Maximum Genre set to 1, but still applies 5, 6, 12, or more. WHY?

Picard seems pretty rad. And really quite accurate most of the time. However, the genre stuff seems a bit wonky and I’m not sure how to fix it. What did I do? What did I not do that I should have?

Right now, I have the genre options set to use genres from musicbrainz and to fall back on album’s artists genres if no genres are found for the release or release group. The minimal genre usage is set to 100% with a maximum number of genres set to 1. Yet it still applies usually 5 genres, but I’ve seen it do 12 or so on one track and maybe one or two of them could apply but most aren’t even close. Is there some other setting I missed? A plugin I should add?

I’ve restarted Picard, refreshed it, had it scan/rescan/lookup/apply manually and save it to see if it sticks (it doesn’t). Restarted the computer, signed out and back in. Uninstalled and reinstalled. I bet it’s some embarrasingly simple thing since I haven’t seen any other questions about it.

Thank you in advance :slight_smile:

You might have a plugin active that is setting additional genres. Please check which plugins you have activated.

Genres are partially subjective, and are never going to be perfect, and of course Picard does not create genres itself, but instead uses data from Musicbrainz or elsewhere.

IMO this is the one area where Musicbrainz is very poor indeed. Genres are a defined subset of tags, which are essentially votes, rather than being a curated part of Release, Recording or Work metadata as I believe they should be.

Genres are also hierarchical in nature, with many-to-many relationships i.e. Baroque would normally be considered a sub-genre of Classical, and fusion genres will have more than one parent. But this is not represented by the genre list in Musicbrainz either.

This is further complicated by Picard plugins that can get genres from other sources - and many of these sources allow freeform genres which confuse things immensely.

Picard also lacks functionality to combine genres from multiple sources correctly. As previously discussed, Picard would benefit from having a generalised genre framework which would support the combining of genres from multiple sources and the filtering of genres to something sensible.

In the mean time, if anyone has the interest, skills and time to create a Picard plugin that:

  • takes the curated Musicbrainz genres list and modifies it to include parent relationships;
  • adds parent genres when a child genre is used;
  • provides an Options UI to set filters etc.

I am sure that would be welcomed.

The lastFM PLUS plugin had some extremely useful functionality in this area, and that might be a basis for much of the functionality needed by removing the lastFM specific code to leave just the UI and filtering code.

4 Likes