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« on: March 16, 2017, 10:39:55 AM »
I find myself at a crossroads in my Music listening career, and would appreciate your input.
I recently upgraded to MusicBee from Media Monkey. I've spent the last few months getting all my music properly tagged from Discogs using a plugin from Media Monkey. The plugin tags years, ISRC, Involved People, Cover art, and genres. I still get new music regularly, but it has reduced from a roar to a trickle. I'm now sitting at 84,669 tracks, at 1.3 TB.
While tagging with Discogs, I knew that at some point, I would have to fix my genres. I assumed that they would be at least close, and that I would be able to go through the handful of oddball genres and albums, and tweak them to make them fit better in my library. What I've discovered, is that the Discogs Genres are wildly inconsistent. Some albums seem well tagged, especially the "Studio realeases." Many of my albums, especially the compilations are less reasonable, or lacking in detail with only one genre.
So here are my paths as I see them;
1. Bite the bullet and analyze each track individually for proper genre classification. This path is dark, paved with flowing lava, the plants all give off toxic fumes, and the animals will devour me constantly. (1 minute per track, an hour a day will take about 4 years.)
2. Use the Last.FM autotag in MusicBee to autopopulate Genre, Mood, etc.; for each track. Seems promising, I'm afraid of losing the genres on the good ones.
3. Continue on with the original plan, and just go with it? Seems like a fools errand when I'm staring down the barrel of 37K tracks with an Unknown genre category, 6K tracks with no genre at all, and having to rewrite an "advanced search and replace" preset for each genre modification.
4. Hybrid? Auto tag everything except genre for tracks with more than one genre, and everything for the rest? (I'm leaning towards this.)
The problem I see is that until I work with the database when I'm done, I won't really know how well it worked. I like the concept of occasions and Moods from Last.FM, and the settings seem well thought out in MusicBee. It looks like almost all of the problem tags are taken care of.
Thanks in advance!