Best practices in tagging

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Iver

Best practices in tagging

Post by Iver »

Dear Forum members,

I am a happy user of MediaMonkey and use the product to keep control on a 4000 albums lossless library.

One of my favourite genres is Jazz, and I am now completing my collection.

Given my jazz collection is getting big, I'd like to diverse the Genres. For the moment, all albuls are tagged "Jazz", but I'd like to split them up in things like Jazz-funk, Jazz-Big band, Jazz-Vocal etc .... What is the best way to go ?

Of course I can create different Jazz-genres, but what I really like, is a kind of sub-genres "below" Jazz, so everything tolls up to the master genre Jazz. Can this be done and how ? If not, do other users have an alternative approach for this issue ?

Cheers,
Iver
yarguy
Posts: 394
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2012 8:34 am

Re: Best practices in tagging

Post by yarguy »

Iver,

I created a Jazz collection (to parallel the Classical Music Collection that comes with MM). File > Manage Collections > Add new collection. (You may have to scroll down in the right panel of the options box that comes up to find the Add new... option.) This serves to group all the genres that I use for my jazz recordings. A collection can be defined by Genres (among other properties) and that is all I use to define the jazz collection. For the genres I use pretty standard labels: swing, bop, hard bop, free, mainstream, fusion, post-bop (pretty meaningless I know). If I need to think about what genre I want I use "Jazz" as a place-holder. Because you can have multiple genres for a recording (separated with ; ) I also have a group type genre (big band, vocals, small group, piano trio, etc.). For example, I just added Buddy Rich's Big Swing Face and used the genre(s) Mainstream; Big Band and the recording automatically shows up in the Jazz Collection.
Iver wrote:
Given my jazz collection is getting big, I'd like to diverse the Genres. For the moment, all albuls are tagged "Jazz", but I'd like to split them up in things like Jazz-funk, Jazz-Big band, Jazz-Vocal etc .... What is the best way to go ?

Iver
dtsig
Posts: 3588
Joined: Mon Jan 24, 2011 6:34 pm

Re: Best practices in tagging

Post by dtsig »

I don't know of a way to "roll up" to Jazz and if here is I will be very excited to hear about it. But I simply use multipe genre allowing to find the flavors I want. Use a semi colon to seperate your genre and it works pretty well. I always put Jazz as the first one (don't know why but ocd again). Then try to keep the others in some sort of order.

If there is a better way I would love to hear about it
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DTSig
Scottes
Posts: 150
Joined: Sat Mar 21, 2009 6:51 am

Re: Best practices in tagging

Post by Scottes »

I like fairly generalized Genres, but stuff all the various, more detailed genres from Discogs and last.Fm into Custom5. Then I can query on Genres to play general Rock, or query Custom 5 if I want to hear some Progressive Space Rock.
yarguy
Posts: 394
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2012 8:34 am

Re: Best practices in tagging

Post by yarguy »

MM (at least in version 4, I didn't use earlier versions) has several ways to "roll up" genres (and other album & track properties). I wrote above about using a collection as a roll up. You can also use automatic playlists. Any recording gets automatically put (by MM) in my jazz collection if the genre meets the criteria I set up for that collection (other collections include comedy and blues; and of course they have different criteria). Nothing prevents a recording from being in more than one collection. I use automatic playlists to create "sub-collections". For example, I created an automatic playlist called "vocal jazz" whose criteria are that the track appear in the jazz collection and that one of the genre entries is "vocal" (as you note MM allows many genre entries for a track, separated by ; ). This works very well for me. And it would probably work even better if I could always decide what genre(s) to assign to a recording rather than just stick "jazz" in the genre field.

dtsig wrote:I don't know of a way to "roll up" to Jazz and if here is I will be very excited to hear about it. But I simply use multipe genre allowing to find the flavors I want. Use a semi colon to seperate your genre and it works pretty well. I always put Jazz as the first one (don't know why but ocd again). Then try to keep the others in some sort of order.

If there is a better way I would love to hear about it
meatlump
Posts: 18
Joined: Mon Aug 15, 2005 6:47 pm
Location: Pennsylvania, US

Re: Best practices in tagging

Post by meatlump »

Iver wrote:sub-genres "below" Jazz, so everything tolls up to the master genre Jazz.
Iver
Here's how I do it with my rock music.

I use multiple genres, pulled from allmusic.com styles. My choice of most appropriate "sub-genre" goes first, followed by any others, with rock at the end.

- All rock music is accessible through the rock genre, without having to worry about all of the sub-genres.
- When syncing to a device I only use the first genre, so that is my choice of most appropriate sub-genre. (could reverse with rock first if you want only that to show on the device.

e.g.
Lynyrd Skynyrd - Southern Rock; Rock -> syncs as Southern Rock
The Eagles - Country Rock; Album Rock; Soft Rock; Folk Rock; Rock -> syncs as Country Rock
Black Sabbath - Heavy Metal; British Rock; Alternative Rock; Rock -> syncs as Heavy Metal
meatlump

There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can't.
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