Author Topic: Proposal: Extend 'Genre' hierarchy with 'Subgenre'  (Read 93667 times)

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
The way it is now is e.g. breaking my own adage of not mixing genres and locations in the same taxonomy.
When you say 'now' do you mean inN Stephen's example ?

I will post a substantially updated version of my genre sheet in a second.
It might answer some questions by itself, but I will read your latest post better after that and respond if I think I have something useful to say ;-)

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
I find Folk/Ethnic/Region still a bit problematic and difficult to force into this hierarchy in a way that makes sense and is practical.
The way it is now is e.g. breaking my own adage of not mixing genres and locations in the same taxonomy.
I believe I found a nice solution for this problem.
I created new genre categories for genres that most people could probably agree on are tied to a rather specific region and/or ethnicity:

Ethnic African
Ethnic Asian
Ethnic Australian
Ethnic Central American
Ethnic European
Ethnic North American
Ethnic Russian
Ethnic South American

'Contemporary Folk' is also a new category, which has solved issues that I had with the 'Ethnic/Folk' category. (which is now gone)

At this moment I don't have simply 'folk' as genre, because it seems a bit too vague to me at this moment, and any music that could fall into such a genre can now find a place in one of the above categories.
Maybe it should be there somewhere though, not sure yet.

download Genre-Subgenre sheet


edit:
I am also not quite settled on main genre categories 'Roots', 'American folk music', 'Ethnic North American'.
After reading this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_folk_music
it seems there is a lot of overlap that will be difficult to solve in a comprehensive and practical sheet.

edit2:
And... 'Roots' is gone again.
updated with another approach to American/Country/Folk/Ethnic North American. (v0.92)
Last Edit: July 12, 2020, 07:34:39 PM by hiccup

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
Oops, the upload went wrong.
The new version should be up now.
(named v0.90)

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
The way it is now is e.g. breaking my own adage of not mixing genres and locations in the same taxonomy.
When you say 'now' do you mean inN Stephen's example ?
As what he is suggesting is valid for all tags, not just genres. So you could have a  "Relationships" panel that only establishes parent/child relationships for genres, and it's up to you how far you want to customize those - name, or branching/depth wise.
But, this goes far beyond just a 3rd layer to manage genres....
If I understand Stephen correctly, and this was my hope, that I could have relationship trees & integrated auto oplaylists generated for every tag there is on my files.
i.e. this is what I would attempt for my library in the  "Relationships" panel: ...

I was speaking about my own genre sheet.

I am mainly focusing on what I proposed in the very startpost of this thread, and what I explained in reply #53.
And in relation to genres, I am strictly aiming to produce a correct and practical as possible genre taxonomy sheet that can easily be inserted into MusicBee when it can handle an extra hierarchy level.

It seems you are a few steps ahead and seeing more advanced opportunities with regards to relations, and a much broader practical use.
I am not sure I understand how that would work and how it would turn out in MusicBee exactly, so I will respectfully take a backseat on that part of the discussion.

Steven

  • Administrator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 34311
@hiccup, so do you have 2 fields - one for genre and one for sub-genre and you tag both those fields with the values you list in your sheet?

Steven

  • Administrator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 34311
@alec.tron,
regarding <DISCOGS_STYLES>
Are they unique for each genre ie. specific to Acid House and specific to Disco House using your example

   EDM
      House
         Acid House
         <DISCOGS_STYLES>
         Disco House
         <DISCOGS_STYLES>

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
@hiccup, so do you have 2 fields - one for genre and one for sub-genre and you tag both those fields with the values you list in your sheet?

That's correct.

It may well be some unrealistic pipe-dream, but I am thinking about being able to do something like in the screenshot here:

https://getmusicbee.com/forum/index.php?topic=8987.msg123195#msg123195

Steven

  • Administrator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 34311
@hiccup, so do you have 2 fields - one for genre and one for sub-genre and you tag both those fields with the values you list in your sheet?

That's correct.
Then this discussion about a relationship panel doesnt really add anything to what you could already do using the library explorer to drill down on genre/ sub-genre. I will revisit the topic you linked to.
With the discussion with alec.tron, it would be possible to mix drill down tags and also add your own hierarchy of non-tagged groupings on top of tagged values, so it seems you both are after different things

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
@hiccup, so do you have 2 fields - one for genre and one for sub-genre and you tag both those fields with the values you list in your sheet?

That's correct.
Then this discussion about a relationship panel doesnt really add anything to what you could already do using the library explorer to drill down on genre/ sub-genre.

I only answered the question which I understood to be only about how I am currently doing it.

alec.tron

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 752
Then this discussion about a relationship panel doesnt really add anything to what you could already do using the library explorer to drill down on genre/ sub-genre. I will revisit the topic you linked to.
With the discussion with alec.tron, it would be possible to mix drill down tags and also add your own hierarchy of non-tagged groupings on top of tagged values, so it seems you both are after different things
To my understanding:
- we're both after a taxonomy/grouping/hierarchy system
- we're both after being able to define on each parenting branch, which tag field is queried (based on ones own library & file setup).

To illustrate, what hiccup has in the UI mockup, would be this in the text based taxonomy approach (which imo is much more versatile for a variety of users than hard-coding a 3 layer system with a dedicated tag editing UI for a pre defined set of tags)

Code
<HierarchicalName="Classic" Tag id=""/> 
    <Child="Modern"/>
<HierarchicalName="Modern" Tag id="Genre"/>
    <Child="20th century"/>
    <Child="Contemporary"/>
    <Child="Modern 1830-1930"/>
    <Child="Minimal"/>
<HierarchicalName="20th century" Tag id="SubGenre"/>
<HierarchicalName="Contemporary" Tag id="SubGenre"/>
<HierarchicalName="Modern 1830-1930" Tag id="SubGenre"/>
<HierarchicalName="Minimal" Tag id="SubGenre"/>

Form/Style would be a new set of complexities, as this is another classification on its own.



As for:
@alec.tron,
regarding <DISCOGS_STYLES>
Are they unique for each genre ie. specific to Acid House and specific to Disco House using your example

They should be but discogs is not perfect either... see
https://blog.discogs.com/en/genres-and-styles-list/
i.e. Acid House is, Disco House does not exist on discogs.

A note regarding that - for discogs current taxonomic genre definitions (and folk/world is notoriously badly mapped out... and genres in general are very slow to make it onto discogs, and the backlog is fairly large...):
The duplicates I've seen so far in the above for example is "Gospel" appearing under "Folk, World & Country" as well as "Funk/Soul".
And it's most likely not the only occurrence, but, I could flag that with some discogs folk as I would think this is an oversight/historically grown issue.

c.
Last Edit: July 19, 2020, 09:39:16 AM by alec.tron

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
Form/Style would be a new set of complexities, as this is another classification on its own.

Thoughts will surely differ on this, but when narrowing this down to using a system for genres, Form/Style in my mind is a somewhat different entity:
While genre and sub-genres would have more strict relationships, and should try to adhere to some pseudo-academic correctness, Form/Style/Keyword/whatever would be a less restricted listing of all sorts of words and terminologies that a user may want to have available to apply to his liking.
This will allow to use the fuzzy human brain capacity for handling chaos. Which is probably an essential factor to make this all usable in practice.

For example for genres, such a 'chaos' list could contain words related to music and genres such as: independent, alternative, ballroom, crossover, elevator music, industrial, serenade, soft rock, Top 40, etc.
I would like to be able to apply them independent from a selected genre.
(I have such a list, I'll see if I can include it in my updated genre list, probably later tonight)

This 'chaos list' could of course also be an unrelated independent tag, but it could be nice to have it included in an xml sheet such as you are proposing.

When using such a system for instruments, I am sure you could also come up with a list of words that do not fit in the musical instruments taxonomy from an academic standpoint, but you would still like to have available there?

Steven

  • Administrator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 34311
I have the new tag hierarchy panel to a fairly advanced stage now, where the panel can be used for navigating and filtering; and there is a dialog where you can edit the relationships. Its not fully ready yet but wanted to describe how the hierarchy is constructed. Also i do plan to consider tag editor support to make use of the hierarchy.

- You can enter any arbitrary nodes to the hierarchy. Often the names will correspond to file tag values but don't have to. For example you might group a bunch of genres where the grouping name doesnt correspond to any file tag - see EDM in the example below
- child nodes must be indented. Indentation must be a multiple of 4 spaces which will be validated. Using the tab and shift-tab keys in the hierarchy editor will apply the 4 space indentation
- if the node corresponds to a tagged value in a file, append '::<tag>'
- if a node is tagged, that tells MusicBee that when the node selected the results in the main panel can be filtered on that tag value eg. selecting Breakbeat would filter Genre='Breakbeat'
- if a node is not tagged, that tells MusicBee that when the node selected the results in the main panel can be filtered for all the child nodes where there is a tag value eg. selecting EDM would filter Genre='Breakbeat' or Genre='House'
Code
EDM
    Breakbeat::Genre
        Acid Breaks::SubGenre
        Big Beat::SubGenre
        Drumstep::SubGenre
    House::Genre
        Acid House::SubGenre
        Disco House::SubGenre
Where
    Europe
        Spain::Country
        Portugal::Country

@hiccup, i know you are working on a taxonomy for genre-category/ genre/ sub-genre.
Would you be happy to share that (in XL or text format) so I can include it as the default?

alec.tron

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 752
I have the new tag hierarchy panel to a fairly advanced stage now, where the panel can be used for navigating and filtering
wow, just wow...!






Let us know when it's availble and if/where we can help.



Curious - is this through a single text file where the tags & hioerarchies are defined ? or can we have multiples and swap between  (easily) ?
Churs.
c.

Steven

  • Administrator
  • Sr. Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 34311
its a single text file as in the example. I guess you could overwrite the file but i have no plans to support multiple files

hiccup

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 7781
@hiccup, i know you are working on a taxonomy for genre-category/ genre/ sub-genre.
Would you be happy to share that (in XL or text format) so I can include it as the default?

Sure.
I have been doing a lot of work on it and made lots of changes.
Some decisions I made on the hierarchy may trigger some discussion with other invested members.
Later tonight I should be able to post the latest version. (as a .pdf)

Depending on the feedback I could then perhaps made some adjustments to it, and weed out some possible plain mistakes.
After that I can share it as .txt, .xml or .xls.