Getting very strange genres

I’ve been going back and forth on whether this should be a forum post or a ticket, but I figured I’d ask here first in hopes someone has a simple solution.

I turned off all the genre plugins because they seemed to be causing more trouble than they’re worth. I still have Picard configured to use MusicBrainz genres, but in the process I’m getting tags that aren’t genres, like this:

“Private/23Be81C8-D861-4133-8A6E-29C9874Afc63;Added/2010/08”

(from this release)

I know I can exclude genres in Picard, but if I’m going to be getting very specific results like this, it seems like an awful lot of work to exclude them all one by one.

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The easiest way to solve this would be to disable “Use folksonomy tags as genres” in Options > Metadata > Genres. Then only the folksonomy tags considered actual genres by the MB genre implementation will be used.

See also https://picard.musicbrainz.org/docs/options/#genres

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Thanks! I was hoping it would be something simple like that.

Just to give some more background: Picard supports the MusicBrainz genres since release 2.1. Before that release one is indeed limited to using all folksonomy tags.

For new installations the “Use folksonomy tags as genres” option is disabled. So if you enable the genre support you will by default get only genres, you have to explicitly opt-in to get all folksonomy tags.

But on existing installs the “Use folksonomy tags as genres” will be enabled, if you had enabled folksonomy genre support before. With this option enabled Picard will basically behave identical to versions before 2.1. The idea here was to not regress in behavior for users who where used to getting all folksonomy tags. So everybody who was using folksonomy genres before the 2.1 release should check the options and decide whether they want the new or old behavior.

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Good clarification, thanks. Is there documentation anywhere of what folksonomy tags actually are? Because that’s what threw me off. It doesn’t say to me “random user tags from MusicBrainz”, it sounds more like some official tagging source, like “wikidata genres”

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For MusicBrainz: Folksonomy Tagging - MusicBrainz Wiki

More general:

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I’m having a problem with the LastFM pluggin giving the most random tags.
I’ve been updating my entire library without any problems, and when starting up the next day on my ‘Q’ folder and when checking previously saved stuff I’m getting lots of random

Queen - hardstyle
Queens of the Stone Age - catchy
Radiohead - stylish
Metallica - galicia
Bjork - groove metal

This is just the nature of folksonomy tags. Those are user assigned tags on Last.fm, nothing prevents anyone to enter a tag like catchy or stylish. Actually this is by design, the tags are not only meant for genres but for categorizing the music on Last.fm in various ways. Some tags might even only be useful for the user entering them.

To fix this you can add last.fm tags to the blacklist in the last.fm plugin’s options. Or you try the builtin MusicBrainz genres instead as described above.

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I’m just baffled how I have gotten though all of my other folders in days of updating with out a single problem. Literally went from exactly what I expected with 95% minimal tag usage selected, to just getting terrible matches.

If I put ‘hardstyle’ as an ignore, Queen become ‘pop’, where as previously they would have been ‘classic rock’ which is still shown as the most used genre on last.fm.

Another example: Nine Inch Nails saved as ‘industrial’ only a week ago now come up with ‘emocore’, and if I ignore that they become ‘synthpop’

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Ok, there is indeed something very strange happening to the last.fm API. When you look at https://www.last.fm/music/Nine+Inch+Nails it shows as top tags industrial, industrial rock, electronic, rock, alternative, instrumental.

But if you query their API for the top tags of Nine Inch Nail (which the plugin does) it returns as the top 5 “emocore”, “rock en espanol”, “Sweet Dreams”, “Stylish” and “groove metal”. The word “industrial” does not even show up in the entire list. The top tag “emocore” has only 58 uses, which looks pretty low for an artist as popular as NIN. When querying the API for track to tags, let’s say for Hurt, I don’t even get any tag.

But this is an issue with last.fm’s API, it has been reported already at https://getsatisfaction.com/lastfm/topics/gettoptags-getting-wrong-tags

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Ahhhh thanks so much for this, I’ll keep an eye on that thread for developments. I’m glad to see its not just me going crazy!!