iTunes screws up Genres

[Ralf11]

There are quite a few different genres for rock music, but iTunes tries to shoehorn all the vastness of Jazz into a single category (!!)

 

Then there are Indian Ragas - some get assigned to (you guessed it) Ragas, but iTunes cleverly places other ragas into the genre Indian.

 

I mean, "dayum!" 

 

I don't use their cloudy music at all - this is purely for rips of CDs - about 1,600 albums.

[Richard Dale]

15 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

There are quite a few different genres for rock music, but iTunes tries to shoehorn all the vastness of Jazz into a single category (!!)

 

Then there are Indian Ragas - some get assigned to (you guessed it) Ragas, but iTunes cleverly places other ragas into the genre Indian.

 

I mean, "dayum!" 

 

I don't use their cloudy music at all - this is purely for rips of CDs - about 1,600 albums.

As far as I know iTunes just uses the text string that is associated with the 'Genre' tag within the Apple Lossless, AAC or AIFF metadata. If it handled FLAC, WAV, or mp3 genre metadata, then iTunes or any other music app would have the same problem because none of the metadata tagging in the other music formats is any better.

 

Even given the simplistic 'Genre' strings, the string encoding handling of formats such as UTF8 vs ISO-8895-1 or whatever correctly is often a mess in MP3 or similar tagged music files. I once worked on a car IVI project developing software to 'guess' the encoding of the tag value strings because the music tracks didn't have a way of flagging the string format used for the tags, or it it did the character encoding specified was wrongly.

[4est]

3 hours ago, Richard Dale said:

As far as I know iTunes just uses the text string that is associated with the 'Genre' tag within the Apple Lossless, AAC or AIFF metadata. If it handled FLAC, WAV, or mp3 genre metadata, then iTunes or any other music app would have the same problem because none of the metadata tagging in the other music formats is any better.

 

Even given the simplistic 'Genre' strings, the string encoding handling of formats such as UTF8 vs ISO-8895-1 or whatever correctly is often a mess in MP3 or similar tagged music files. I once worked on a car IVI project developing software to 'guess' the encoding of the tag value strings because the music tracks didn't have a way of flagging the string format used for the tags, or it it did the character encoding specified was wrongly.

I am not even sure if format has anything to do with it. AFAIK, they use the Gracenote database, which is one of the biggest. Those DBs are often reliant on the first person to rip that adds the data. Genre is often a mess IME.

[Ralf11]

Yes, I think that's right - and it displays all the detriments of "crowd sourcing"...

[4est]

15 minutes ago, Ralf11 said:

Yes, I think that's right - and it displays all the detriments of "crowd sourcing"...

You get what you pay for... There are tagging programs that can address this with your input.

[GregWormald]

Change the genres yourself to match your preferences.

[Bikutoru]

1 hour ago, GregWormald said:

Change the genres yourself to match your preferences.

 

That's what I do. Never had a problem ?‍♂️

Often I do remap thousands of files from one to a different genre.

 

[AudioDoctor]

This is why I have Meta, I tag everything myself the way I want it done.

 

https://www.nightbirdsevolve.com/meta/

[Richard Dale]

3 hours ago, 4est said:

I am not even sure if format has anything to do with it. AFAIK, they use the Gracenote database, which is one of the biggest. Those DBs are often reliant on the first person to rip that adds the data. Genre is often a mess IME.

My point is that it isn't possible to capture the full semantics of a concept like 'genre' with a single text field. It doesn't matter if you enter the text field yourself, or whether the text field comes from the Gracenote database. 

 

Here is is a link to the part of the DBpedia RDF ontology the attempts to define 'genre':

 

http://dbpedia.org/ontology/MusicGenre

 

Unfortunately the Semantic Web never caught on and music apps don't attempt to do anything complex with Linked Data that would be needed to properly handle the complex ways different sorts of music are related.

[Ralf11]

2 hours ago, GregWormald said:

Change the genres yourself to match your preferences.

 

of course

 

there are only 1400 of them

[GregWormald]

4 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

of course

 

there are only 1400 of them

 

Only 1400--piece of cake.?

Sort by genre or artist or whatever works, select or create temporary playlists, and change each group of files at a time.

Once you have the new genre, adding a new album to it is easy.

[kirkmc]

5 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

of course

 

there are only 1400 of them

 

You have music that fits in 1400 genres? Or you are saying that there is, for you, a taxonomy of 1400 genres? 

 

Select all the tracks you want to change, and enter the genre you want in the Genre field. You can do this any way you want. For example, I have genres like Classical: Keyboard, or Shakuhachi, or Dylan, because that's how I organize my music. 

[Bikutoru]

8 hours ago, Richard Dale said:

My point is that it isn't possible to capture the full semantics of a concept like 'genre' with a single text field. It doesn't matter if you enter the text field yourself, or whether the text field comes from the Gracenote database. 

...

 

It is not unique to the iTunes then, but they should probably change it to something that can capture genres better. Would anybody know if Roon does it better or by http://dbpedia.org/ontology/MusicGenre?

[kirkmc]

iTunes doesn't "capture" genres. It gets them from the Gracenote database, and from the iTunes Store. I believe that the iTunes Store has precedence, if a CD is matched when you rip it, but iTunes Store data depends on the record labels and how they want to apply genres. As for other discs, the Gracenote database is notoriously weak because a vast majority of it is crowd sourced. I'm sure there is some attention paid to major artists and labels, to ensure that the correct data is there, but as you can see when you insert a CD and iTunes shows you multiple possibilities, this isn't always the case. 

[Ralf11]

1,400+ is the number of albums I have

 

I am aware of the 'fix' of manually changing things,  but dislike having to have to do that...

 

More importantly, I'd like to make SURE that Apple cannot screw the changed ones up by overriding any genres I have changed...

[GregWormald]

I've never had iTunes change anything on my computer by itself so I don't think you should have any worries.

 

 

 

(I don't get music from Apple but currently have 3000+ albums on iTunes.)

I've been using Macs since 1985.)

[Ralf11]

Thx - I have you beat on how long I've been using a mac (but only for specialized tasks)

[AudioDoctor]

Crazy idea, you could always stop using iTunes...

[Ralf11]

I'm not that crazy

[AudioDoctor]

1 hour ago, Ralf11 said:

I'm not that crazy

 

Me either, yet...

 

I have pretty much sorted my tagging woes though, by not using iTunes for that.

[kirkmc]

12 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

1,400+ is the number of albums I have

 

I am aware of the 'fix' of manually changing things,  but dislike having to have to do that...

 

More importantly, I'd like to make SURE that Apple cannot screw the changed ones up by overriding any genres I have changed...

 

Don't use iCloud Music Library and you won't have any problems. 

[Ralf11]

I never touch the stuff.  I also get out from under the cloud periodically.