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The music classifying nightmare

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Re: The music classifying nightmare

#41

Post by baddox »

veridies wrote: post #16
baddox wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not irrelevant. If the exact same recording of a song appears on two albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies of the song. An easy way to think of it is a normalized relational database. If the song has an id of 5 and is on two albums with id 2 and 3, then there would be an AlbumSong join table with schema (album_id, song_id) and two rows…

Each album is going to be mastered separately, and thus include slightly different tweaks (to volume, compression, whatever). You'll almost never see the exact same audio file stored twice.

It's fairly common in genre compilations and "best of" albums.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#42

Post by quesera »

baddox wrote: post #41
veridies wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each album is going to be mastered separately, and thus include slightly different tweaks (to volume, compression, whatever). You'll almost never see the exact same audio file stored twice.

It's fairly common in genre compilations and "best of" albums.

Those songs are identical in every pragmatically meaningful way, but they still won't be bitwise identical.

You'd have to do aural spectrum comparisons, with appropriate tolerances.

Which is why no one bothers.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#43

Post by rishonik »

I have two classifications for my digital collection: Old Music and New Music. Old Music is everything recorded before I was born. New Music is everything recorded after I was born. It cuts down on putting too much time into it all.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#44

Post by ux »

mquander wrote: post #40
ux wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's the same person behind. Even if the artist tried to give a different "personality" to his music over the time, following all his creations is actually a good listening experience. The "hey I just want to listen to the musical evolution of this guy" isn't a rare feeling IMO. Grabbing all his nicknames is kind of a problem. Of course, you have a point, I'm making the problem harder than it needs, and you can…

But that's not a problem, either. In my music collection I have, e.g. tags ARTIST=AFX and FILED_UNDER=Aphex Twin. Then when you make a playlist with your favorite music player, you can just sort things by FILED_UNDER, if you prefer. What's so hard about that?

Interesting, so you have a way of making the relationship at the end. Now I could start nitpicking about how you decide to make the link to Aphex Twin and not his name (or another nick), and how would you make that decision for any similar cases.

Note that I don't consider this issue the main problem, it's just one I hit a few times, and I wasn't able to select a correct solution.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#45

Post by adamzochowski »

cletus wrote: post #30

I only go so far as sanitizing and standardizing my music collection through Tag&Rename (and I haven't found a good OSX equivalent to this yet sadly). It gets the data from Amazon in 98% of cases, adds the album art (which I like having on my player), etc. Then I store the files in: Artist/Album/Track# - Song name [- Artist name] The last is only there for soundtracks and other "Various Artists" type collections. Thi…

Addressing points

  --
  [[ Albums have artists too ]]
Albums often have a person that mixes songs together. In ID3v2 series we use a tag "TPE2". Early ID3v2 adopters used "TXXX ALBUM ARTIST" and "TXXX ALBUMARTIST" as originally TPE2 was reserved for Band definition. iTunes and WMP both standardized on TPE2 for album artist.

Armin Van Buuren - State of Trance v561- #2 - Artsy - Open Space

  TPE1 (song author) - Arsty
  TPE2 (album author) - Armin Van Buuren
  TALB (album title) - State of Trance v561
  TRCK (track number) - 2
TPE2 typically comes in use with TCMP designating that a song is a compilation. (Before TCMP became standard, people also used "TXXX COMPILATION").

  --
  [[ You need multiple versions of songs ! ]]
Most programs automating software will ask which version of album it is.

For example, Pendulum band released album "Hold Your Color" in 2005. http://www.discogs.com/Pendulum-Hold-Your-Colour/release/494...

However, in 2007 the rereleased the album, http://www.discogs.com/Pendulum-Hold-Your-Colour/release/134...

The last two songs differ. You need to pick right year to ensure you tag them properly.

Alternatively, the year could foretell how remastered the song is. Is this original compression, or the new louder version? See Loudness war article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

  --
  [[ date/year is screwed up -- agreed ]]
We have to differentiate three types of dates:

When song was recorded -- aka: This song was released in 1994

When album compilation was released -- aka: the best of 90s was released in 2005

What decade the song is trying to recapture -- aka: the song feels like music from the 60s

  --
  [[ Genres / taggins is a solution -- although at time blunt ]]
Genres were terrible in old ID3v1, where we were locked to 127 genres.

In ID3v2 we can enter whatever we want into genre, and store multiple of them. Good taggers read data off Last.fm / discogs / music brainz enter complete information about songs. This includes tags detailing genre, instruments, style, moods, decades. Certain players, like XBMC can use style and moods. Some systems like discogs even support hierarchal tags (see their style vs genre).

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#46

Post by qbrass »

wrekkuh wrote: post #35
cletus wrote: post #30

I only go so far as sanitizing and standardizing my music collection through Tag&Rename (and I haven't found a good OSX equivalent to this yet sadly). It gets the data from Amazon in 98% of cases, adds the album art (which I like having on my player), etc. Then I store the files in: Artist/Album/Track# - Song name [- Artist name] The last is only there for soundtracks and other "Various Artists" type collections. Thi…

I'm not sure how much of this is conjecture. My thinking differs from yours with respect to the following - "Albums don't really have years either. Or at least they have publication years. The songs have years. Normal studio albums have a common year. Compilations and soundtracks do not." An album that is released by a record label does have a year, as upon release it becomes a publication. By this train of thinking…

Yes, but you're usually more interested in when the song came out than when the album came out.

If you sort your playlist by date so you can pick songs from the 90's, you probably wanted to hear something like Nirvana instead of The Best of The Who: Volume 3.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#47

Post by adamzochowski »

qbrass wrote: post #46
wrekkuh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how much of this is conjecture. My thinking differs from yours with respect to the following - "Albums don't really have years either. Or at least they have publication years. The songs have years. Normal studio albums have a common year. Compilations and soundtracks do not." An album that is released by a record label does have a year, as upon release it becomes a publication. By this train of thinking…

Yes, but you're usually more interested in when the song came out than when the album came out. If you sort your playlist by date so you can pick songs from the 90's, you probably wanted to hear something like Nirvana instead of The Best of The Who: Volume 3.

I agree that year is screwed up, but some taggers (like the picard-lastfm tagger) reads also decade feel tags. So music that sounds like 90s is tagged as 90s music, even if it isn't recorded in 90s.

For example, ""La Roux -- In It For The Kill"" will get the song tagged as sounding 80s like:

http://www.last.fm/music/La+Roux/_/In+for+the+Kill/+tags

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#48

Post by adamzochowski »

ux wrote: post #44
mquander wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's not a problem, either. In my music collection I have, e.g. tags ARTIST=AFX and FILED_UNDER=Aphex Twin. Then when you make a playlist with your favorite music player, you can just sort things by FILED_UNDER, if you prefer. What's so hard about that?

Interesting, so you have a way of making the relationship at the end. Now I could start nitpicking about how you decide to make the link to Aphex Twin and not his name (or another nick), and how would you make that decision for any similar cases. Note that I don't consider this issue the main problem, it's just one I hit a few times, and I wasn't able to select a correct solution.

Discogs tracks Alternative Nicks that artists use, and can help you link songs together. Here is Aphex Twin example:

http://www.discogs.com/artist/Aphex+Twin

Also, discogs will track which albums were released under different artist tags. Foobar+discogs tagger combination lets you pick, if you want to use most common general name (so all tracks are Aphex twin), or the alternative name that songs were released under (aka: AFX songs stay as AFX).

---

This is same issue as a book ''Running Man'' (yes, followed by a movie with Arnold). Was it written by Richard Bachman, or Steven King? How does your public library list book?

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#49

Post by adamzochowski »

Figs wrote: post #27

This sounds like exactly the kind of problem that relational databases were designed to solve. You can organize it with an entity-relationship model fairly easily. Once you have stored your information in a database, the filename doesn't really matter as long as each mp3, ogg, etc. gets a unique name; you can look up the file by querying the database for files that have the properties you care about.

This isn't something that relational database fixes. It is about schema and data tagging. It can all still sit in ID3v2 tags, as long as people use all tags properly.

The problem is that most tags are badly written, and most software that displays songs only displays bare minimum. Typically tags I miss seeing: Style / Moods / Genres / Composers / Performers. Even Album Artist or Compilation tags are bad. Same with some misspelled tags, or inconsistent (is it 'D&B' or 'DnB' or 'Drum-n-Base', etc).

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#50

Post by adamzochowski »

baddox wrote: post #39
redbad wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the exact same recording of a song appears on two > albums, an ideal categorization system would allow it to > appear as such without storing multiple (redundant) copies > of the song. I don't agree. The song was released twice; if you have both albums, you ought to have two copies of it.

Yeah, it's not going to be a big storage hit in reality (and even if it were, you could just rely on file system level compression/deduplication). I, like the author, just enjoy musing about the "perfect" way to organize a music library.

Some artists re-record or alter their song on secondary release. Or if it is live performance.

Deduplication should be done by algorithm that detects that it is same binary copy -- not through tags.

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