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[Arcadian]

Considering a big re-working of my 'Genre' tag metadata (deep breath... big undertaking), by moving many over to the 'Style' field using metadata retrieved from Discogs. (Side note, any thoughts or wizdom anyone has on whether Discogs is a solid de-facto source for Genres and Styles much appreciated. Seems pretty good to me... Are there better alternatives?).

The problem I find is that the system default 'Style' library field in MC is only data type String (rather than List) which means the multiple styles pulled down from Discogs just line up with a comma and I can't edit them individually. Eww.

My first question is why? Why would such a useful field be single entry and not multiple like the Genre field? Could the devs consider changing this to a List data type? If not, why?
My second question is, am I faced with having to delete the default 'Style' field so I can create the one I need? Is that my only option?
My final question is, what are the implications I need to be mindful of if I start not only deleting default fields but replacing them with an identically named custom field?

Thanks!

[blgentry]

In no particular order:

Default fields can not (to my knowledge) be deleted.  So [Style] is not something you can change or remove.

However, you can define your own field and make it a List type so it can take multiple values.  I call mine [Styles] . 

I was going to do a bunch of Genre and Style tagging myself a few years ago.  What I found was that I did not agree with all of the classifications on Discogs.  So I would consult AllMusic also.  I didn't agree with them 100% either.  So I ended up with a mix of data from both and some of my own that did not agree with either.

Ultimately I found this to be very difficult to do and I realized part way through it that I didn't really have a good way of using all of this data once I had painfully entered all of it.  In short, while I thought Genre and Style(s) were great ways to organize my collection, I didn't really even want to use them for browsing and searching.

Perhaps that's true for me because of my relatively small collection of a bit more than 600 albums.  If I had the somewhat insane collections that some people do with 10,000 or more albums, I might be looking for more organization in Genre and Style.  But at that point, how could you ever hope to accurately tag even 2000 or 3000 albums?  It would be a huge effort.

Best of luck to you,
Brian.

[comox]

Interesting discussion. I too have not found genre to be a field I commonly use for browsing so I don't put a lot of energy into refining it.

What has worked for me is to create a relational field linked to Artist with edit type five stars called [Artist Rating].

If you are going to put energy into cleaning up genre in a custom list type field I suggest you consider using the hierarchy feature of list fields. For example:

Styles\Pop+\Pop
Styles\Pop+\Rock
Styles\Pop+\Rap
Styles\Other\Country
Styles\Other\Folk
Styles\Other\Gospel
Styles\Classical\Opera
Styles\Classical\Orchestra

[Arcadian]

Brian, thanks for the feedback. I hadn't considered calling it 'Styles', I suppose I could just reconfigure the Discogs field mappings with that name. Do AllMusic have a tagging service like Discogs? Or did you look everything up manually? I'm using a Foobar2000 plugin to speed things up.

Comox, the hierarchy approach is an interesting one but the Genre tag is so ubiquitous in media players I just know it would grate seeing it blank or with different / duplicated content to styles in there.

My primary reasoning for using both Genres and Styles are this:

- Currently I have wayyyy too many genres because i've included a ton of styles in there (oops). Browsing is total overload.
- I would find definite benefit when browsing to begin by choosing from broader Discog-like Genre categories such as Electronic or Classical etc, they fit with a general mood based choice I feel.
- I would use Styles as a second level of categorisation when browsing into each Genre.

To go back to my original question. Could a dev please give me a sane reason why the 'Style' default field is not a multi-select list data type? Can this not be changed? Or would that cause problems? Surely nobody uses such a useless field with just one style !??

[eve]

"Sub-Genre" / Style tagging isn't even close to standardized anywhere that's available publicly.
beets + metadata from some 'unofficial' sources

[Arcadian]

It's a shame the MC field can't be made more useful. Is there anything to lose by changing it to list mode?

[DangerJP]

(Side note, any thoughts or wizdom anyone has on whether Discogs is a solid de-facto source for Genres and Styles much appreciated. Seems pretty good to me... Are there better alternatives?)

If you want to go full OCD with genres/styles, I'd suggest to check RYM genre system https://rateyourmusic.com/genres/. Pretty much the most complete genre database available, there is no competition IMHO
Unfortunately, there is no data scrapper for this site (to my knowledge).

[blgentry]

Do AllMusic have a tagging service like Discogs? Or did you look everything up manually? I'm using a Foobar2000 plugin to speed things up.

As far as I was aware there's no supported way to automatically grab Genre/Style from Discogs or AllMusic.  There is a set of scripts that MrC wrote that can do some of that, but it was too hard for me to set up.  Also, it used an API key and that key had restrictions that make mass queries impossible.

Maybe your foobar plugin has a better way of doing this.  I did it all manually.  I got tired of it quickly.

Best of luck.
Brian.

[eve]

If you want to go full OCD with genres/styles, I'd suggest to check RYM genre system https://rateyourmusic.com/genres/. Pretty much the most complete genre database available, there is no competition IMHO
Unfortunately, there is no data scrapper for this site (to my knowledge).

I agree with most of the names / choices that RYM has. Having said that, for more obscure things, they're likely to be lacking that in-depth tagging (you get the main genre, not subgenres, if the release is even on RYM). 

They unfortunately don't have a public API (I assume Sonemic has something internally, they're branching out into video games (very needed) and film) .

[Arcadian]

Thank you for all your helpful input.

DangerJP - I will definitely check out rateyourmusic.com/genres. Useful for individual album lookup but with the scale of my task I was only really planning to do it with the Foobar2000 Discogs scraper plugin.

blgentry - Completely understand, I was never attempting to use MC. For many years it's been my all-time favourite media manager for lots of reasons but tagging hasn't really been one of them. What I was seeking through my original post was to see if the MC devs would consider changing the Style field such that it would correctly display the metadata i've retrieved from other sources, in this case Discogs via the Foobar plugin.

eve - I see, my ultimate goal is to have two levels for better navigation but not necessarily two levels of what many term as genres. Although I know this is subjective, I personally think that the concept of a genre should be more restricted and more stable. Limited to a fewer number of top level definitions. Beneath those can exist the ever expanding myriad of what I see as styles that usually belong to one or more genres.

I hope the MC devs can see the benefit of opening up the default style field for more and better use through multiple entry list mode instead of string. Until then I will create a custom field.

[EnglishTiger]

Personally I use Wikipedia as a source for Genre, even though extracting them has to be done manually, as it often combines what other metadata sites/providers call "Genre" along with what they call "Styles" or "Sub-Genres".
One of the reasons why I dislike using "Genre" and "Style" from sies like Discogs is because all too often albums released in more than one "Region/Area", i.e. Europe, can have totally different Genres and Styles in other Areas, i.e. America, Asia, Japan or Australia.

Incidentally I never could find any logic in spreading information/metadata across multiple tags/fields when it can all be held in a single field.
Nor do I find any sense in building a "Genre" tag  that includes what sites like Discogs label as Genre when the name of that genre is included in the list of Styles/Sub-Genres