iTunes screws up Genres

[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.

[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.