Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Support for organizing by multiple genres per song.

[John Russell <jjrussell gmail com>]

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 07:22:40 -0500, John Russell <jjrussell gmail com> wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 19:32:43 -0800, Jonathon Watney <jon platypus bc ca> wrote:
> > John,
> >
> > Thanks for your reply.
> >
> > Stop me if I am wrong but I read your response as: RB cannot support
> > such a feature because not all (namely id3) tag formats support multiple
> > genre fields.
> >
> > Maybe I was not clear before. Songs would have as many genre references
> > as genre comment fields, no? And formats that do not support multiple
> > genre fields would obviously only have one genre reference.
> >
> > Or maybe I read your reponse wrong. I just do not see how id3
> > limitations come into this if RB can intelligently extract tag fields.
> 
> That is an excellent point.
> 
> I also found this...
> 
> http://smartplaylists.com/comments.php?id=107_0_1_0_C
> http://www.macosxhints.com/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20030409021945127&title=Smartlist+by+location%2C+please!&pid=0
> 
> These discuss using multiple genres if they are separated by commas in
> itunes.  HOwever, it says that itunes just sees them as new genres.
> 
> e.g.
> 
> Rock
> Hard Rock
> Rock, Hard Rock
> 
> are three separate genres, not a hierarchy like I think you want. The
> entire concept of the UI would have to be changed as itunes, the ipod
> and RB all use the drilling down into the genres concept.  You would
> need to add an arbitrary number of levels to that.  And at what point
> would you stop drilling down into genres and start seeing artists?
> 
> e.g.
> 
> Decend from Rock into Hard Rock.  Now you see all your Hard Rock, but
> not your other just Rock songs.  Would Hard Rock show up on the same
> level as just Rock songs?  I would love to have this work somehow as
> "Classical"  just doesn't cut it for my collection, but I'm not sure
> it can be jammed into the current tools.
> 

Actually, after thinking about this a little more, I guess that
sub-genres are not really necessary and all that you are looking for
is to have a single song be in more than one genre.  Sort of the way
that v-folders work in evolution where a single piece of mail can be
in multiple v-folders and you don't have to have multiple copies of
the same song.  That might be really nice and not require any changes
to the UI as the song would simply appear in more than one genre. 
Would this work?

John



> John
> 
> >
> > Jonathon.
> >
> > On Fri, 2005-02-25 at 09:58 -0500, John Russell wrote:
> > > > An Example.
> > > >
> > > > I have a number of metal bands in my collection and a lot of them play
> > > > multiple styles, sometimes even in the same song. For instance death and
> > > > black metal styles are present in a number of them. And even some are
> > > > grindcore/hip-hop/electronica styles. Also it may be convenient to label
> > > > all metal bands as metal and offer an additional comment to describe a
> > > > particular style such as thrash. I would rather avoid maintaining
> > > > playlists for such a situation. All that manual work. :-P So the
> > > > comments might look something like this:
> > > >
> > > > genre=Metal
> > > > genre=Death Metal
> > > > genre=Black Metal
> > > >
> > > > And then I would able to pick any three of these genres from the genre
> > > > pane in the browser and have that particular band listed.
> > > >
> > >
> > > I would love it if this worked, but I don't think its a RB feature to
> > > implement.  RB just reads the id3 tags off the mp3 files.  Other files
> > > may use other labeling formats, but mp3 uses id3, so its really the
> > > limitations of id3 that need to be addressed here.
> > >
> > > John
> >
> >
>