cellio | how do you tag your MP3s?

MP3s ripped from CDs or bought digitally (usually) come pre-tagged, including "genre". "Genre" has an eclectic set of options including folk, rock, soundtrack, children's, Christmas, gospel, international, electronic, and electronica/dance, to name just a few. Some CDs of Jewish music came tagged as Christian (!) or gospel, and I changed those to Jewish (a new category) at the time. An MP3 can have at most one genre (hence options like folk-rock, I guess).

Some of these genres are orthogonal to each other. Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds", "Pirates of Penzance", and "West Side Story" are all soundtracks, but they are not similar musically. Children's isn't a genre; it's an audience or application. "Nowell Sing We" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are both Christmas songs, but they're not the same at all (I would sort the former with "early", another category I had to invent because "classical" just doesn't fit the middle ages and renaissance). (Ok, I wouldn't have the latter in my collection, but work with me here...) I have no idea what the difference between "electronic" and "electronica/dance" might be, and how the latter differs from "dance".

I think the makers of the tagging system conflated style and purpose. We're running into this a lot with international dance music (often dances are set to folk songs), or with everything from folk to blues to rock ending up together because they're "Jewish", or SCA dance music being scattered across "SCA" (this must have been a custom category for someone), "dance", "classical", "folk" (?), and probably others. And I'd like to be able to tag the subset of folk music that is children's music (for selective exclusion), without losing its folk-ness.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the correct way to do this is to use "genre" for what it is musically and some other tag for usage (if it has a primary usage). Looking at the tags available to me in iTunes, it looks like I should use "grouping" for this. (I've never seen this field filled in, so I don't know what conventions surround it.) So early music is early music and some of it might be grouped as "dance", folk is folk and rock is rock and some of each might be grouped as "Jewish" (or perhaps "Jewish liturgical", since that's what I'm really after), and the Hebrew folk songs that are used for Israeli dances would "folk" (genre) and grouped as "dance", and so on. (Maybe we want to distinguish SCA dance and international folk dance; that's an implementation detail.) But before I try to do anything along these lines I'd like input: how do you capture multiple dimensions of your music? (Another option, just to throw it out there, is to use playlists as buckets. We're doing some of that but it doesn't feel sustainable to me.) I want to be able to find music by genre or by purpose, which says to me I want two searchable fields.

We are currently using the comments field to support tags iTunes doesn't give us. For example, there's no off-the-shelf way to tag the language of a song! So for the languages we care about we have entries in the comments field like LANG_HEBREW. We're also doing something similar to tag the Child ballads (TAG_CHILD_#_) so we can easily find the dozen variations on "Maddy Groves" scattered through the library. (Child ballads are a special interest of Dani's.) We're also using this field for meta-data about our own recordings (e.g. TAG_WEAK); "comments" probably isn't a good place for that but those were the first tags we added so we grabbed the obvious field and now we're kind of stuck unless we want to do a lot of work.

A problem with using "comments" is that you can't systematically add to a comment field, only replace it. So if we wanted to use it for other tags (like usage) and wanted to apply those in bulk, we couldn't without stomping some of our existing tags. Well, we could write a perl script, I guess, but I looking for something a little closer to the GUI.

So how do the rest of you track extra information? Or are we the most finicky among our circle of friends? :-)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Soundtrack" was the most useless category. Anything tagged that, I break up, into Show Tunes, Rock, Folk, etc.

I do sometimes combine genres (Folk Rock, Punk Rock, Punk Folk, etc.) such that a playlist searching for "Folk" would find multiple subcategories.

There are Applescripts out there for mass-editing iTunes info that might do comment-add; try Doug's Scripts (http://dougscripts.com/itunes/). If you don't have a Mac, I'm not sure what the Windows equivalent is. A perl script would definitely do it. ;)

I also use Comments -- aka 'etc.' -- for such info. I used to put Composer in there until it became a field, and still have some leftovers like that.

One of the tags I want is "live" versus "album version". I've ended up putting these in the title, sometimes with even more info ("Bridge Over Troubled Water [Live 1982]") when I have 3 or more versions. Otherwise the de-duper sometimes tries to cull them.

Gosh this cat is well-flossed! I should get back to writing.

Thanks for the script pointer. I do have a Mac, so no issues there. I'll look around and see what he's got that we can reuse.

I hadn't thought about a "live" tag. That would be useful! Especially on albums where the spoken intros are part of the track instead of separated out. Sometimes I just want music, after all. Putting that in the title sounds like a good approach.

I should get back to writing.

If that would be the sequel to "No Present", I won't argue. :-)

"No Past" has been written for almost decade now...I'll stop teasing y'all and post it.

Honestly, I do not bother tagging, because (a) I'm lazy, (b) it didn't support UTF-8 for far too long, and (c) I'm generally looping through maybe two dozen hand-picked songs that I happen to want to listen to this month. It does seem shocking that they do not support more than one genre (apparently there is a secondary section where additional genres can be placed, but Winamp doesn't recognize it).

Dani and I are merging music collections as part of this, which means there are good discovery opportunities for both of us if we can just get functional tagging. 20,000 songs on shuffle isn't useful. :-)

But you need not only good tagging, but a player that can subselect based on those tags. That almost sounds like a custom music player (or a ton of auto-generated playlists from the Perl code you write).

Smart playlists in iTunes do a reasonable job of that. You build a query based on tagging and it auto-populates a playlist (and keeps it current when you change tags or add more music).

I did not know that. Cool!

I've only had my iPod for a month, but have but perplexed by how the genre tags are used in iTunes. Particularly bizarre was the three CD set by the same performer where two were tagged "country" and one was tagged "folk". WTF? I've been going in and changing genres so I can group songs for listening, but would be interested in other methods. Yeah, ok, playlists, but they're annoying to build.

We've seen multi-genre CD sets, where that was clearly not about different types of music in the same collection, too. We've also seen some mutations in Israeli CDs, like a two-CD set where one CD was tagged in Hebrew and the other in transliteration. (We've also seen translations of varying quality.) I understand variation from CD to CD even from the same publisher, but from disc 1 to disc 2 in a single set? Weird.

I seem to recall that iTunes uses a service which is essentially a user-submitted database. So if two different people submitted the CD info, you'd get two different tags. I've seen errors on occasions, but I think that the worst ones do get fixed (eventually)

I'm quite certain the short answer to "where do these genres come from" is "in which aisle would Your Mall's CD Store file this" - which in turn is a very rough cut at "people who bought X also bought Y". As a result, "Early Music" can land in Classical, Folk or even World Music on the grounds that said store doesn't have enough of it for its own aisle and its fans probably overlap "well enough" with one of those. Leaving aside for the moment the question of how useful that is to anyone outside of that context, its historical value means it's something you're more likely to get for free as part of your data feed from each of your publishers - although that also means you may get "dance" or "pop" or "rock" for the exact same style depending on what language each feed uses and what level of schema normalization you try to do.

On the one hand, I re-tag for genre ruthlessly (I'm sure it's no surprise that I've got enough "Early Music" to break that out into its own too). On the other hand, I'm not sure how much I really ever use that, after going through the trouble to try and tag - I typically build playlists or search by artists.

You're probably right about where the genre tags come from. Though it's weird that sometimes similarly-styled CDs from the same artist from the same publisher vary. Maybe "classical" was too 20th-century, to be replaced by "world"? (iTunes has both "world" and "international", by the way -- another weird one.)

I find that some genre tags are more useful than others. "Folk" has too many thousands of songs in it to be useful on its own, but "early" has potential to still be useful, particularly if I could tag for dance, choral, non-choral vocal, and instrumental. "Humor" is still small enough to be useful.

Currently I tend to select music primarily by artist, but it's easy for tunnel vision to set in. We've got a lot of music I haven't listened to in years and some I've never heard (Dani's); I'd like to improve that situation. But random selections from the full set (shuffle, in other words) isn't the way to go; I want at least some clustering.

I don't bother with expanding the tagging. While I agree that the existing genre tagging is wonky at best, I generally rely on the artist/group's name as my best sorting criteria.

How big is your library, out of curiosity?

It's odd that iTunes doesn't support language listing, since it is supported in the file format. Here's a list of ID3 fields (http://www.id3.org/Frames) (which I believe is the industry standard for encoding meta data onto music files).

Wow, odd indeed. Thanks for that link.

how do you tag your MP3s?

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