Best Way to Keep Rock/Pop Separate from Classical

[tarnkappe]

Such a „main genre“ is the reason why I am using folder view. I have different folders like classic, jazz, pop, rock. And e.g. in rock there is alternative rock, hard rock, etc. Or in pop there is also soul and funk, etc.

I think it is too much work to re-tag all files and clean up the genres. Also because there are so many genres that in my opinion are chosen wrong for many albums.

After navigating into a folder I can access the meta-tag browsing using the „>> Tag View“ folder.

Gert

[simbun]

(16-01-2022 11:41)tarnkappe Wrote:  I think it is too much work to re-tag all files and clean up the genres. Also because there are so many genres that in my opinion are chosen wrong for many albums.

It sounds like you have a file structure that gives you the genres/styles you want, so it should be relatively trivial to translate that into tags (in terms of your time, not the processing time of course), any decent tagger should be able to handle that type of operation for you.

(16-01-2022 11:41)tarnkappe Wrote:  After navigating into a folder I can access the meta-tag browsing using the „>> Tag View“ folder.

The problem is that if you want to use your "main Genre" you need to do it as the first operation, as whilst you can switch from folder view to tag view, you can't do the opposite, so, using RecentlyAdded as an example, you couldn't look at the albums you added over the last year and see what Genres they were made up of. It also flies in the face of what to me is MinimServers strength, its Intelligent Browsing.

[JohnBrown]

Hi, I am currently considering a move from (Linux server+LogitechMediaServer+Logitech Player) to (Synology NAS+some media server+some UPnP HiFi renderer). Part of it is my research of various media servers and I ended up with two candidates: MinimServer and Asset, both recommended by e.g. Cambridge Audio. One of the problems I will have to solve is the difference between classical and non-classical music. I almost started a new thread but found this one, so I am rather adding my two cents here.

There are many on-line discussions regarding tagging classical music (some of the interesting ones are e.g. https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Classical, https://absolutelybaching.com/music-arti...-tagging/, https://absolutelybaching.com/music-arti...to-music/. I dare not recommend any structure, everyone will need to find his own way in this minefield. However, what all articles / guides / etc. seem to agree on is a need for completely different structures for classical and pop music.

The first thing I excluded were the profiles. They would be the ideal solution, if they could be selected in the control point as the first step in the browsing tree. Which they can't, I think.

That leaves custom tagging and multiple instances. I came to the conclusion that I will need a custom tag (let's call it MainGenre or Collection or Library), as proposed by adriaan, unless I physically separate the collections. I made a test with a few FLAC files and added an "extended tag" named MainGenre to them using mp3tag, setting its value to "classical". Then I added this tag to indexTags in MinimServer and rescanned. And bingo, MinimServer dutifuly picked it up and the Bubble UPnP control point on my Android displayed MainGenre as one of the top-level nodes of the browsing tree. So I think that this is a viable option (provided you have some current way to identify and separate the files for batch tagging). (I suppose this a very similar solution to the one proposed by stefano_mbp, using the tagUpdate property, the difference being that in that case you depend on MinimServer and cannot reuse the classification in other apps.)

My remaining concern is the obvious need for different browsing structures for each MainGenre. Here I think the solution probably depends on the complexity of the collections and the browsing needs. Personally I only need AlbumArtist - Album for pop and Composer - (Genre) - Work - (Artist) - (Movement) for classical. That is only seven tags for the start-up screen, which I think is acceptable. On top of that, if you always start by the MainGenre, Work and Movement will never appear in pop. Composer might, I have a few files like that, tagged by someone else, personally I do not bother filling this in for pop songs. If you start with classical, you will see all tags, but then this is not necessarily bad, e.g. if you want to choose a compilation album.

Well and if none of the above works, the least appealing solution seems to be to use an instance per collection.