediaElch program which you can change the Genre's for music very easily.

That's all gravy of course, but all of this is sounds very 'power user'. It is my humble experience that a great many Kodi users don't know how to change the skin settings, let alone fiddle with scraper settings, .nfo files and external plugins.

As much as it pains me to say it - and it does pain me a great deal - the default genres supplied by iTunes cover a good amount of ground in terms of generally accepted genres of music. Perhaps It might be worth starting with them as a built in default set that users can quickly apply to their collections manually? At least that way we start to move towards some degree of consistency!

Something very cool I found analyzing data on wikipedia album entries:

http://www.bradybutterfield.com/musicGenreFDG/

Particularly interesting is how the genres relate to each other.

That's really cool and really interesting, great share.

Admittedly i'm taking a few liberties with my interpretation, but I had chuckle when I spotted that "Christian Metal" seems to have closer ties to "Comedy Rock" than "Metal".

..and WTF is "Deathdoom"? I missed that memo.

Interesting to see how - relatively speaking - incoherent electronic music is genre wise. Synth botherers and their love of labels :-)

Thanks for the Picard plugin references, interesting to know how others approach setting genre.

If I understand what you are getting at @thedeadman, it is that a user can scan their music collection, do some scraping of artist and album data, and then find
a) the genres node lists an inconsistent multitude of genres e.g. "alt rock", "alternative Rock" etc.
b) the genres they see displayed for artists (or used by some remote apps - Kore, Chorus etc.) seem to have no relation to those on the genres node.

You would then like Kodi to provide a way to un-jumble this user created mess.

Some kind of fuzzy logic perhaps, that wrangles genre variations into a predefined list? But whatever "official" list we pick there wil be a load of users that want something else. And interpreting messed up tagging is a mugs game you can never win.

I know some hope for Kodi to one day be able to take an untagged pile of music files and magically transfer in into an organised library, using audio fingerprints and some online resouce lookup. This may well come, and it will suit certain kinds of user. But there will always be others with eclectic music tastes, or strong personal opinions on how they like things organised, that have tagged there music accurately. I am the latter, so I won't be working on "turn my mess into a library" any time soon (but others can).

If the issue is too many mixed up genres in the genre node then those values come for the tags, and the way to fix them is at the source by better tagging. Having the facility to change them inside Kodi will not help, it is the embedded data in the music files that needs to change.

Tagging is not rocket science, there are some great tools to help - like Musicbrianz database and Picard, and Mp3tag. And I personally don't have any interest in users that are not prepared to take responsibility for their tagging. I have tried to make Kodi more forgiving in artist tag scanning, and I will support users with tagging related issues, but the users still need to do their bit.

If the issue is what we do with scraped artist genres then I think we need a number of changes
a) Optional to scrapping of artist genre
b) Store them as codified genres, not just decorative text
c) Populate initially using song genre (possibly in some weighted way)
d) Offer artist genre based selection/navigation as an option

But if I do that it will just make it possible for users to make an even bigger mess of the genre node - scrapped genres will appear along with the ones from tags.

However a large and diverse music collection can result in a lot of (valid) genres. That provides a reason to have genre grouping, and such a feature could help those whose genre tagging is inconsistent. So if you have manged to tag with an inconsistent mix of say "Alt Rock", "Alternative Rock", "Rock: Alternative" and "Alt-Rock", you could group them together. Equally if you have a only an handful of blues songs, some accurately tagged "Acoustic Blues", others "Contemporary Blues" or "Electric Blues", it makes sense that you only want to them collected together under "Blues" .

So my offerings are to sort out artist genre (and users even more rope to hang with), and grenre grouping facility. Any interest in either?

Quote:Any interest in either?

Would both be a valid answer? :-)

Thing for me is: I run away fast as a thunder of the sources where the crowds assign ur genres. My experience at least. Same than with some contests where the crowd is allowed to judge (by cell sms for example) the results use to be very unexpected, surprising, and u end up with thousand of stupid phrases in ur genre tags.
I would kill for a reliable specialized source of this info to scrape directly, even if the subjetive nature of the tag was debatable.