Genres: how many and which ones to use?

I think it depends on how you want to use it, and what your music taste is. I have somewhere between 1,200 and 1,300 albums, which I have as:

Blues, Celtic, Classical, Comedy (Mainly old Radio 4 shows), Country, Folk, Jazz, Other (odds and sods such as CDs of birdsong,), Opera,  Poetry (readings of Heaney, Yeats, Shakespeare's sonnets etc.), R&B, Rock, Soul.

I do sometimes think I need to go back and sub-divide the Classical section, but so far I've found that a UPNP presentation of Genre/Composer gets me where I want to get quickly, so if I feel in a Baroque mood choose classical and then scroll down the composers and stop at Bach, Vivaldi... as the mood takes me.

Thanks sharing your thoughts.

So far I don't use (for browsing) the genre tag at all. Mostly because it's only something like 400 albums, but a lack of useful tags would keep it like this. And that's why I'm asking. Maybe good tags will lead to their use.

The handful of classical music is unproblematic. Jazz could be divided into classic (fifties and sixties) and modern (from the eighties on). The remaining Rock/Pop/Alternative albums are the main issue.

I've never worked out a sensible way to subdivide Rock and Classical which are my two main genres. I usually have an idea who/what I lwant to listen to, so just head there via artist/composer. However that isn't always the case, so if I am looking for inspiration I tend to choose the right genre for my mood, select Rock/Artist/Album or Classical/Composer/Album,  that makes me pick 1st letter of artist/composer name (using Synology Media Server), I pick a letter at random and then see if anyone grabs me, if not pick another letter.

That works for me, I suspect others will have much more structured modelling for many possible reasons, e.g  because they want to be able to find the right performance of a specific classical piece, or because they're just naturally more organised than me. 

I have a collection of over 11.000 albums and have started with a certain genre setup which I extended a bit, but gives me a satisfying result as in every category I have enough albums, and I easily can find stuff.....

Acoustic - all kind of new classical, season and modern a-cappella music

Blues - with also bands like The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton etc

Chamber Music

Classical Piano

Classical Cello

Classical Other - all other instruments like horn, clarinet etc

Classical Orchestral

Classical Violin

Classical Vocal - opera and lieder

Electronic - Yello, Vangelis...

Hifi - Album from hifi magizines

Jazz - my biggest single category

Jazz Vocal

Pop - including also things like dance etc

Progressive Rock

Progressive Metal

Rock

Soundtrack

The success of my system is that the genres work for me, so often I don't care about the official categories. The structure also means that even with 11.000+ albums, I still find my stuff easy. So the core advice balance, and according to your logic. And don't change is too much work.

In addition to that you also have to think about sub definitions for especially classical music. For symphonic music artist - conductor - orchestra, for title album, composer(s), key pieces, if you have more add decenia ......

For jazz summarize on a key artist otherwise you might have 10 different artists for one key artist so not Trio, Quartet etc unless it's the only form you know the band in - so I have only Miles Davis and not the Miles Davis Quartet, Quintet or Sextet...

Hope the tips help.

Not having a huge selection (<800 albums) I primarily search via genre/album.

I have about 20 genres (some with very few albums); I split classical (which constitutes the majority of my collection) into chamber, piano, concerto, opera, symphonic.

Have to admit to I have a problem with artists and composers as they are all over the place (Mozart, W.A. Mozart, Mozart, W.A. etc...) so "genre" is pretty crucial for me. 

Now that I read Bert´s post it is very close to how I organize myself (despite the order of magnitude difference between the sizes of our libraries!)

I have 12.575 digital albums atm and mostly search via the directory structure (artist/year album) using quite general categories for genres only.

I spend a lot of time for tagging though in order to keep identical names etc. and always search for the best cover art possible (> 1000x1000 pixel)...

Bert, you are right about picking genres that work for you. If Johnny Cash is heavy metal to you, nothing else makes sense . Now I just have to find the perfect ones for me.

Not being into classical music seemingly seems to help here . Regarding the key artist for Jazz albums, this is what I do as well.

DrPo posted:

[SNIP]

Have to admit to I have a problem with artists and composers as they are all over the place (Mozart, W.A. Mozart, Mozart, W.A. etc...) so "genre" is pretty crucial for me. 

[SNIP]

When I moved to a NAS from a HDX I retagged all my albums, and was very careful to create,consistency in composer and artist name (I do occasionally notice two names for the same artist/composer usually different capitalisation of and or dots around an initial,  and I immediately fix them with mp3tag). That makes a huge difference in searchability. 

I search by genre 90% of the time. If I want some jazz singing I choose 'jazz vocal', and so on. These are my genres. It's worked for five years and 3,000 albums. 

Look at musicgenreslist dot com, they have a long list , it will help you chose the ones that make sense to you.

I've tried diferent alternatives, not happy with any of them.  Most of the time I search for a key word (composer, artist or part of album name) and A+ find what I'm looking for.

I have a US and have gradually pared down and amended the rather odd selection of genres offered - no 'Soul' for example and the weird 'Pop- Rock'. The lack of a space before the dash is an N-serve characteristic, as in 'R& B'.

My most useful genre is my wife's first name which I use to tag all the music she likes.

This topic is perfectly timed for me. I am in the process of tidying up a few anomalies.

I notice when looking up by 'genre' that the first on the list is '8' ? It refers to a downloaded Keith Jarrett album, and I cannot see the number 8 anywhere in dBpoweramp data.

I am sure I can sort it by editing all the data to the way I usually structure it, but I do like to understand the various threads.

The data clearly has the word Jazz under the heading 'Genre' NOT '8' ?!

There are three other lines of text which only seem to occur on some downloads:-

IFRM has the number 3 beside it

IPRT has the number 1 beside it

ISTR has 'Keith Jarrett' beside it

Can anyone please 1) solve the issue & 2) kindly explain the above i.e. what are IFRM etc. ?

Thanks

If you want to mail me the album I'll have a look at the metadata for you. It's hard to think what the 8 might be doing.

Erich posted:

Look at musicgenreslist dot com, they have a long list , it will help you chose the ones that make sense to you.

I've tried diferent alternatives, not happy with any of them.  Most of the time I search for a key word (composer, artist or part of album name) and A+ find what I'm looking for.

This is the same for me, I don't really use genre now....

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Erich posted:

Look at musicgenreslist dot com, they have a long list , it will help you chose the ones that make sense to you.

I've tried diferent alternatives, not happy with any of them.  Most of the time I search for a key word (composer, artist or part of album name) and A+ find what I'm looking for.

This is the same for me, I don't really use genre now....

Same here. Went from lots of genres, then to fewer. Then stopped using genre for search altogether.

I'll usually think of a genre I am in the mood for, then look up a familiar artist on allmusic.com. That gets me started. Then I'll  explore who is related (via album credits or the "related" artist tab). Most of my digital listening starts with something old via UPnP, and ends with something new via Tidal. But I usually keep it to one genre (broadly defined) per listening session.

I use genre to categorise my 4000 albums e.g. New arrivals; Hot List; Favourite artists; etc. I find this much more useful than by genre.

Thanks for all your thoughts and suggestions so far, please keep them coming. It's somehow comforting that I'm not the only one who is struggling with the genres.

Even if I continue to use the Artist tag as the main way to what I want to listen, the following genres may make sense for me:

- Early music/classical 

- Jazz

- Modern Jazz

- Electronic/Trip Hop

- Easygoing (Acoustic, Pop, Folk etc)

- Rough (Rock, Punk etc)

- Spoken Words 

I never look up genre tagging when listening. Mostly through 'recents'. Sarah Endipity often helps me to look for what I want