I just thought to quickly look on how to proper deal with multiple genre entries in music files. But I think there isn’t any real and good solution that suits everyon’s ideas of how to do it. The current ID3 tag version still has only the one “Genre”-tag for a whole bunch of music genre and style varieties.
So I am torn between the two ideas of having one tag “Genre” to put all the information in or adding multiple “Genre” tags for each genre and style.
Audirvaña supports the first idea, but I tend to lean towards the second one. Also, because I think that this version would be something more music players will recognise.
So, what are your ideas on that and how do you organise your genres? Also, do you use a seperator when having everything in just one field? I found one example that uses semicolons and no spaces: “Rock;Prog-Rock;Krautrock”.
I also gave up on genre, I wish music files tags could work with keywords instead, and was the standard (I mean, that’s just incredible, each software shows a different set of values for tags, and some softwares like music player for iOS don’t even bother reading the year). Like reddog1 said, too difficult to define as well, you can have several genres in one album of one artist, and people fight about which genre it really is, even worse when it comes to subgenres. In the end, I just create playlists with tracks or albums I feel to be in the same mood, and most are either labelled rock, pop, electro, classical. And even there, rock and pop are too generic and too specific at the same time, haha.
Genre tags are important for me, because that’s one of the few keywords I am making playlists from. And that’s why I am interested in having more than just the generic “Rock” entry there. Audirvaña doesn’t support multiple Genre fields but if it finds them, it shows them as it was just one field.
When I buy digital music, the Genre tag quite often is empty. I guess nobody wants to burn their fingers here, as it really is also a personal taste. I always look at Discogs for the music genre and msuic style, but do not agree with every assignment someone did there. But at least they try.
I do have an upgrade on this topic, as I contacted the author of the tag editor Kid3, which is my standard editor for tagging music files. He explained the Genre topic to me, and here’s how I understood it:
mp3- and dsf-files can only have one genre field, but can hold multiple genres in it.
As a seperator, the pipe symbol “|” should be used without a space between the genres (“Rock|Rhythm and Blues”).
With ID3v2.3.0 all but one genres have to be from the official genre list (see wikipedia), as genres are listed with their corresponding genre number, and not with their name. “Rock|Rhythm and Blues” would be stored as “17|14” within the music file.
Depending on the programme you use to add and change tags in your music files, you propably have to type in the genre number, instead of the genre name. If not, the programme changes the name into a number internally. A music player software might ignore those names that are not from the official genres list. So if you ever wondered where your genres have gone, this might be the cause.
With ID3v2.4.0 genres are listed with their names, so you can feel free to add whatever genre name you can think of in your list. You still should use the Pipe as a seperator.
Flac files (they use the Vorbis comment for describing meta data), should have multiple genre fields instead of just one, so one field for each genre you want to add.
And as with mp3 and dsf files, you should look out for the ID3 version you are using.