Author Topic: How to retrieve good quality genre tags using Picard  (Read 24539 times)

Mr. Trev

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 454
Saw that "subgenre" has been pretty much dropped from your genre hierarchy list. That's not going to affect any of these scripts is it?

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
The main difference concerns what you could do with the Enhanced Genre Hierarchy browser, and MusicBee's Tag Editor.

The Enhanced Genre Hierarchy browser used to check both 'genre' and 'subgenre', and for the Tag Editor, if you selected a song that had a genre that had several subgenres 'hanging under it', the Tag Editor would propose these subgenres for that genre so you could easily select and add them as subgenre.
That's gone now.

Mr. Trev

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 454
As long as these scripts still function as originally intended I'm happy. I really don't use the genre browser too much, but I do like using the scripts to write the genre tags into my subgenre tag for my own usage (autoplaylists mostly).
I had noticed over the past week quite a few additions to my library were only being tagged with a single genre/subgenre (rather than the usual 5 I typically get) and I wasn't sure if that was just coincidence or if something was amended in the scripts too

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
I had noticed over the past week quite a few additions to my library were only being tagged with a single genre/subgenre (rather than the usual 5 I typically get)
The maximum amount of retrieved genres is determined in Picard's preferences. (see screenshot #2 in the start post)
The scripts play no role in that.
If you have doubts like these, it's pretty easy to check yourself: re-run songs that had five or more genres assigned to them before and see if that has changed.

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
The matter of the (sometimes large) amount of genres that Picard will be able to retrieve from MusicBrainz' database has been itching in the back of my head a bit.
It's not that problematic, since most of the proposed genres will make some sense, but there is also quite some redundant garbage in the genres that MusicBrainz/Picard is providing.

For example:
It has a lot of music that is labelled 'Jazz' when it is only somebody playing the saxophone.
It has a lot of music that is labelled 'Electronic' if only someone is playing a synthesizer.
And if the word 'woman' is in the title it is 'Blues'.
etc.

So this afternoon I had some thought on one path to attack this problem:
I am assuming that when a song/album gets a very large amount of genres matched to it (e.g. more than 10), a lot of them will be useless or incorrect.

That made me create a virtual tag that will show the amount of genres a song has been matched with:

Code
$If($Len($IsNull(<Genre>,,$RxReplace(<Genres>,"([^;]+)","");))=0,,$Len($IsNull(<Genre>,,$RxReplace(<Genres>,"([^;]+)","");)))
It will display the amount of genres attached to a song.
This can be useful to filter out songs/albums that have an unrealistic amount of genres attached to them.
I am using this to filter out the most problematic ones in my library, and edit their genre entries at the MusicBrainz database.

I just thought to share this with other users that are actively helping in trying to improve the MusicBrainz database regarding genres.
It will surely help in getting even better results if others contribute and improve on it.

edit:
In case of doubt on what genres to apply to your music:
Check RYM (RateYourMusic)
It's by far the best one out there regarding genres.


edit 2:
fun poll:
What is the largest amount of genres a song has been appointed to in your library?
Mine is Dare by Gorillaz.
28 genres…

I will be checking that one in a few days again to see if you also care about this stuff and actually did something about it ;-)
Last Edit: November 20, 2022, 05:38:06 PM by hiccup

Mr. Trev

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 454
I throttled my Picard to max 5 genre, 10% minimal usage, just because of the sheer amount of WTF moments I was getting. Maybe I'm limiting myself too much?

Did a quick mod of your virtual tag (changed genre to subgenre for my purposes) and the most I have currently is 17. "Everything Matters" by Aurora - the rest of the songs from the album (The Gods We Can Touch) only have 14 subgenres. This must have been tagged before I throttled things. For the record RYM only lists 4 genres for the entire album.
The remainder of my library is 8 or less - I still have a whole lot to Picard tag (I'm a lazy, lazy man)

This virtual tag reminded I'm still having an issue with your MUSICBRAINZIDS tag - I'll rebump the issue there
Last Edit: November 20, 2022, 08:53:16 PM by Mr. Trev

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
I throttled my Picard to max 5 genre, 10% minimal usage, just because of the sheer amount of WTF moments I was getting. Maybe I'm limiting myself too much?
Setting a max won't make sure you will get the most applicable genres.
You may be filtering out the ones that are better than the ones you are allowing.
(the filtering may be simply on alphabetical bases)

Quote
"Everything Matters" by Aurora - the rest of the songs from the album (The Gods We Can Touch) only have 14 subgenres. This must have been tagged before I throttled things. For the record RYM only lists 4 genres for the entire album.
That looks like a good example of MusicBrainz providing/allowing for a lot of genres that are not completely appropriate to the music.
I just edited the genres for that album on MusicBrainz. If you re-run the album through Picard, are the results better now?

Mr. Trev

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 454
I throttled my Picard to max 5 genre, 10% minimal usage, just because of the sheer amount of WTF moments I was getting. Maybe I'm limiting myself too much?
Setting a max won't make sure you will get the most applicable genres.
You may be filtering out the ones that are better than the ones you are allowing.
(the filtering may be simply on alphabetical bases)

Quote
"Everything Matters" by Aurora - the rest of the songs from the album (The Gods We Can Touch) only have 14 subgenres. This must have been tagged before I throttled things. For the record RYM only lists 4 genres for the entire album.
That looks like a good example of MusicBrainz providing/allowing for a lot of genres that are not completely appropriate to the music.
I just edited the genres for that album on MusicBrainz. If you re-run the album through Picard, are the results better now?

Hmm, I was just going on the assumption that the given genres were filtered by relevance - I have no idea if this is actually true.
As far as my example album… too late, I manually edited the tags in MB using the genres from RYM (unless your changes are different from RYM)

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
Hmm, I was just going on the assumption that the given genres were filtered by relevance - I have no idea if this is actually true.
It isn't.
How would a filter know what genre is more relevant than another?

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
As far as my example album… too late, I manually edited the tags in MB using the genres from RYM (unless your changes are different from RYM)
Well, the purpose of what I offered in this thread is to retrieve genres from MusicBrainz in the best possible way.
Feel free to enter your genres manually, but that is not what this thread is about.

Mr. Trev

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 454
Hmm, I was just going on the assumption that the given genres were filtered by relevance - I have no idea if this is actually true.
It isn't.
How would a filter know what genre is more relevant than another?

Say for example if more people called a certain album a certain genre then it'd be more relevant? Dunno if Musicbrainz (or anything else) even works like that. It kinda makes sense to me that if you're going to crowd source data there should be a way to offer feedback on what's available (upvote/like genre choices?).
This probably just shows that I haven't spent any time on the actual Musicbrainz website

As far as my example album%u2026 too late, I manually edited the tags in MB using the genres from RYM (unless your changes are different from RYM)
Well, the purpose of what I offered in this thread is to retrieve genres from MusicBrainz in the best possible way.
Feel free to enter your genres manually, but that is not what this thread is about.

True, my point just was I already changed the tags myself for that album (RYM was already open to that page, so why not). But, I did rerun it through Picard and your changes are way better than what was there before. IIRC, the only difference from RYM was folk-pop vs. indie-pop. Nothing I'd give a second thought about, really

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
This probably just shows that I haven't spent any time on the actual Musicbrainz website
If you are interested or critical about how Picard retrieves genres exactly you probably should.
It all boils down to (sometimes flawed) human effort.

Mr. Trev

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 454
I did try somewhat a while back (couple years ago).
The last time, I was trying to add the Canadian release of "The Holy Bible" by Manic Street Preachers. I somehow managed to make some unintended changes to every release. The whole process was very unintuitive IMO. I did manage to get some advice via PM on how to best make entries/changes from somebody who luckily caught the mistake and veto'd them, but I really never put much into it after that.

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
The last time, I was trying to add the Canadian release of…
The whole process was very unintuitive IMO.
You are talking about creating and adding new releases.
That's a very different and rather complicated matter.

Editing or adding genres for existing releases is pretty simple.
It's pretty much a simple voting system:


 

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7758
updated

- added a couple of genres to the whitelist
- some changes in filtering/mapping regarding:
  Dance pop/Dance-pop
  Rock and roll/Rock & roll
  Rhythm and blues/Rhythm & blues