Author Topic: contributing to improve MusicBrainz' database regarding genres  (Read 1489 times)

hiccup

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This is a carbon copy of what I posted in another MusicBee thread, but I thought to give it a special place in Beyond MusicBee also.
It's pretty much a suggestion or invitation to users interested and willing to improve on the MusicBrainz' genre database to help with getting better results when using Picard to retrieve genre information.


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, 05:37:37 PM by hiccup