I've spent an excessively long time fussing with the metadata of my similarly excessive music library. A large part of that has been worrying over genres: a few decades of different auto-taggers and reference libraries left me with a scrambled mess of genres for most of my life. Upon trying to build a playlist of instrumental music for work, I was infuriated to find songs tagged as "Classical", "Baroque", "Baroque/Classical", "Video Game", "Soundtrack", "OST", etc., etc.
I tried to solve this manually but I've gotten sick of consulting Wikipedia, Discogs, Allmusic, and (once upon a time) Spotify to boil down that mess into a single category. Lo and behold, the music auto-tagger that everyone seems obsessed with, beets.io, allows for "canonicalization" of genres when tagging music, which makes me vaguely giddy.
It works like this:
- Install and configure beets to one's liking.
- Setup configuration file to use the "lastgenre" plugin.
- Either set the "canonical" flag to yes to accept the default setup or point it to a manually created file (guess which one I'm doing haha).
- When recordings are auto-tagged with a genre, beets will take genres from last.fm, match that value to a value in the canon, and then walk up from that specific genre to a root genre. For example, "J-Rock" can become "Asian" and "West Coast Blues" can become "Blues".
This automates part of what I've been trying to do, but ideally I'd like to be able to also tag music with a style or category, like the aforementioned "Instrumental". More to come….