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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."
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/
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.
Dead Can Dance? Easy. Just make a 4AD label and you're covered. : p
Why on earth would you want to use id3v1? id3v1 has the goofy single-byte genres. id3v2 supports strings of arbitrary length. Some software (like Slimserver) lets you have multiple genres per track, using the delimiter of choice.
The real catch is defining your genre set, but that gets very tricky to do in a way that you'll be satisfied with.
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.
This brings to my mind a very interesting point. In my mind, genre is not something that should be assinged by artist. There are many artists in my collection that play many different types of music. I'm in the process of re-tagging all my music so that each song is assessed on its own merits. eg. "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a lot different than "Give It Away", and I don't think that they should be classified the same. This makes it a lot easier to create playlists that have similar music. The only thing that would make this even easier would be if iTunes would set up keywords (similar to iPhoto). This method does make for more work setting up the database initially, but makes it a lot easier to manage once it is all set up.
I also think that there is no ideal third-party solution for this problem. Everyone has different tastes, and different ideas on how things should be organized. Any music collection will need some tweaking, at a minimum, to get things the way you like.
Do you reckon that might be because iTunes gets its info from CDDB?
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
Does anyone know an applicatioin that handles songs that are not in English? e.g. Chinese or Japanese.