On Tue, 2005-03-22 at 21:22 +0000, Keith (BB) wrote: > freeform or is there an "official" list of genres. Looking at some of > my music I have "brit pop", "alternRock","sixties","new age" but to > mention a few. If there is an "official" list how do I find out what > genre my album should be?
As others have said, genre is at best a comment. And the history is a bit convoluted. For some, check out http://www.id3.org/ Most important, ID3 tags are really only applicable to MP3 files. Flag and Ogg get a similar function from a much more robustly specified set of metatags see http://flac.sourceforge.net/ The initial ID3 tags were invented by the folks at Winamp (or some other early MP3 player) and reflected two critical biases: first, the developers were young and liked rock and rock-like music and second: there was only room for 64 options. As a result, the initial WinAmp had about 40 genres, which had 30 or more selections of rock, grunge, techo, industrial, jungle, etc and only one classification for all of "classical" There have been revisions to the id3 format, with more types, and finally a free form field so you can enter what you want. As far as I have been able tell, there is no official standards body for ID3 tags (i.e. no IEEE or IETF, etc.). There are ID3 "version 2" format specs, with two separate sub-versions that are only partially interoperable. See http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames.txt for 2.4 and http://www.id3.org/id3v2.3.0.txt for 2.3 There are assorted notes about ID3 v 3 and even some claims of a version 4, but while I can have google point to people talking about these versions, I can't find any site that actually defines them. Having a single genre on a song is simplistic idea. It is too subjective to be generally useful. One of the reasons driving the SlimServer 6.* effort is to allow more generalized data structure so you can call a song "rock" and 'classic" and "head banging" all at once. Pat -- Pat [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
