Author Topic: Ability to map the same genre to at least two different genre categories :)  (Read 1218 times)

NatashaRobison

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I think it would be awesome if you could tag a song with a genre let's say of, blues rock, and have it show up in both genre categories of blues and rock when searching in the thumbnail browser. There's tons of genres that can easily belong to at least two different genre categories ex, americana could be folk and country or alternative dance could be electronic and rock. If there's already a way to solve this problem please someone tell me lol. Anyways, thanks Steven for making an awesome player and being so kind to actually listen to people and set up a 'wishlist' thread. I'm not that tech savvy when it comes to computer programs so it would probably help me if i actually understood all the ins and outs of musicbee but it does so much and I don't understand all this coding jazz yet with the filters and what not. I just wanna sort through my gobs of music lol

alec.tron

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There's a larger genre (taxonomy) discussion that has been going on for a while:
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=8987.60
but has unfortunately gone quiet for over a year now, where this sort of falls in - i.e. how to deal with non-unique genres...
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hiccup

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If there's already a way to solve this problem please someone tell me lol.

My solution/suggestion would be to make sure you have setup a solid genre/genre category structure that avoids such problems.

Looking at your examples, for me:
Blues rock falls under Rock (like a cat fish is a fish, not a cat)
Americana is a genre category by itself
Alternative dance falls under Electronic (same as Dance)

As tempting as it is to let go of such a strict structure and have genres merging or overlapping in several ways, that's not what main categories are for, and it goes against the principles of taxonomy.

frankz

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I think of it like Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc from biology class.

Music is Kingdom.  Genre Category is Phylum.  Genre is Class.  As hiccup said above, Genre Categories have multiple included Genres, which is what makes them categories, but Genres can belong to only one Genre Category because they're specific.

Another way to think of it is that Genre Category is really the Genre, while what we normally refer to as Genre is actually more a description of style(s).

I struggled with genres a lot when I tried to get really cute with descriptions and subtle differences in genre.  Categories help break you of that when you realize that everything really does fall somewhere under those big umbrellas. 

alec.tron

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Imo it would be nice if music genres/subgenres/microgenres were as straight forward as biological/evolutionary families/taxonomy.... but they just aren't, as a dolphin can't suddenly breed with a grass-hopper. As Interesting as that would be.
Whereas musical genres' never live in isolation inside its' family tree, but, due to its' natuer, of people/musicians soaking up influences from all over, and that makes this so complicated & subjective (as to ones subjective education & exposure), there is cross-pollination/-influences all over the place... eg there's techno/house heavily influenced by reggae/dub until it even becomes the later in the end (think Basic Channel / Rhythm & Sound / Burial Mix group of labels and their musical path...).
More resources/thoughts/ideas on this:
https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=21862.0

Churs.
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