Improved genre support

[Bedlore]

I follow the discog method of genre definitions, as such one track can fall into several genres and styles.  To do we require separator/delimiter support. 

For example I use a semi-colon like this.  Rock; Pop, so my seperator would be "; " I opt for semi-colon because one common name in discog contains a comma, specifically, Folk, World, & Country

Also I'm not sure how much interest there would also be in adding style support but I find that extremely useful and would get my vote as an additional filter.

[Tim Curtis]

I thought MPD already parses a delimited genre tag into multiple separate genre tags. If not then IIRC tag editors have an option to do this.

[Bedlore]

I thought MPD already parses a delimited genre tag into multiple separate genre tags. If not then IIRC tag editors have an option to do this.

I'm not aware that MPD can.  I get that I could mass edit and retag all 115,000 tracks to suit Moode, but I suspect this would not be an uncommon issue users would face, thus the request.

[Tim Curtis]

Here's the most recent MPD issue I can find related to multiple genre tags
https://github.com/MusicPlayerDaemon/MPD/issues/940

[Bedlore]

Thank you. That's interesting, I might have to dive deeper. In moode I'm lacking a lot of genres I know are there, and also seeing non-separated genres like "Rock; Pop".

I've searched mpd docs and can't find anything on this, so I assume its hard coded.

[Tim Curtis]

Right. I think to achieve your goal the tagging app needs to create multiple genre tags instead of a single tag with a delimited string.

IIRC the reasoning behind MPD not supporting the delimited genre string is that there is no standard for how its structured i.e., is it semicolon, comma, space etc., and what about an accidental mixture like genre1; genre2, genre3;genre4 genre5

[TheOldPresbyope]

Right. I think to achieve your goal the tagging app needs to create multiple genre tags instead of a single tag with a delimited string.

IIRC the reasoning behind MPD not supporting the delimited genre string is that there is no standard for how its structured i.e., is  it semicolon, comma, space etc., and what about an accidental mixture like genre1; genre2, genre3;genre4 genre5

There's multiple sides to this problem.

1. What can a particular metadata tagging scheme accommodate? VORBIS COMMENT, for example, explicitly allows multiple instances of a tag, including genre. ID3v2.3 supports one instance of the genre tag and doesn't allow for multiple genre values (but people hack it with slashes, commas, and other crapola). OTOH,  ID3v2.4 does allow multiple values using a null character as separator. Yada, yada, yada. This means FLAC files will have to be dealt with differently than will MP3, than will Apple Music files, etc.

2. Every metadata editor I've come across has its own way of hiding the sausage-making details from the user and making it seem all music files can be tagged the same way.

3  MPD has many different plugins to deal with different audio encodings and metadata tag schemes.

4. MPD mushes what it gets from these plugins into its own scheme of supported tags. (see the list in the MPD documentation)

5. Every music player built on MPD has its own way of dealing with the result. We're focused on moOde here.

I started a project several years ago to work through this backwards. Since moOde knows only what MPD tells it and since MPD forces everything through its supported tags, I started trying to figure out what had to be present in different track encodings to get what I wanted displayed in moOde. I wanted to have a portfolio of files in different formats for testing and demonstration. I ran out of patience.

I have no idea what a "style" tag would be.

Regards,
Kent

ETA - PS - I'm not aware of any metadata tagging schieme which supports genre classification. I'd love it for organizing classical music (as just one example).

[Tim Curtis]

I had an old TODO list item to "parse genre tag if delimited string" for tag and album view but I ran into the issue mentioned earlier: "who knows how the string will be delimited". There are collection that use semicolon and others that use commas, slashes, etc.

[Nutul]

Multiple genre handling is file-format specific (or should I say tag-specific)
FLACs (Vorbis comment tagging method) require MULTIPLE genre tags.
Id3v2 may use the semicolon OR the pipe to separate genres (not always supported, depends on the actual version/release, 2.0 / 2.1 / 2.???).
Others escape my memory ATM,

MPD handles them all with great care.