Is It Crack Or Not?
Now for the second Is It Crack Or Not? competition. This one is short and sweet, so everyone can play.
Sound Juicer has a genre list containing the most popular genres, such as Rock, Soul, Jazz, and Spoken Word. The question is: should Soundtrack be considered a genre?
My take is that it shouldn't, as Soundtrack means "music from a film",
which must have a specific genre. For example, the soundtrack for The
Commitments is Soul, and the soundtrack to Star Wars
is Classical Orchestral.
And yes Shaum, I'll add Funk once I've branched, honest. I noticed that you entered it into the documentation screenshots to spite me. :)
Posted by glandium at Fri Sep 16 12:47:32 2005:
Actually, the problem is that there is only one categorization field, while it should be able to get a list of categories. I want to be able to find a sound by its sung language, its so-called genre, if it's part of a soundtrack or not, etc.
Posted by Götz Waschk at Fri Sep 16 12:48:54 2005:
I think genres should be free form. The ID3 standard contains lots of made up genres like Christian Rap that nobody ever uses. I rather want to tag my files with genres like "polish melodic black metal" or a list of genres like the Tags on last.fm.
Posted by Ross at Fri Sep 16 12:53:47 2005:
glandium: as I've said often in the past, if you can come up with a nice UI for multiple genres, then I'll consider adding it to SJ. I'm considering parsing a comma-separated list.
Gotz: the SJ genre field is freeform, MP3 is the only format which has a hard-coded list.
Posted by Dan at Fri Sep 16 13:07:01 2005:
Gotz: the SJ genre field is freeform, MP3 is the only format which has a hard-coded list.
Multiple genre's are almost a must these days. What genre would you look for to find Radiohead or Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rock, New Age, Indie, Funk? I have no idea which on they fit in to, and I'm sure you all have different ideas about each. CSV sounds good. If you do implement multiple genre's then perhaps sound track should be one of them, just not the primary? Having a separate field just for that seems a bit, well, just not right to me. What about musicals, "relaxation" music, radio plays or even collections of sound effects? would they end up having special tags too?
Classical actually refers to a specific period in European music history, 1740-1830.
Posted by Murray Cumming at Fri Sep 16 13:18:02 2005:
Classical actually refers to a specific period in European music history, 1740-1830.
"<Shrug>" should be the default genre. And I should be able to add new genres using a text config file, optionally using a sqllite, postgres, or mysql backend. Obviously.
Posted by David Nielsen at Fri Sep 16 13:38:17 2005:
Where's the general option for I think the genre field is crack as a whole and an abomination that's best kept away from humanity for it's babyeating bloating useless crap potential?
Seriously, what is the point in setting genre, music is art, most artists present a fusion of different genres or the album contains elements of different genres. All we accomplice by setting the genre field is getting an ever expanding genre list to pick from, hell when you hit up musicbrainz for album information I have personally never seen it set the genre field in sound-juicer. Merely indicating how little people care about this field.
It's crack people, stop doing drugs.. please think of the children.
Posted by Ross at Fri Sep 16 13:57:50 2005:
Seriously, what is the point in setting genre, music is art, most artists present a fusion of different genres or the album contains elements of different genres. All we accomplice by setting the genre field is getting an ever expanding genre list to pick from, hell when you hit up musicbrainz for album information I have personally never seen it set the genre field in sound-juicer. Merely indicating how little people care about this field.
It's crack people, stop doing drugs.. please think of the children.
David: I use the genre field to group similar music so if I'm after some soul I can tell my iPod to play all Soul music. SJ will never set the genre field when looking up songs on MusicBrainz as MB doesn't store any genre information.
Posted by Darren Winsper at Fri Sep 16 14:26:54 2005:
But what of soundtracks that contain multiple genres? The soundtrack to Appleseed, for example, certainly isn't one genre. Adding multiple genres also doesn't help, since several tracks would get marked orchestral when they're clearly not.
Posted by Ross at Fri Sep 16 14:28:37 2005:
Darren: my point exactly. Soundtrack isn't a genre, but a property of the recording, like compilation. It's also a long-standing bug that SJ can't handle per-track genres, which needs to be addressed at some point.
Posted by Jakub Steiner at Fri Sep 16 14:29:36 2005:
I completely agree that a single Category field is totally unsufficient. A set of keywords, tags to classify a song (not a whole album) would be much more useful for searching.
Posted by David Nielsen at Fri Sep 16 18:25:33 2005:
I've been dabbling with the idea to use audioscobbler instead of genre, in the likes of generating relation lists (this song/artist is like that song/artist). Which would endlessly more useful than the genre field, a single field is insufficent.
Posted by AdamW at Fri Sep 16 19:21:24 2005:
I'm probably not the best person to have an opinion, given that I find the tag utterly useless and categorise every file in my collection as 'Rock', but -
the soundtrack for Star Wars may be orchestral, and the soundtrack for The Commitments may be soul, but what about the soundtrack for Natural Born Killers? It's got a short extract from a classical piece. It's got the Cowboy Junkies' Sweet Jane, which is alt.country. It's got Lard's Forkboy, which is pure old-school industrial. It's got Back In Baby's Arms, which is very-old-school pop. But it's certainly a soundtrack...
Posted by Ross at Sat Sep 17 12:19:48 2005:
the soundtrack for Star Wars may be orchestral, and the soundtrack for The Commitments may be soul, but what about the soundtrack for Natural Born Killers? It's got a short extract from a classical piece. It's got the Cowboy Junkies' Sweet Jane, which is alt.country. It's got Lard's Forkboy, which is pure old-school industrial. It's got Back In Baby's Arms, which is very-old-school pop. But it's certainly a soundtrack...
AdamW: this is where the per-disc genre in SJ needs to be replaced with an optional per-track genre. Maybe I need a Multiple Artists button which when selected turns on per-track Artist and Genre fields.
If you tagged that album as Soundtrack, some songs by Cowboy Junkie's would be under Sountrack and some under Country, which is obviously wrong.
Posted by Gouchi at Sat Sep 17 16:56:59 2005:
If you tagged that album as Soundtrack, some songs by Cowboy Junkie's would be under Sountrack and some under Country, which is obviously wrong.
Just say that because all my CD's didn't have a "genre" in Sound Juicer ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soundtrack_composers
So if not Soundtrack ? Maybe Film Score ? Music from a movie ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_score
Thank you.
Posted by Luca Cavalli at Sat Sep 17 17:09:38 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soundtrack_composers
So if not Soundtrack ? Maybe Film Score ? Music from a movie ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_score
Thank you.
I have posted on bugzilla (#316573) a mockup to handle per-track genre in sound-juicer. Any comment will be more then welcome.
A sidebar will also add the possibility to add different pages, other than the genre one, like a page for album details (cover, date of release, authors...).
Posted by C. Rebert at Sun Sep 18 02:33:36 2005:
A sidebar will also add the possibility to add different pages, other than the genre one, like a page for album details (cover, date of release, authors...).
IMHO, the Genre dropdown should be a combobox so people can use their own genres (there are quite a few obscure ones that people might want to use). Also, Soundtrack is a valid genre as a movie may have music from multiple genres.
Posted by C. Rebert at Sun Sep 18 02:33:48 2005:
IMHO, the Genre dropdown should be a combobox so people can use their own genres (there are quite a few obscure ones that people might want to use). Also, Soundtrack is a valid genre as a movie may have music from multiple genres.
Posted by C. Rebert at Sun Sep 18 02:33:54 2005:
IMHO, the Genre dropdown should be a combobox so people can use their own genres (there are quite a few obscure ones that people might want to use). Also, Soundtrack is a valid genre as a movie may have music from multiple genres.
Posted by Ross at Sun Sep 18 11:20:32 2005:
Gouchi: "soundtrack", "film score" and "music from a movie" all mean exactly the same thing. My point is that all music which people will classify as "soundtrack" is, by definition, also another genre.
C.Rebert: if you see a genre combo, you need to upgrade. If you read the discussion you will see that per-track genre is planned, so the "using soundtrack as compilation" idiom is not required.
C.Rebert: if you see a genre combo, you need to upgrade. If you read the discussion you will see that per-track genre is planned, so the "using soundtrack as compilation" idiom is not required.
