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An Accurate ID3 Tag Database?
Andy Le Couteur Bisson asks: "Can anyone suggest an ID3 tag database that doesn't label everything from Gabber to Ambient as Electronica & Dance, or worse? I am currently ripping more of my CD collection and it is annoying to have to review and edit almost all of the tags after every session. The odd error or difference of opinion is understandable, but I struggle to comprehend the logic that categorizes The Liberators and Luke Slater as R&B (for the uninitiated they are Techno). I guess I'm looking for a more UK centric database but Googling hasn't helped much, thus far."
Unfortunately Tag & Rename is shareware, but it's a GREAT application. You can select a whole list of mp3s and have it search for the albums on Amazon.com and automatically generate ID3 tags. I've done my entire collection of 150 albums in a couple of hours (I believe you have to do one album at a time). The link is http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm
:/
By the way, there is another program that IS freeware that does the same thing with amazon.com, but I can't remember the name
learn2rip
For tagging music files with properly spelled artist names and song names and the like, I find the MusicBrainz tagger to be quite useful. It's also got the advantage of being editable by the users, and easier to clean up than other places.
However, you'll get no genre info there. That's something that's just really, really hard to do well. Especially because of the overlap that some artists have between genres, and how specific someone wants to be. Is VNV Nation EBM? Futurepop? Or just Electronica? How about Dead Can Dance? I think they've hit a dozen different genres over the years, how do you pick one?
For the most part, I've tried to just give up on genre entirely. It rarely says anything of value anyway.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Everyone's musical tastes are different, and this extends to how we classify the music we listen to. Would you classify US3 as Jazz? Acid Jazz? some variation of Rap? It depends on how YOU percieve it. No online databse is gonna be perfect. Just suck it up and label everything how you think it should be labelled as you are ripping your CDs. Even then you will have to deal with crossover bands that blend elements of different musical styles. I've alost completely done away with this kind of classification for some of my music, as once my collection gained any depth, classifying some songs/artists/albums became next to impossible.
Fight psychopharmacological mccarthyism. http://www.norml.org/
http://www.musicbrainz.org Haven't used the new picard looker-upper, but I know the original works wonders. Check that out.
It's not that I'm asking the big questions, it's that I'm asking lots of small ones.
this service already exists by musicbrainz, and if you use amarok then you have already witnessed it in action.
seriously, do people google before they ask slashdot?
I finished ripping my 300+ CD collection and I manually checked every CD. CDDB and other databases usually have different spellings of bands like "Smashing Pumpkins" vs "The Smashing Pumpkins", even song names are spelled differently across albums. On the live album you got a song spelled one way, on the studio version another way and so on. There is also the 3-4 versions of the same album, all spelled different way. Of course different spelling spells doom for library programs who think that 2 albums from same artist is different because name spelled a bit differently.
... I said screw it, do it manually!
I ripped my CDs once in FLAC, keep em on two jumbo hard disks (manual raid 0). It was long, but well worth it. I have a lot of weird CDs, tried musicbrainz, Amazon tagger for MediaMonkey, all worked to a certain extent. Some unknown metal bands don't show up at all on musicbrainz or amazon, amazon gives me a rap album instead of Symphonic Pink Floyd
What (I think) you're asking for is an alternative CDDB source for track information when ripping your CDs? If this is the case then, to my knowledge there are only two CDDB (now Gracenote and commercial) and FreeDB. Both of these accept submissions from the general public so you can't guarantee that what they choose to clasify the artists as will be in line with your own opinion.
You can always edit the tracks afterwards, I use the already recommended Tag&Rename myself however there are a number of open source utilities which are just as good especially if you're not using Windows.
Another alternative might be to try Musicbrainz which identifies individual tracks using some kind of hash of the song itself and might have "better" genres assigned to artists.
http://xdev.narod.ru/tagscan_e.htm Tag Scanner is a great full-featured T&R application.
Does anyone dislike the genre "Alternative & Punk"? Why join them? Anyway, I think it would be more convenient if multiple genres or tags were allowed, eg. "Rock", "Instrumental", and "soundtrack" for one song.
genres itself are wide and varied on its own, and depending on which site u r basing on, you will get alot of different types for the same artist. Ive seen so many different sites [Yahoo Launch, Amazon, HMV, etc] rating Madonna from R&B to pop to dance to rock. As long as the artist has released a track in that genre, it screws everything up. Paul Van Dyk the pop king? Libertines the R&B boyband? My advice, find 1 single site [Launch is nice] and stick to their genre recommendations. Sourcing from multiple sites will just give you the headache.
derek
the algorithm used to derive the cddb id is crap, so it leads to loads of collisions - just download the db and find all the files which have the same name (named after the id). the algorithm used to derive the musicbrainz style id (cdindex id in cdda2wav, i think) is much better and vastly less likely to collide.
:)
also, musicbrainz has a community moderated thing going on, so mistakes get corrected
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but a good source of music data is AllMusic.com. They have fairly good genre/style info. You'll probably have to roll your own screen-scaper around it, though, if you intend to automate at all. This guy seems to have taken a stab at it. (Of course, I understand Tag&Rename can pull from there as well...)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I would try www.DbPoweramp.com for their music converter. Freeware and you can select genre etc before ripping and change any titles as you wish. When you start it checks on freedb to see if it reckonizes the cd and so far I have found it very good. Also if you have a cd that is not on their database you can submit it thus helping to keep it up to date. Or for editing mp3 you already have I use Moosic. Basic straight forward and can do batch converts, extracting from filename, freedb intergration as well and freeware again. Not the fastest but I can do 2-300 mp3 in a batch with no probs. www.bluecowmedia.com/MOOsic/ Hope this might help
I think the real problem is the ease of fixing problems in these databases when you find them. Most of the software I use either doesn't fix the originating database when you make a correction, or it makes it hard to update it, or you can't even tell if the database was updated or not (thus discouraging updating). Then who the heck knows if the database accepts the changes, or accepts the wrong changes? Somebody needs to re-think the whole system.
On section stories on the front page, it will sometimes say x of y comments, where x>y.
As others have pointed out, defining a tune by a single genre is at best useless and worse incorrect. It takes no account of mood, tunes that straddle >1 genre and doesn't help with the context a song was made in. Is 'britpop' a genre? Are Spearhead 'hip-hop', 'rap', or 'funk'?
No service offers this - the nearest is AMG who provie multiple styles, genres, moods and instrumentation per artist. As far as I know there is no official automated tool which rips this information.
You'll be better off with your own rips using APEv2 tags which allows multiple genres and no retarded 32 byte limit on field lengths. Foobar2000 works great with ape tags and allows fine control over how your sound comes out.
sean
Genre can't get specific (as you mention, it can't take mood or other things into an account), but if you've got 3000 songs and you want say, a "progressive metal" playlist that you want to hear in your car, genre can help you cut out a lot of those 3000 songs, leaving fewer for you to pick through.
Although they appear to be more dedicated to mixing your music based on the mood of a song, MoodLogic also has a huge database of user identified songs. You have to pay to use the feature, but you can download it for free and see how it would tag them before you pay. http://www.moodlogic.com/
Godfather would be your best choice. Rip, then tag with this. It can get its data from allmusic.com, which is way better than the ID3 tag databases.
MusicMatch has a supertagging thing that works so incredibly awesome...it has album art and everything....its the best of all. even iTunes.
I've been working on this problem for a long time now and the last thing I want to do is to edit individual songs. The best solution I've come up with is to create a folder called "genre" under which I created individual genre folders. I then moved my artists and loose mp3s into those folders. The freeware I used to inspect the artists/paths in my collection is called "Mp3 Explorer". I should point out that I am only interested in the 148 genres of the ID3v1 tag because my BPM based player software uses this to select drum sets and grooves. Of those genres the major headache is the Blues (0), Other (12), Unknown (255 - hex(FF)), and Classical (32 - i.e. ASCII space). During the last year my Winamp front-end has been speaking the track details before and after the song plays to aid me in cleaning up my folders. I've also been using Allmusic.com to check up on artists and my collection is pretty stable now. I am now ready to code a routine to reset these main problem genres to their folder name. When that task is done I'll be able to use a tagger to work through individual folders, looking for anomalies. The freeware Winamp front-end that I wrote, called Ingrid, is a quantum computer emulator that is capable of detecting vary diverse musical signatures. When my collection is clean enough I intend to overlay mood shapes onto those signatures to generate accompaniment using more than just drums, e.g., guitars and piano rolls. http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~income/ingridx/
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
Yeah, I could google for it.
But I guess I'm just an old fart, because while I've at least *heard* of "Ambient", I don't know WTF "Gabber" is...
The AllMusicGuide has a wide number of "style" categories which albums are classified into, but the number of actual genres are surprisingly sparse. Most /.ers' music collections will all fit into Electronica, Jazz, Latin, R&B, Rap, and Rock.
Why so few genres? Because AMG's real purpose is for music stores to display consistent information about an album. When a record store buys a truckload of albums, they need to categorize them somehow. If you're looking for Fatboy Slim, for example, you're going to look in the Rock/Pop section.
Imagine if record stores had a "Funky Breaks" section (the primary style that AMG gives for Fatboy Slim). It would be a nightmare trying to find any music that you weren't already familiar with. That kind of categorization makes sense for an obscure independent store where you probably haven't heard of most of the music there, and so you'll look for a style you're familiar with and pick out something that looks good. But it doesn't work when people are looking for a particular CD first.
What bearing does this have on the question? Well, in my opinion, any respectable music tagging site should classify music according to the AMG genres. You lose a bit of information, but the system will never fail; music will never be misclassified, just insufficiently classified.
Besides that, it would be nice if ID3-using programs supported styles (so that you could designate New Order as both post-punk and synthpop, for example), but if they don't, then I'd just recommend that you attach the most relevant style by hand. I classify New Order as "Rock: Post-Punk", where the first part is the genre and the second part is the style that is most relevant for me. This has the added advantage of keeping the record store genres next to each other in an alphabetical list, so that depending on my mood, I can choose to play all of my rock albums or only the post-punk ones.
Of course, lately I haven't been genre-tagging my music at all. It's very rare that I don't know exactly what album I want to listen to at any given moment. And shuffle mode is right out. Albums are meant to be listened to as a whole...
Don't bother with ID3 databases, either. Even if one were "accurate," it would not be right for most individual listeners. Here's a small list of the problems I encounter when trying to use tags pulled from a database, even when there are no obvious typos or fuckups...
For non-classical music:
- Genres are wacked (duh)
- Both artist and album names often differ from what the album cover says: shortened or on the other hand made "more informative"
- Year is wrong. I don't give a fuck when the album (or even worse, the greatest hits collection) was first sold. I care when the song was put in its final form (if I can find out)
- Song titles may be shortened, and almost always have gratuitous Caps At The Start Of Each Word whether or not the artist put them there
- Due to changes in the database over the years fields may be switched or missing
For classical music and opera the situation is far worse. I have my own tagging system refined during years of keeping digital music and figuring out how best to shoehorn orchestra/chorus/conductor/soloist(s)/ensembles/mo vement titles/opus numbers/acts/scenes into "Artist," "Song," "Album" and "Grouping" fields. I would hazard the guess that for any serious classical music listener there is no point in a database -- different information is important to all of us and we will all perform the field-consolidation shuffle differently. We can whine about the need for entirely new tagging systems but we are enough of a minority that no one listens, so in the meantime, we have to Optimize Very Highly.
In short, just type the damn information in yourself if you want it to be accurate. There is no other way.
Oh yeah, *great*.
As a previous person asked: "Is VNV Nation EBM? Futurepop? Or just Electronica? "
Well, according to allmusic.com's *great* genre info, they belong in the "rock" genre...
And so does every other EBM and electronica band I looked up.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Well, Sarcastro, you might wish also to consult the styles listed right in front of your fat face:
* Industrial Dance
* Electro-Industrial
* Dark Ambient
They even have a bunch of moods listed:
* Provocative
* Reflective
* Confrontational
* Confident
* Energetic
* Passionate
* Stylish
* Theatrical
* Brash
* Brooding
* Hypnotic
* Intense
* Intimate
* Enigmatic
Still not good enough? Classify 'em yourself, lazy.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
www.mediamonkey.com it does ripping and tagging to your specs, you can then do a lookup on amazon for the album (amazon uk as well) and add the album art etc.
i've been using it for a while. it's also the only thing that can handle my mp3 collection. everything else crashes.
MusicBrainz is a free (libre) CCDB-like database of audio CDs.
The best ID3-Tag-Editor: - Can edit ID3 v1, v2 and Filenames - Table Layout: You see all your files at the same time - Open Source and written in Java, works on every operatin system http://mp3dings.sourceforge.net/
Who cares about musical genre anyway ? Who needs these useless categories, they are just boxes for the mind when real music is just about the opposite ...
Are Black Flag Punk or Hardcore ? Is Ministry Industrial, Punk or ... New Wave ? Are these genre tags including a "Progressive Punk Jazz Mayhem" category for John Zorg ? I say just drop those lame classifications :)
With that aggravating beauty, Lulu Walls.
I recommend you TigoTago - tag editor which provides access to 2 internet databases: freedb & discogs. More info at http://tigotago.com/
Now available new beta http://tigotago.com/beta
It's important to note though that the original poster was having a problem with the genre classification of his tagger. MusicBrainz has explicitly stated that they despise the notion of genre and do not go out of their way to support it. I use MusicBrainz to tag all my mp3s and ogg files but I've noticed oftentimes the genre just contains a bunch of junk and sometimes isn't populated at all. Just a caveat.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Yeah, laugh if you want to...
iTunes is free, it can rip CDs (yes, to mp3 as well), it organizes your library, you can search, you can make playlists.
iTunes uses Gracenote CDDB, which is quite good IMO.
the official standard (http://www.id3.org/) only defines 80 genres.
Nullsoft added a further 45 to the list, but these remain 'unofficial' additions.
you can see the whole list at http://puremango.co.uk/id3lib.txt
Goes like that in pseudo sql:
metal : genre ilike '%trash %' or genre ilike '%metal %' or genre ilike '%hard %'
rock: (genre ilike '%rock%' and genre not ilike 'hard%'), etc etc
classical: genre ilike '%classic%' and genre not ilike '%trash%' and genre not ilike '%rock', etc etc
So 'classical trash' will be listed in metal, classical rock in rock, but classical music in classical... Of courses there are way more criterias than that but you get the idea...
Then i ditch the genre view in the media library and use the dynamic playlists instead of it.
It works surprisingly well, in something like 95% of the cases the playlists will be enough.
And this way you can even have sub level, like metal playlist which will categorize all metal, death, trash, you name it band, and sub playlists for each genre if you really just want one of them...
I agree - multiple 'genre' tags would be ideal for me. I listen to many different styles of music, but for ease of use, my 57GB collection is broken down into 'pop', 'alternative', 'easy', 'rap', 'metal', and 'rock'. That's about it. (I do it this way so that I can choose 'Play Genre' on my MP3 player and end up with plenty of music - anything that wouldn't surprise me if heard on a true alternative station goes under 'alternative') If I run across an artist that fits into multiple categories, I'm screwed. Why not allow 'The Streets' to carry both the 'alternative' tag and the 'rap' tag, for example? That way, I'd hear that artist when playing a random selection from either genre.
TPJ - Founder, The Amazon Basin
Nice, but how many portable devices support APE tags?
TPJ - Founder, The Amazon Basin
My solution, in iTunes anyway, is just to use multiple Genres in the tag.
So if I'm not sure if a song is (for example) Metal or Alternative, I just tag it "Alternative Metal". That way searching for either "Alternative" or "Metal" in iTunes will bring up the song.
I'm not sure what the character limit is for the Genre field, but it's been enough for me to get several tags in there at once, on my more eclectic songs.
The obvious shortfall of this method is that if you SORT by Genre, as opposed to Filtering/Searching, then the song will only appear once in the sorted list, by whichever genre you put first (so in the above example, it would be Alternative). However I've found that most people, especially once they get a few thousand songs, find it more convenient to filter for a specific genre than sort and scroll for it.
If you wanted to be slightly more anal retentive, just consider the first genre you put down the "primary" one, and then the others as "secondary" ones; therefore having it sorted by its primary genre seems more logical.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The major place user submitted id3 databases fall flat on their faces is in the cataloging of classical music - some of the schema people use for that stuff is quite simply insane - movement names in the author fields, a lack of comprehensive composition names in the track field (ie, naming the first movement correctly and naming the second movement ii. allegro and that's IT), a total disregard for performers, no standard for capitalization, disparity of composer name formats. There's nothing even approaching a standard for such things and you end up doing it ALL by hand.
Just saying, if all you're worrying about is changing a genre field for every album you rip, will, it could be a helluva lot worse.
I actually wrote a basic guide to get through this particular minefield; it's over here on E2.
iTunes is still somewhat on my shitlist because it has a tendency to truncate my tags. If you have the automatic directory organization, it will also truncate the filename as well. Suddenly your "Leonard Philman - You Stole My Heart, You Stole My Life, But You Ain't Stealing My Pickup Truck.mp3" file becomes "Leonard Philman - You Stole My He.mp3" and the tag is changed correspondingly. If you manually set the tag in iTunes, it keeps the full name, but if you're importing, they get truncated. And then there's iTunes's tendency to choke on special characters...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
When editing my tags with some popular taggers, I noticed they did not view tags the same, and a few were inserting incorrect tags. Viewing what one editor inserted appeared differently on another. I found someone's free tagger at http://www.lomont.org/Software/Utilities/TEdit/ind ex.php which has some really nice viewing features, and I have used it for editing a lot of tags without problem.
MP3Bookhelper (mp3bookhelper.sourceforge.net) is great for mass tagging files. It won't lookup information for you, but it makes batch tag editing a breeze.
r t/
CDex is another fantastic piece of software. It's an open source CD ripper that can automatically check the FreeDB.org database to add tags to your ripped music. http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdexos
Album Cover Art Downloader will, surprise!, download and insert album cover art from Amazon,Walmart, and Yahoo into your mp3s. Did you know you could insert a jpeg into the id3v2 tags? A little rough around the edges but still recommended. http://louhi.kempele.fi/~skyostil/projects/albuma
For those of you who are more interesting in accurately naming your MP3s, I strongly recommend Jim Willsher's Bulk Rename Utility. It's amazingly powerful. Good for all kinds of files, not just MP3s.
qntm.org
I'd love to see the genome project open its data .. then the databases would serve text info for the track that isn't disputable (preferably from the record producer) and then the genome.
.. if this *band* is a jazz band, then every track on every album is tagged 'Jazz'. However there's many bands who might be considered Jazz who include a track that just isn't Jazz. Or more often, an 'Acid Jazz' band will include a 'Luisiana Jazz' track. I imagine the same problem exists in the OP's meta-genre of modern dance music.
.. they categorise individual songs on various things .. Major Key Tonality, Mildy Synchopated, Strong Vocals ...
Unfortunately many albums on FreeDB and CDDB are all marked with the same genre
The genome doesn't care who the band is or what anybody else thinks of them
That's much more useful than 'genre' as it (should) help any music player to find like-music. The genome project have released Pandora for this purpose. Give it a song you like and it will play other similar music based on the genome, not on the band or 'genre'.
Cheers!
Rick
MusicMatch Jukebox allows you to add your own genres. A good thing, too, given how completely lame the original genre set is. So now I have, for example, several hundred songs in the Bossa Nova genre (one they left out of the original genre set.) So if I'm in the mood for it, I can just pick (or auto-pick) Bossa Nova songs and I'm grooving.
So, yes, for me the genre definitely is useful. But no single tag is going to be enough, all by itself, to satisfy most people's categorizing needs.
In addition, MusicMatch allows you to also specify the Mood and Situation of the song, so you can have Instrumental Party, Late Night, Driving or whatever you'd like, and you can throw in whatever songs of whatever genres you want into them.
So to generate a playlist sometimes I use Genre if, say, I'm in the mood for heavy metal or 60's Punk. Sometimes I use Mood if I want to hear something melanchony, which could be Nick Drake (Folk) or Instumental Jazz, etc. It's so useful and flexible that ... I actually use it!
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
This may be news to some of you but I would be surprised if it was news to all. I am simply amazed that it has not yet come up in this discussion.
With iTunes, Amarok, Pandora and who knows what else, the genre classification of music simply does not matter anymore. Song, Artist, Album (or not), even Track Number is generally enough to identify a song as unique except for those of us that will be editing these fields ourselves. If all you want is to be able to listen to what you want when you want it and otherwise listen to your collection in some quasi reasonable progression look into "smart" or programable playlists.
With iTunes this is represented through the Party Shuffle feature which leaves a great deal to be desired as it is not even possible to include only or exclude parts of your music collection, it does however do a halfway decent job of avoiding putting entirely innapropriate types of songs together in the shuffle.
Amarok is perhaps the most obvious choice for those of us who use KDE, their Dynamic Playlists attempt to do the same thing that the iTunes Party Shuffle does but also ties into last.fm (previously known as Scrobbler) so that you can share your thoughts on what songs should follow others (this appears at the moment to only be a positively weighted system, no ability to balance this with a negative weighting). Amarok also allows for scripting and other means for generating dynamic playlists almost to your hearts content. I do hope they keep improving it into the realm of what Pandora is doing.
Pandora is a web based music player created by the Music Genome project that attempts to use their library of music which they have gone through and classified to a greater extent than any of us ever would (i would love to see their database). With this system they attempt to create individual and personalized playlists with the intent of both improving their system and introducing listeners to new music that they will like.
Perhaps someday when music genres are widely ridiculed as the amorphous conglomoration that they have beceome, it will be possible to go into a music store, be it brick and moarter or an internet reseller, and instead of searching by genre we can simply go through alphabetically and get what it is we want before checking out.
What do you use to tag files in Linux? I usually use the powerful EasyTag, but it doesn't use other forms of info, like amazon.com data. The gentoo default version also is an older one, that doesn't have some nice features. Any suggestions?
How do you handle this?