I'm seriously considering deleting all "genre" tags from itunes

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

i think this is a great idea, somehow! talk me out of it. or not. i always disagree with whatever genre the tracks come to me in, and i spend way too much mental energy (as in: any) deciding "uhh ok is this r&b or funk or what?" also, "Electronica/Dance" ugh please! just leave it all blank, i say. right?

― geoff (gcannon), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:34 (nineteen years ago)

do it!

it's better to burn out than fade away!

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:37 (nineteen years ago)

good idea.

― Special Agent Gene Krupa (orion), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:37 (nineteen years ago)

i should do the same thing, actually. it's a pretty useless feature.

― Special Agent Gene Krupa (orion), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:37 (nineteen years ago)

half of the albums in my iTunes don't have genre tags (usually because they're obscure albums that I have to enter the song title and info for manually and don't bother w/ genre), so it's pretty useless for me anyway. but it doesn't bother me enough to delete them.

― Alex in Baltimore (Alex in Baltimore), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:37 (nineteen years ago)

get rid. genres and music don't go well together anymore.

― whatever (boglogger), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:39 (nineteen years ago)

When I lived with my brother, he always used to change the genre tags on the computer we shared. As I recall, Postal Service became "Cloying Mail-Pop."

― jaymc (jaymc), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:39 (nineteen years ago)

fuckin' awesome!

― regular roundups (Dave M), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:41 (nineteen years ago)

jaymc otm, fake genre names are awful fun

― Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:41 (nineteen years ago)

i was doing this for a long time, but then i couldn't be bothered anymore.

― the bitchy guy in the pince-nez from the old films (Jody Beth Rosen), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:44 (nineteen years ago)

i hate genre tags

― cutty (mcutt), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:45 (nineteen years ago)

genre tags can be useful for organizing stuff, especially separating music from audiobooks, comedy or whatever

― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:47 (nineteen years ago)

http://www.cutty.org/genre.jpg
http://www.cutty.org/genre.jpg
http://www.cutty.org/genre.jpg

― cutty (mcutt), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:48 (nineteen years ago)

if anything, putting the record label in the genre tag is more helpful...

― cutty (mcutt), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:48 (nineteen years ago)

yeah - why delete, when you can just not display?

― pssst - badass revolutionary art! (plsmith), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:50 (nineteen years ago)

get rid. genres and music don't go well together anymore.

HELLO 2 U MORAN

― Confounded (Confounded), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:57 (nineteen years ago)

I don't do genre tags.

― worst iPod case scenario (fandango), Thursday, 23 February 2006 20:58 (nineteen years ago)

whoa that took a long time to delete.

ps unchecking that box does nothing. now to get rid of the column altogether

― geoff (gcannon), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:08 (nineteen years ago)

"why delete when you can just not display"

I did this last week. I didn't really use the tags but I was spending time "fixing" ones that I thought were wrong ('cause I'm anal like that). so I just made the field go away.

― Renard (Renard), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:08 (nineteen years ago)

LABELS ARE FOR JARS MAAAAAN

windows media player genre tags are good for when i dont wanna listen to rap but cant remember all the non rap songs i downloaded

― ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:17 (nineteen years ago)

racist

― pssst - badass revolutionary art! (plsmith), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:18 (nineteen years ago)

i hate all the people who tag shit with stupid genre tags (funny is ok)

Does anyone remember how "PRIMUS" was a genre in ID3v1? Man those dudes needed to hear more music.

― xngnznevqnznplbetbarnpphzhyngbe (ex machina), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:20 (nineteen years ago)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genres

― xngnznevqnznplbetbarnpphzhyngbe (ex machina), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:20 (nineteen years ago)

The only genre tags that are useful are the ones that seperate music from comedy, and the ones that say Album so I can find actual whole albums on my ipod. All the rest can rot. Like I'm ever going to spin the dial to Jazz so that I relax with an evening of Jelly Roll Morton, John Coltrane, and Chuck Mangione.

― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:21 (nineteen years ago)

i hate when shit like wu or tribe is in 'downtempo' - what the fuck is wrong w/ british ppl!??!!

― ,,,,,,,,,, Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:28 (nineteen years ago)

wtf you guys are so tagist

― midi sanskrit (sanskrit), Thursday, 23 February 2006 21:42 (nineteen years ago)

genre tags bug the fuck out of me. family fodder is "general rock"? "indie" is a genre? (well, maybe it is if you're british.) what's the difference between "indie," "alternative," and "alternative & indie"? "electronic," "electronica," "dance," "electronica/dance," and "electronica & dance"? max tundra's remixes & interpretations cd is "holiday"? (i do like how some of my coil mp3s are classified as "coil.")

― spastic heritage (spastic heritage), Thursday, 23 February 2006 22:07 (nineteen years ago)

i am curious how people here organize their mp3s outside of itunes

/music and to hell with sub folders?

― harshaw (jube), Thursday, 23 February 2006 22:43 (nineteen years ago)

Some people here are talking about genre tags as if they are powerless to change them. I defined my own, and find that it makes it much easier to browse the iPod (since it cuts down on the number of artists or albums). The trick is to make the categories broad--group together styles that you want to listen to in similar contexts.

Though I can understand not wanting to spend the time.

― eek, Thursday, 23 February 2006 23:03 (nineteen years ago)

i do the record label thing that cutty mentions above

― electric sound of jim (and why not) (electricsound), Thursday, 23 February 2006 23:08 (nineteen years ago)

i like genre tags. not everything needs them, but it's fun to e.g. listen to all my hip-hop on shuffle. or sometimes i need a soothing lullaby, and i head for ambient. i am a metadata dork.

― Lukas (lukas), Thursday, 23 February 2006 23:16 (nineteen years ago)

Deleting any pre-written genres is always one of the first things I do.

― Pillfob, Thursday, 23 February 2006 23:20 (nineteen years ago)

revolution is in the air!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Thursday, 23 February 2006 23:26 (nineteen years ago)

i always delete genre tags. though i was tempted to keep the genre 'aniseed' which someone had for a sun ra record

― terry lennox. (gareth), Thursday, 23 February 2006 23:30 (nineteen years ago)

It's all rock and roll anyways. Unless it's classical, and then, only if it's not
http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drd700/d794/d79454kcre7.jpg

― M. Biondi (M. Biondi), Friday, 24 February 2006 00:19 (nineteen years ago)

your first problem is using itunes...

― AaronK (AaronK), Friday, 24 February 2006 00:24 (nineteen years ago)

I deleted all my genre tags a while ago. I've considered creating my own, but am still working on a criteria. Any suggestions? I've thought about a narrowing-down system, like "music:rock:punk:postpunk" or "music:electronic:dance:house:acid", but there's a problem right there- would you sort electronic into dance and non-dance, or dance into electronic/non-electronic? I've heard it's better to just list those terms in the comments for making smart playlists, which I can narrow down myself.

― naus (Robert T), Friday, 24 February 2006 00:59 (nineteen years ago)

i agree that overall this can easily tend to take more time to mess with than the benfit you get out of it - the best thing ive thought of is that at the very least if there were multiple genre fields - trying to create some sort of subgenre system would very quickly become a logistical nightmare, i think - if itunes was a more flexible, more-or-less full database app, you could simply add as many genre fields as you want - this would likely lead to more logistical problems, but it might at least be a step out of the one-genre system, which seems just a bit confining to say the least - i mean, even myspace gives you 3

― justin shanti de guire, Friday, 24 February 2006 01:29 (nineteen years ago)

I actually use the genre tags for one thing: creating really specific groups of songs to shuffle from. Comps of old ethnic 78s (Secret Museum-type stuff) get tagged "Ethnic Classics," first-generation punk obscurities (Killed By Death, Bloodstains, etc.) are "Rare Punk," etc. It's easier than having to edit a playlist every time I rip a new CD.

― Jason Toon (Jason Toon), Friday, 24 February 2006 15:33 (nineteen years ago)

Me, too, although probably more conventionally than Jason, so that I have an easy way to shuffle for my popjustice, power-pop, or MPB moods without fear of Thin Lizzy, the Moody Blues, or P-Funk coming up (if that's not what I want).

― Mitya (mitya), Friday, 24 February 2006 15:47 (nineteen years ago)

genre tags are great. they can really help if set up to taste.

itunes default genres suck != genres as a whole are pointless

― irrigation can save your purple, Friday, 24 February 2006 15:49 (nineteen years ago)

if you don't care about the genre tag why even bother deleting? why think about it at all?

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:09 (nineteen years ago)

I'm really anal about tagging my MP3s. The first thing I do when I download a record is redo whatever tags are already there, due to rampant idiocy in the realm of file tagging.

Everything is capitalized, properly, files are named according to my specifications, all the tags I consider extraneous (comment, composer, etc.) removed, 150x150 PNG image of the cover attached, and genre defined by me. It just makes it so much easier to take the extra three minutes when I rip and album to do it this way, and it makes creating "smart playlists" on my iPod much nicer cause I can group everything by genre - at least how I broadly define my genres.

I've written Perl scripts to do a lot of this for me, which saved me tons of time. I also use the Linux program Easytag which is really nice for dealing with lots of this stuff. I'm not just clicking and renaming everything by hand for 1,200+ albums.

― joygoat (joygoat), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:31 (nineteen years ago)

yeah, that'd be a real waste of time

― s1ocki (slutsky), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:34 (nineteen years ago)

the best thing ive thought of is that at the very least if there were multiple genre fields - trying to create some sort of subgenre system would very quickly become a logistical nightmare, i think

Not really, if you use the comment fields as thus: "music:electronic:dance:house:acid"

and then a library search for "electronic:dance:house" would give you all your house music.

― Paunchy Stratego (kenan), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:40 (nineteen years ago)

i use the genre tag for... a piece of info that isn't genre.

― The Man Without Shadow (Enrique), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:40 (nineteen years ago)

it's mark on pitchfork

― The Man Without Shadow (Enrique), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:41 (nineteen years ago)

icky.

― Paunchy Stratego (kenan), Friday, 24 February 2006 16:43 (nineteen years ago)

wow joygoat that's even more anal than me.

i use tagscanner to edit filenames and tags:

http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/TagScanner/981935153/1

― AaronK (AaronK), Friday, 24 February 2006 18:45 (nineteen years ago)

Media Rage is my choice for Mac OS X and I'm about as particular as joygoat is about tagging.

I've got a lot of non-English files so I use the genre tag for id'ing the country... France, Afghanistan, Brazil, etc.

― The Equator Lounge (Chris Barrus), Friday, 24 February 2006 19:17 (nineteen years ago)

I've deleted genre tags for years. Their arbritrariness drives me nuts.

― Abu Hamster (noodle vague), Friday, 24 February 2006 19:20 (nineteen years ago)

joygoat makes me feel lame :)

though I do have a system (gotta have a system!)

Media Rage is about the only decent choice on OS X no? I could barely look at it, much less use it.

― worst iPod case scenario (fandango), Friday, 24 February 2006 19:27 (nineteen years ago)

i use only a few genre tags: good, bad, rock, british, other.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 24 February 2006 19:30 (nineteen years ago)

This idea of assigning genre tags to other uses is intriguing me.

I would definitely want to hexedit the program code to say something other than "genre" for that selection field though. Which is where I begin shying away from the idea again :|

― yes I am ready to "dance" (fandango), Friday, 24 February 2006 19:36 (nineteen years ago)

get rid. genres and music don't go well together anymore.
HELLO 2 U MORAN

-- Confounded (confoundsk...), February 23rd, 2006.

moran moron moran moron

― whatever (boglogger), Friday, 24 February 2006 21:56 (nineteen years ago)

mormon

― M@tt He1geson (Matt Helgeson), Friday, 24 February 2006 22:01 (nineteen years ago)

HOME GENRE TAGS ARE KILLING MUSIC!!!!!!

― Confounded (Confounded), Friday, 24 February 2006 22:01 (nineteen years ago)

four months pass...

I was trying to figure out what genre tag to use for Rolf Harris and I couldn't come up with anything better than "Australia"

― Elvis Telecom (Chris Barrus), Friday, 21 July 2006 20:00 (nineteen years ago)

i downloaded some william basinski which some cunt had genre-tagged "pitchfork"!!!! then i downloaded some other stuff from the same guy and about 1/2 of it was tagged "pitchfork"!!!!

wtf?

― jed_ (jed), Friday, 21 July 2006 20:51 (nineteen years ago)

it's music that this person heard about from Pitchfork.

they've reviewed Basinski a few times, I believe. surely creating many new listeners for him.

― CDDB (Dan Deluca), Friday, 21 July 2006 20:57 (nineteen years ago)

yeah i got that much, but "pitchfork" as a genre is fairly depressing.

― jed_ (jed), Friday, 21 July 2006 20:59 (nineteen years ago)

I bet Haxor Jon knows a way to delete all genre tags from all itunes everywhere.

― M. V. (M.V.), Friday, 21 July 2006 21:09 (nineteen years ago)

I've just downloaded the Broken Social Scene album - labelled "Britpop".

― Si.C@rter (SiC@rter), Friday, 21 July 2006 21:50 (nineteen years ago)

Uno momento..

I'm using Winamp and Mp3tag. I've ignored genre tags thus far. Butttt I'm about to resort the whole mp3 library on disk and figure ifff I'm gonna do any tag editting now is the time. I'm considering using the Genre tag for it's purpose (using my own genres). However, using the search function on Winamp turns up results by comments as well as other fields so I'm thinking of figuring out some sort of comment tagging system instead to reflect genre/use/mood or whatever. Does anybody tag their MP3s using the comment field?

The problem I forsee is that this may become useless once I cough up the money for a zen.. hmmmm.

― Major Alfonso (Major Alfonso), Friday, 21 July 2006 22:16 (nineteen years ago)

actually I'm not sure I can make winamp search the comment field... can i?

― Major Alfonso (Major Alfonso), Friday, 21 July 2006 22:18 (nineteen years ago)

For the love of God don't do it man.

― kornrulez6969 (TCBeing), Friday, 21 July 2006 22:26 (nineteen years ago)

resorting mp3s?
using genre tags?
fiddling with the comment tags?
buying a zen?

Or all of the above?

I have a headache now....

― Major Alfonso (Major Alfonso), Friday, 21 July 2006 22:28 (nineteen years ago)

one year passes...

Teach me something : why is there a lot of downtempo and lounge shit being commonly tagged as LO-FI ???

― Snowballing, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 14:13 (seventeen years ago)

I don't know. Maybe because they both use slowed down samples of scratchy old records? I came here to weigh in with the idea that the "genre" tag should be left blank or removed entirely. It's the thing that most frustrates me going to HMV - they still categorise their CDs according to genre, when I wish they'd just do it alphabetically. Also, I have to note that you have an even worse ILX username than me...

― snoball, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 14:31 (seventeen years ago)

if anything, putting the record label in the genre tag is more helpful...

i do this, it's especially helpful for techno

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 14:33 (seventeen years ago)

Yes I know (about the username), and please trust me when i say I didn't know what kind of dirty thing it could mean until very recently!!!
About the genres, I think the the only way to go is by tagging by multi-genres (mediamonkey's perfect for that).
Obviously very time consuming, but the database cross-searching thing allows some powerful stuff.

― Snowballing, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 14:49 (seventeen years ago)

haha when I posted this I had only had a computer w/ iTunes for 2 months and didn't have much music on there yet. now I have tons on there and have come up with a few personalized genre tags that I try to categorize everything by.

― some dude, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 15:08 (seventeen years ago)

I want all my music to be tagged "Native American"

― Curt1s Stephens, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 16:02 (seventeen years ago)

Why do Primus have a tag all to themselves?

― snoball, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 16:04 (seventeen years ago)

I saw an English girl on the train yesterday wearing a Les Claypool t-shirt, I thought that was seriously weird.

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 16:21 (seventeen years ago)

Almost everything non-American/European I have gets tagged "reggae"

― Hurting 2, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 16:22 (seventeen years ago)

esp. as you live in fucking france or whatever (xp)

― blueski, Wednesday, 25 June 2008 16:22 (seventeen years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.