[Empeg-general] Re: Genres

[yn0t_@empegbbs-noreply.merlins.org]

Well I thought about allmusic and the problem is their genres (they call them styles) go by artist and not by song or even album..  So artists which change over the years or exhibit many styles on an album (most artists do to some extent) are hard to figure out.  Plus they list six or seven different styles for many of them, and sometimes none of them really apply in my mind...  Then some of them are really obscure styles like "Paisley Underground, " "Frat Rock," or "Bar Bands" which, while I understand the context of the name, I don't really consider genres.  Too specific and too obscure, I guess.

But the biggest limitation for me is that they don't get down to the album or song level with their genres.  So while allmusic was good for ideas on organizing, I couldn't really work with the way they broke them down.

In any event, I tried to write a little Perl script which gets genres from allmusic, and was relatively successful.  Because allmusic's search algorithms *STINK* it depends on your artists being spelled exactly like theirs (including the word "The" is often required, for instance) but it seemed to work okay.  Right now it just prints out the genres for each artist comma-separated but I could add a few lines and have it change the genre field...  But as I said, allmusic is a little too limited for me at this point.