Combining Genres

[DavidHB]

(18-12-2014 11:02)mars51 Wrote:  I couldn't find a reference to this and I've become rather confused with all the tagging options so apologies is this is a stupid question as I've just come from JRiver with its view rules.
I have my Jazz tagged with multiple Genres (Jazz (Funk), Jazz (Post Bop) etc.). I've added #AudioQuality and I'd like a see a folder that gives me ALL Jazz at that quality. How do I combine the various Jazz (Xxxx) Genres together without making it a static playlist?

Thanks for asking this question, which I believe provides a very good illustration of the limitations of music tagging as we currently know it. Neither in MinimServer nor in any control point that I know of is it possible to group the results of a selection on a particular tag. And the point of MinimServer is that it does not have 'view rules'; the whole purpose of its intelligent browsing feature is that selections are made on the fly.

I assume that your files have just one Genre tag, and that the value in each tag is the full Genre designation - 'Jazz (Funk)' or whatever. Ideally, of course, it would be possible to use UPnP Search to identify files where the Genre tag includes the text 'Jazz', but as implemented in MinimServer (and in any control point I know, which is why Minimserver does it this way), the search function does not address the Genre tag. Any change to that approach would have to be implemented both in MinimServer and in (probably) more than one control point, so will not necessarily happen any time soon. So you can't achieve the grouping you are looking for without further tagging work.

There are two approaches I can think of. One is to have multiple genre tags in each file; one tag might have 'Jazz (Funk)', while another would have just 'Jazz'. The normal MinimServer selection process would enable you to select all the Jazz tracks and then the Audio Quality. Having multiple genre values in each file would slightly complicate the results of each selection step, but I don't think that would be a big issue.

The approach that I personally prefer, because it explicitly responds to your requirement for genre grouping, is to create a new tag altogether, which you might call 'Genre_Group'. This is the tag that would hold the value 'Jazz', and thereby combine your various jazz sub-genres. Having created this new tag, you would of course need to include it in the MinimServer indexTags property (and restart MinimServer) so that you can browse by genre group.

I'll not go into the 'how to' of multiple genre tags and creating a new tag, as this will be dependant on the software you use. But any good tagging program should do these things quite straightforwardly. Having a lot of files to re-tag can seem daunting, but again a good program that can deal with multiple files at once and read sub-folders recursively (such as MP3Tag on Windows machines) could probably get the job done in a couple of hours, even if the collection is quite large.

I hope this is helpful.

David