Map Genre to Genre Category on portable devices

[Zak]

I've only just started using the Genre Category to let me assign "proper" genres to tracks without having each appear as a separate entry on the genre list. While MusicBee's genre categories work very nicely, any other program or device will show the genres exactly as they are stored in the Genre tag.

When I'm listening to music on my MP3 player, I usually want to quickly select select tracks from whatever genre I'm in the mood for. If I'm in the mood for "Rock" as I'm walking to the supermarket, I don't particularly care if it's Alternative Rock, Soft Rock, Classic Rock or Hard Rock but my MP3 player (and I imagine most other players) will show me each of those genres as a separate list entry.

It occurred to me it would be great if MusicBee had an additional option in the On-the-fly-conversion settings on the Devices preferences tab to automatically update the genre tag of synced tracks to the values assigned for the Genre Category. Then all tracks from those rock sub-genres mentioned above will appear under "Rock", where I can find them more easily as I'm trying to select music without bumping into people.

Thoughts?

[psychoadept]

Would find this really handy (as an option), as I like seeing fine-grained genres on my computer, but am more likely to listen to things based on Genre Category.

[Patufleon]

Hello,

I really appreciate the option "replace artist tag with sort-artist", it makes the browsing experience much easier on my phone.

I would like to know your opinion on a option "replace genre tag with genre category", for when there is no support for genre categories on the phone.

That, or a possibility to automatically replace any tag during sync using formulas or virtual tags. But this would probably require a lot of efforts for such a non-essential feature.

Thank you for this amazing program.

[alvarodel8]

+1 to this option

[chrswrn]

Whilst this would be nice, the obvious "workaround" is to have auto-playlists for your favourite genres (or in your case, any genres that you're likely to select on your device).

For example you could have a 'Rock' playlist configured to have any track that contains the word 'rock' in the genre field.

I use playlist folders for this, so I have a folder called Best Of and then have sub-folders called Artists/Genre/Years:



The Country & Americana playlist is configured to play anything with those words in the genre field that is rated 4-5 stars:

[psychoadept]

+1, it's true you can use playlists tho organize.genres but there are also display concerns with multiple genres that this would address.

(Update: I found two other requests for this, so I merged them)

[alvarodel8]

Yes! I did what @chrswrn proposes and works well (I did establish Genre Category->Hard Rock so I can change whatever is on the playlist manually). It's so cool that the application is so customizable!

Anyway it's just a workaround and would be great to have this option since Google Assistant doesn't seem to work with playlists. I use it a lot to change music genre while in the car.

[Steven]

This is done for the next v3.3 update.
When enabled, if no Genre Category is matched, the first Genre only (when multiple) is saved.

Keep in mind, that enabling this option or the replace artist option requires MB to rewrite a temporary copy of the original file so can be time consuming

[Steven]

https://getmusicbee.com/patches/MusicBee33_Patched.zip