Multiple Genres

[rjwr10]

Hey all,

The feature I would like to see most in the next version of winamp is support for multiple genres. I know this has been said before, but I'd like to say it again.

For example, I tag my mp3s like this:

Suppose I'm tagging an mp3 by DJ Rap. If I play by genre, I want her to show up for Drum & Bass as well as Electronic. I use id3-tagit, imho the best completely freeware mp3 tagger. (www.id3-tagit.de) It allows the ID3v2.3 feature of having multiple user defined genres as well as the standard ones.

If I were doing the coding, I would make it work so that if someone sorts by genre, then the first genre in the tag gets used as the sort key, however any other genres are listed after the fisrt in a comma delimited list in the genre column. When someone searches or filters by genre, then the search should be checked against all the genres that file has.


I hope someone finds this useful, I know I'm dying for this feature. Right now my workaround is to make new views in the media library with filters that accept all the genres I want.


thanks,
rj

[zrenneh]

Hi, I agree with all the above. Multiple genres would be awesome. Multiple artist tag-ability is also required. With the Media Library this quickly becomes apparent.

My suggestion is as follows:

• The simplest multiple genre implementation would be a tagging style field (in the web-2.0 sense). See del.icio.us or flickr for example implementations.
• The user would be free to enter as many genres as they want in free-text, separated by some separator character e.g. ;
• Free-form text input is key for user-friendliness, but to avoid slight derivative spellings forming two genres, tagging software and media libraries could suggest what to write based on the genres already present in the user's library or 'tag cloud'. For example, is it 'electronic', 'electronic music', 'electro', 'electro-pop' or 'electronica'? Or something else? Your media-library would suggest whatever you'd previously used, but you'd equally be free to type electro-punk-funk if you felt like it.
• The ID3 standard and the Vorbis standards both allow this already!
• The Media Library would then file the tracks under *all* the genres listed.

Henry

[Mixsynth]

Absolutely. As I posted elsewhere, now that the ability has now been added to browse by genre, it's now more important than ever to implement multiple genre support to the media library, and multiple artist support at the same time. It's been a requested feature for at least 3 years -- let's see this in the next release, please!!

[Japa]

if this gets implemented, that's one more reason Winamp is better than iTunes

[zrenneh]

Ha, yeah. Winamp is already better than iTunes! because of PLUGINS and because it's not a 40Mb download...!

[Snuq]

I would love to see this feature as well, even if winamp just combines the genre tags as amarok does. For instance, one tag as 'electronic', and second as... I dunno, 'country', would become 'electronic country' in genre lists.

[Firehalk]

I don't like the idea of combining genres, but I like the idea of the file being displayed on both genre sections in the ML. That would be great!

I don't know if more people do it as I do, but this genre stuff could have also an option (pull-down menu) with all the genres winamp found while searching for mp3 media on the pc. So when changing the file's genre and stuff like that, wouldn't have the probability of someone type the genre incorrectly.

[deus|diabolus]

Using the semicolon to denote multiple artists or genres is a great idea and is already successfully in use in other media players.

[lazycritic]

Sorry to revive this - but is there a way to collapse artists so that I only few the first one when they are separated by semicolons? Because these albums with multiple artists really screw up my list of artists. I have another artist for each song in the album...