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[In v3.2] Music Genre Mapping

Post here to suggest ideas for future versions.
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Pauven
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[In v3.2] Music Genre Mapping

Post by Pauven » Sat Dec 07, 2019 9:46 am

I'm looking to add a new feature to CMC v3.2 to help manage my music collection, and I thought I would open the discussion up to see if anyone had feedback or input.

I have a very large music collection of about 42k songs, and it is not well maintained. Over the years I've tried different solutions to get my collection in shape, but in general none have worked the way I really want.

My biggest problem is that my songs fall into too many genres. I guess that could be nice if I want to find and play just the 1 song I have in the genre "Latino/Rock", but that is something I would never do. And if I play genre "Rock", then that 1 song in "Latino/Rock" is excluded, so I feel like I'm abandoning a part of my collection.

Even worse, do I really need 5 genres just for Blues Rock? Crazyness!

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I have 169 music genres, many of which are typos or spelling variations of the exact same thing. What's the difference between "Rock", "Rock*", and "Rock**", "Rock/Live", "Rock/Live*", "Rock/Live**", "Rock/Lve", "Rock/Rare/Live**", "Rock/Rock", and "RockLive"? I'd like to be able to play "Rock" and include all of those variations.

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One solution I tried last year was a tool called Music Bliss. Among the various features it offered was the ability to restrict genre assignments to a specified list. While this helped, this was a permanent change that I didn't really like, plus I had other challenges with using Music Bliss on my collection (probably self inflicted, not trying to diss the Bliss) - namely that I had several "various artists" compilation albums that it split up into separate artist albums with 1 song each, not cool - glad I tried this on a backup copy of my collection.

While I was working on programming the Music Library last year, one of the ideas that popped into my head was genre mapping. The idea is pretty simple, allow a user to map any genre to any other genre in CMC. The original genres in each file would be left untouched, and could still be accessible in CMC if desired by disabling the genre mapping feature. But with genre mapping enabled, I could have "Rock**" show with "Rock", and "Blues/Rock/Live**" show with "Blues Rock". And instead of the 169 genre overload mess I have now, I'd probably have a much more usable 30-40 genres that actually align with my listening preferences.

This is actually a feature that I've already laid the groundwork for in the code last year, but I've never had the chance to get it finished up. For CMC v3.2, I decided to focus on the Music Library since it hasn't received much attention lately, and genre mapping is high on my to-do list.

The task of genre mapping is likely to be somewhat cumbersome - you'll have to open a panel listing all of your genres, and assign the mapped genre to each one (or leave it unmapped if desired). But it would only list your current genres for mapping, so if you later add some new songs with a new genre to your collection, you would have to go back in and edit those new mappings. I don't have a good way to predict every possible genre that might come through (i.e. custom genres), so only listing the genres currently in your collection for mapping seems like the best (only?) way handle this.

This genre list will likely be fairly big for some users, so I don't think I will give it a HTPC GUI or add support for MCE remotes, instead it will be a basic program panel and you'll have to use your mouse. I know one of my goals has always been to minimize the need for a keyboard or mouse, but I think the keyboard/mouse workflow is superior for this task of mapping genres.

So, any thoughts? Please feel free to share ideas, critiques, and wishes.

Paul
President, Chameleon Consulting LLC
Author, Chameleon MediaCenter

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