Determining musical genre

[Number45]

In my ongoing battle to get my music catalogue properly catalogued and tagged, I'll soon be moving on to categorising the songs/albums by their respective genre. Does anyone have any tips/tricks for doing this? I'm thinking of keeping it to very simple classifications like Rock/Metal/Pop etc., but another part of me wants to go deeper than that and classify them properly - but then how do I make these classifications (I'm thinking using the genre for the album on Wikipedia where available)?

I don't mind that it's time consuming, I'm in no hurry. I can automate some of the tagging duties with MP3TAG as well.

[abigsmurf]

Use the artist's wiki page. That's probably the most reliable way.

[JP]

This is something that I spent absolutely ages messing around with when transferring my CD collection onto my Mac. After repeatedly messing around and altering the genres I ended up just listing them as what I thought was most suitable irrelevant of what they're listed as elsewhere.

When it comes down to it these labels are little more than ways of being able to sort and collate your library. I imagine I have genres listed that maybe nobody else has ever used or would consider to be a genre but it helps me with a rather large music library.

I used to be a trader or rare and collectable music on CD, vinyl, acetate, etc so over the years I amassed a massive library so I've needed to spend a lot of time organising what I have on the Mac now. Te catalogue system has changed many times but I've finally got something that seems spot on.

I use iTunes which is really good for a large library but I believe if you're a Windows user the software doesn't work as well as the OS-X version.

I still have about a bazillion CDs to add but each time I add some I catalogue them one CD at a time but it's really quick and it takes a couple of minutes to alter the CD listings to fit in with the others in my catalogue.

It's probably going to be a right pain at first, it was for me but I think it's worth putting the time in to organise these things.

[Number45]

Thanks for the feedback John, although I'm not sure I can come up with my own genres past the standard Rock/Pop etc. Genre-ifying things has never been one of my strong points!

Use the artist's wiki page. That's probably the most reliable way.

Would you automatically categorise everything by the same artist under the same genre?

[abigsmurf]

Not always but most big changes in direction and genre by artists are documented.

[Number45]

Cheers, I'll give it a whirl then and see how I get on.

[Darwock]

If it has guitars in it, it's Rock. If it has piano in it, it's Ballad. If it's something you would dance to, file under Pop. Anything else can be categorised as Contemporary General Rhythmic Church.

To be honest I find the whole thing a bit of a headache. Looking at my current library sorted by genre there's some ludicrous stuff in there - some music is even sub-categorised by geographical location (east coast rap).

Some other baffling ones in my library:

ska revival (differs from ska how exactly?)
new age
new wave
old school
lo-fi
industrial dance (conjures up images of the village people to me, a guy in a hardhat dancing)
general alternative (lol!)

[Number45]

Surely something you would dance to is Dance? Perhaps something you would mute is Pop?

Good to see I'm not the only one befuddled by it all!

[EJG1980]

I've never found the need to sort / search my music by genre so for years I've just set the genre tag of everything in my collection to "music".

[Number45]

That would definitely make the process easier.

I'm not sure I could live with it though, I want to get a proper comprehensive picture of my collection.

[rmoxon]

Surely something you would dance to is Dance? Perhaps something you would mute is Pop?

Good to see I'm not the only one befuddled by it all!

Most music that people call dance music isnt what people dance too though, they just jump up and down and nod their head to it.

Music genres are a waste of time anyway becuase every peice of music sounds different. Looking at my own music collection I dont think half of it can be defined at all without the use of about 15 words (and thats for every single song seperatley).

[cutmymilk]

Argh this is the only thing I need to do. It sucks doesnt it!!

[toythatkills]

My music is all classed as "pre-Friday" and "post-Friday."

But I'd just come up with the broadest genres you can, and keep it simple. Rock, Metal, Indie, Pop, Dance, Country, Tuvan Throat Singing

So that they're just vague enough to make everything really easy to classify. And classify them yourself, you know what they sound like. There's no point putting something in rock (because Wikipedia says so) that you consider to be metal, because otherwise it won't be there when you want it.

[kernow]

I own all the music in my itunes on cd, so it defaults to whatever genre CDDB gave it o//

[Number45]

I own all the music in my itunes on cd, so it defaults to whatever genre CDDB gave it o//

I use dBpoweramp which gives me four sources for genre, and they're usually all different.

But I'd just come up with the broadest genres you can, and keep it simple. Rock, Metal, Indie, Pop, Dance, Country, Tuvan Throat Singing

So that they're just vague enough to make everything really easy to classify. And classify them yourself, you know what they sound like. There's no point putting something in rock (because Wikipedia says so) that you consider to be metal, because otherwise it won't be there when you want it.

This is what I'm thinking is the best course of action. The best mixture of accuracy and ease, and probably the only one I'll truly be happy with in the end.