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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
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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
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.
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.
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
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.
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Gabber is a kind of techno/house music, i think its made by Dutch producers mostly. Anyway it is IMHO the most god awfull noise known to man-kind and should be avoided at all costs.