This isn't entirely on point, but I thought you all might find this article interesting: http://tippopotamus.blogspot.com/2009/05/automatic-mp3-genre-tagging-is-it.html
I am trying to set up my genres to match Allmusic.com, and the three-level system would work well with that.
Thnx scampbll, that is very much to the point!
He put most of my motives for requesting this nicely into words.
Indeed one problem is that many genre descriptions are not actually genres at all. It would be a good start to split actual genres from descriptions. (as I tried to do with my listing)
Nice to see his genres list has many similarities with mine. (yet mine is better ;-)
I feel if we would have the possibility or option to use a list like mine in MusicBee there would be some interesting advantages.
Apart from more fine-grained genres and subgenres, maybe MB then could split descriptions often wrongly advertised as 'genre' to appropriate fields, such as mood, form, or description, so to keep the genres fields correct and unified as possible.
Also different spellings or namings for genres could then be changed to an agreed-on name. So that for example "Drum 'n' bass", "D&B", "D+B", "DnB" would all be corrected to "Drum and Bass". (or whatever we agree on)
It would also be convenient when you would for example select "Full on" as a subgenre for a track, MusicBee would automatically fill 'Trance' as genre, and 'Electronica' as genre category.
It would be great if there was an attractive interface for this, with the possibility to easily see and make selections from this complete 'genre category' > 'genre' > 'subgenre' hierarchy.
That would also reduce the amount of typing, thinking about or inventing new genrenames, and also prevent all kinds of different spellings and namings for the same.