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[wmupchurch]

Hi,  I've checked the forum, but can't find the answers to these two questions.  

When I use JRiver to organize my music( 20,000+ .mp3s) I end up with to many genres.  hundreds?  I really need 10-20.  Is there a way to force the automatic cataloging feature to only use a small set of genres and force everything into those categories?

Second question.  In some cases, I have multiple names for my music, such as "red hot chilli peppers", "red hot chillis", etc.  they are all the same band.  Is there any way to auto group songs and albums and rename the folders?   what I need is a way to automatatically correct and group .mp3's to the correct album and folder.  thoughts?

thanks for any help you can provide.  way to many files to fix this manually!

[tcman41]

From an automatic standpoint, I don't think you are going to get much help. However JRiver does have extremely powerful search and tag features.

For example search for red, then highlight all albums that you want to be "red hot chili peppers" and with the tag feature set all to the same artist name with one click.

Your 20,000 files is about 1,400 albums, that's a fair amount but not that huge, first I would rename the albums into your correct artist groups first and then the same effort to get the genres correct.

It's going to take awhile, just do a little bit every day and after awhile it will all get done, when I first did my collection it was about 400 albums, took awhile to get the tags right but wasn't that bad, since then I have added about another 400 albums, giving them the correct tags as each one was added.

Good Luck
TC

[Lunatique]

For any serious music lover who is mostly computer-based, it's really an on-going maintenance thing that you do whenever you have some free time to spare. Try doing it for about a hour or two each week, and over time, you'll get a lot done. But it really seems impossible to get it all done because we're constantly adding new music to our collection, and there's only so much free time in a day. I have over 600GB of music currently and I've been doing this "maintenance" for years and years now, and it NEVER gets totally done since I keep adding more to the library.

[wmupchurch]

Thanks very much for all of your comments.   I did a little more research and found two programs that I'll try and then will fix whatever these programs can't sort out.  The products are tidy songs and tune up media.  Once I try these out, I'll post the results.

I still dont' know how to fix my issue of too many genres.  Last time I categorized my music there were hundreds of genres.  In doing some reading on this forum, it looks like I might be able to use custom fields and views somehow, but I'll have to spend the time to figure it out.  A great feature of MC would be to allow me to create parent-child genres.  For example, if I could see all the genres in a list, and then create "super genres" such as jazz, rock, pop, lounge, etc. and then simply assign all the genres to one of these super list. Said another way, I don't need 20+ categories of hip-hop.  I just need one, with all of the genres of Hip Hop included in the master genre.  Any guidance on how to organize genre into parent-child groups?

[Lunatique]

I have a system I've evolved over the years, and while it's not perfect, it's the only one that works for me currently. It's far too detailed for your needs, but it could give you some ideas on how to organize your own based on your own needs. Here's how it works:

1) First of all, if you are using any typical genre names like rock, blues, pop, jazz...etc, do not use them as is. What I do is add a suffix, something simple like a dash or underscore, or whatever you prefer, as long as it's easy to see and not too distracting. The reason why this is important is because too many audio files are tagged by people who neither have a correct understanding of genre distinctions, nor do they share your idea of what the parameters of specific genres are. So for example, if you have tracks you want to designate as rock, and you bought a new album where the people tagging it somehow thinks that some dance pop artist is "rock," then you'll have tracks that shouldn't be considered rock among your rock tracks, and that's annoying. With a suffix in place, you can immediately tell which tracks were manually tagged by you, passing YOUR personal criteria for what you think rock music should be, not what other people think it is. This way, in the future, whenever you see genres without a suffix in the tag, you know they're tagged by someone else and not you personally, and are to be totally trusted to be accurate in their genre tagging--until you confirm the tagging by retagging them with the suffix.

2) I tend to be more detail-oriented about genre distinctions because it helps me find tracks much faster, and also because I'm somewhat obsessive compulsive about it. I'm one of those people who have all my DVD's in alphabetical order, divided by genres, and sometimes by directors too. My CD's are the same way, as well as all my books. My hard drives are also meticulously organized. It really makes finding stuff much easier, but that also means you have to take the time to do the organization. It's one of those cases where once you start, it becomes second nature, and the rest is just adhering to the system you've created whenever you have new stuff to add to the collection.

3)My parent/child genre list currently consists of these:

Alt (short for alternative, which by today's standards means more like indie or anything non-mainstream)
   Alt-Contemporary (means adult contemporary, folk, or general singer/songwriter types like Sarah       McLachlan, Tori Amos...etc)
   Alt-Ethereal (Shoegaze, dreampop stuff like Cocteau Twins, The Sundays...etc)
   Alt-Rock (Guitar oriented bands with a rock root like Veruca Salt, Bush, Peal Jam...etc)
   Alt-Pop (More poppy stuff like Duran Duran, Rialto, ABC)
   Alt-Synth Pop (Depeche Mode, New Order...etc)
   Alt-Trip Hop

Audio Books

Avant-Garde

Big Band & Swing

Chinese
   Chinese-Other (I tend to use "other for anything that's not strictly pop or rock when it comes to languages other than English.)
   Chinese-Pop
   Chinese-Rock

Chillout (lounge, Cafe Del Mar type stuff)

Classical (not the classical period, but the mainstream use of the word to mean all concert orchestral and "serious" music like concertos, quartets, non-mainstream piano solos...etc.)

Compilations (stuff my friends compiled)

Demos (demo tracks used for pro audio product demonstrations--from synthesizers, guitar/bass effects, sample libraries, drum machine, to anything else.)
   Demo-Brass
   Demo-Drums
   Demo-Effects
   Demo-GM (General MIDI)
   Demo-Orchestral
   Demo-Soft Studios (such as Reason, Orion, FL Studio, or DAW sequencers in genreal like Cubase, Logic, Sonar...etc)
   Demo-Synth
   Demo-Voice
   Demo-Ethnic
(The actual folders further distinguishes between software and hardware demos)  

Electronic (General electronic artists not strongly affiliated with a genre or jumps around between genres)
   Electronic-Ambient
   Electronic-Drum'N'Bass
   Electronic-Electro
   Electronic-IDM
   Electronic-Noise
   Electronic-Pop
   Electronic-Progressive
   Electronica
(I avoid certain types of electronic music, such as happy hardcore or other unmusical, repetitive and annoying sub-genres I can't stand.)

Folk

Funk

Fusion

Hip-Hop
   Hip-Hop-Beatbox
   Hip-Hop-Rap

Humor

I/G (Industrial/Goth)
   I/G-Darkwave
   I/G-Goth
   I/G-Industrial

Instructional (audio production, musicianship, instruments)
   Instructional-Production
   Instructional-Bass
   Instructional-Drums
   Instructional-Guitar
   Instructional-Keyboard
   Instructional-Music Theory
   Instructional-Orchestration

Instrumentalists (musicians known for specific instruments, such as Jaco Pastorious, Steve Vai, Buckethead, Toots Thielemans...etc.)

Japanese
   J-Alternative
   J-Other
   J-Pop
   J-Rock
  
Jazz
   Jazz-Acid  
   Jazz-Bossa Nova
   Jazz-Classic
   Jazz-Contemporary
   Jazz-Fusion
   Jazz-Orchestras
   Jazz-Vocal

Korean
   K-Indie

New Age

Other Ppl's Sheit (music by fellow musicians/composers on various forums. They haven't made it big yet, so they are not categorized into the genre categories. Makes it easier for me to find them in one folder)

Pop (this includes diverse sub-genres like New Jack Swing, RnB, Dance...etc)

Rock
   Rock-Classic
   Rock-Hard
   Rock-Instrumental
   Rock-Metal
   Rock-Progressive
   Rock-Punk
   Rockabilly

Soundtrack
   Soundtrack-Anime
   Soundtrack-Film/TV
   Soundtrack-Games
   Soundtrack-J-Film/TV (Japanese TV/Movie scores)
   Soundtrack-

World

I don't listen to country, polka, or whatever other obvious genres that are missing. Even if I do, I place them in a MISC folder and call it the day. No need to go sort them out since they are not important enough to me.

Sometimes, I have further organization inside of the folders themselves instead of using just genre taggings. For example, although Soundtrack-Film/TV is all-encompassing of all soundtracks for film and TV, I actually have more detailed folder organizations such as by composer names or by only title of the film/show (if the score is not by just one composer, or are song compilations).

[joh]

Personally, I feel that it is too difficult to categorize music into genres. It will result in too many compromises. My strategy is therefore to have as few genres as possible - i basically ended up with:
- Pop & Rock
- Hip-hop, R&B, Rap
- Folk / Ethnic
- Vocal
- Jazz
- Classical & Opera
- Audiobooks & Recitals

Instead on relying on Genres, I try to categorize my favorite tracks (rated 4-5) to what I want to 'use' them for (I have a field "use" which is a multi value list, instead of the default situation), with values such as  Background, Dinner, Listening, Party, Work-out, Dance,... as well as using the  "mood" field.
Just a thought...

[Lunatique]

Yeah, playlists or custom fields are sometimes more useful for certain things. I have custom playlists/fields with these types of categories:

Aggression
Ambientscape
Axe Trax
Beatscape
Catchy As Hell
Chillout
Nostalgia
Darkness Falls
Dramatica
Easy Breezy
Emoticon
Enchanting Mysteries
Ethereal
Guilty As Hell
Humor & Fun
Influences
Monitor Test
Orchestral Gems
Party On
Pop Addiction
Public Broadcast
Rob's Noise (my own compositions)
Rockin' Out
Score!
Simply Good Stuff
Softer Moods
Synthetic Love
Ultra Cool