Sorting music on your player

Raam

Hey there,
I'm in the process of trying to get all the tracks on my Zen sorted and I am looking at genre now. I'm using www.allmusic.com to try and get a handle on how to categorise the songs. However, which is best to go by... genre or style?

Say I look up 'Avalanches', the genre is 'Electronica' and there are 4 different styles. Now I could just keep it simple and tag it as Electronica, but then when you are browsing stuff by genre there will be a tonne of stuff in 'Rock' and 'Electronica' since they cover almost everything, so you are none the wiser about what sort of music you will get.

I don't want to end up with two big genres with everything under them, but at the same time, I don't want to end up with a load of different styles.

What have other people done with their players?

cheers


KR

John

I categorise by artist on my mp3 discman. Or if it's all one artist on the cd, I categorise by album.

Selik

I'm not that arsed with sorting stuff by genre for the very reason mentioned above. For electronic music there are too many variables. Even the way something is written can affect things ie Drum n Bass, Drum and Bass, Drum 'n' Bass etc... If I happen to be sorting out a particular folder or album with Tag & Rename (which is great btw!) I'll stick in the genre I feel most appropriate, even then though it matters little as alot of the music I listen to even within one album would cover many genres in alot of people's opinions.....

Marq

I can't stand the word 'genre'. I also have a Zen, I sort everything by artist and album. this is easy for me cos none of my 5000 tunes are downloaded, they're all ripped from my hard-copy music collection. The genre tags that are attached when copying music are always miles off, I wish that word would go away. Do like how you can display the year of an album in Now Playing if you have it though, the Zen Xtra's a quality bit of kit.

Raam

in the past I've never been bothered with the genre, but I was in 'make-everything-neat' mode so decided to see what other people have done with theirs. I loaded up the organiser, had a look to see what the genres were, and there must have been about 300 hundred different ones. Lot's were variations in spelling of the same word. I reckon I'll just forget about it and stick to album/artist.

thanks for your replies

KR

Marq

loaded up the organiser, had a look to see what the genres were, and there must have been about 300 hundred different ones.

Avant Garde
Avant-Garde
Avant-garde
avant-garde
avant garde
Avantgarde

Wouldn't mind only it means nothing. what a cop-out of a classification

Tusky

Ive an iRiver and I just use Artist/Album to organise, I can find anything in about 5 or 10 seconds so Its grand.

John

Marq wrote:

Avant Garde
Avant-Garde
Avant-garde
avant-garde
avant garde
Avantgarde

Wouldn't mind only it means nothing. what a cop-out of a classification

Avant garde does mean something and it's not a cop-out classification, it's a term that's just thrown about too much. It's a specific style of composition that started after the second World War. It's basically experimental music like John Cage, Luc Ferrari and Pierre Boulez. It has it's roots in musique concrete and gave rise to sampling, minimalism, alleatory music and made use of atonality. John Cale from the Velvet Underground started off studying avant garde composition and applied his studies to rock music. John Cage was the first artist to use scratching in a recording (he did so in the fifties), long before rap music used it. Most of the avant garde movement were big into electronics and their influence to modern music is huge (think of how many songs you hear sampling in).

Raam

Tusky wrote:

Ive an iRiver and I just use Artist/Album to organise, I can find anything in about 5 or 10 seconds so Its grand.

I've no problem finding anything on the Zen. I'm thinking more of a situtation where you want to hear a certain type of music (hip-hop, metal or whatever). The genre would be handy for that, but everything can be classified and then sub-classified and even cross-classified! So I'm at a loss as to what I should classify things as. It's not really a big deal, but maybe it highlights a deficiency in the tagging that is used in mp3s in that it isn't as flexible as it might be.

KR

BaZmO*

Why don't you just pick say 6 categories and stick to them?

Rock, Pop, Dance, Electronica, Hip Hop, Miscellaneous. (or whatever category suits your tastes in music)

Just make sure that you stick to your categories and don't keep adding new ones, that way you'll cut down on all the bolloxology!

B.

Raam

BaZmO* wrote:

Why don't you just pick say 6 categories and stick to them?

that sounds like a plan. I have approx. 7,500 tracks on it at the moment so I might need to subclass them a bit more than 6 categories, but it could be a start. Most of them have the generic tag of 'Rock' or 'Electronica' at the moment, so I would have to spend some time giving them a better tag.

I guess I could use...
Rock/Old (Led Zep, Bowie, Beatles)
Rock/Pop (Blur, U2, Strokes, Pulp)
Electronica/Mellow (Massive Attack, Air, St Germain)
Electronica/Dance (Chemical Brothers, Royksopp)
Classical
Pop (to cover those cheesy songs that I'll never admit to liking!)
Hip Hop
Misc (for all the stuff that goes nowhere)

any other ideas?

KR

Marq

John2 wrote:

Avant garde does mean something and it's not a cop-out classification, it's a term that's just thrown about too much. It's a specific style of composition that started after the second World War. It's basically experimental music like John Cage, Luc Ferrari and Pierre Boulez. It has it's roots in musique concrete and gave rise to sampling, minimalism, alleatory music and made use of atonality. John Cale from the Velvet Underground started off studying avant garde composition and applied his studies to rock music. John Cage was the first artist to use scratching in a recording (he did so in the fifties), long before rap music used it. Most of the avant garde movement were big into electronics and their influence to modern music is huge (think of how many songs you hear sampling in).

Thanks for the lesson in mucicology, patronising as it is. My point is that the word is used as a cop-out - and doesn't refer to the music you refer to above. Anything that can't be boxed into their neat marketing pigeon-holes generally gets labelled as Avant-Garde. I'm not saying there's no such thing as Avant-Garde.

Having said that, there's a problem in stating that only this music you have referred to is Avant-Garde, as the nature of genres does change over time. For instance - I would regard bands such as Broken Social Scene as the inheriters of the atonal pieces Cale created, but with a different approach to instrumentation and song-structure. The Hives are a punk band, but that doesn't mean their sound is identical to the Sex Pistols'. etc.