[ID3 Dev] Using multiple tags to specify genre and other traits.

[Tom Sorensen]

You're already allowed to have multiple genres in the TCON field. v2.4
is explicit about how to separate them (with a NULL), but the more
predominant v2.3 is not (some use NULLs, some use spaces). There's no
need to allow for multiple TCON fields.

One issue is that many taggers don't explicitly allow you to specify
more than one genre though, especially the v2.3 taggers. Which is why
space delimitation is more common in v2.3 -- just string together the
genres with spaces and you're done. There's a minor complication that
you cannot immediately distinguish "acid jazz" from "acid funk jazz",
but that's largely avoidable -- when you're doing genre searches,
enclose the multiple-word genre in quotes and your software _should_
do the right thing.

Tom

On 3/16/07, Ståle Askerød Johansen <s.a.johansen at usit.uio.no> wrote:
>
> Hi. I'm new.
>
> This may be an old discussion, but important nonetheless.
>
> Historically, the "genre" has been the standard for specifying
> the "type" of music in an mp3-file. However, a piece of music will often
> belong to more than one genre. Moreover, people have not always agreed
> on which genres are needed to describe their music, so this has led
> to a plethora of more or less strange genres in use.
>
> It is time to move on.
>
> Structuring information is difficult. As a sysadmin trying to manage
> lots of different hosts with different roles, I meet this problem on a
> near daily basis. The solution is using multiple "roles", or "tags" to
> describe various "abilities" of something, whether it is webpages,
> music or servers.
>
> Over the last couple of years, using multiple "tags" has become a de
> facto standard in some internet communitites for structuring and
> categorizing webpages. A look at del.icio.us is a good example. This
> allows for much more fine-tuned selection criteria than just using a
> single variable.
>
> Let me give you an example.
>
> It's friday. I'm tired from a long week. I want to play some suitable
> music. Instead of choosing the genre "slow jazz", I want to choose
>
> jazz AND slow AND 70s AND instrumental AND NOT french AND NOT sad
>
> Tomorrow I'm having some guests over. For dinner we'd like some
> music. In want to choose
>
> (jazz OR classical) AND piano AND (norwegian OR swedish) AND NOT modern
>
> So. What do you think? My guess is that this won't be very difficult to
> code, the problem is to agree on a standard for this. Or is it a stupid,
> childish idea?
>
>
> --
> Ståle Johansen, Norway.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: id3v2-unsubscribe at id3.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: id3v2-help at id3.org
>
>

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: id3v2-unsubscribe at id3.org
For additional commands, e-mail: id3v2-help at id3.org