Digital Music Tagging (Nerd Alert)

I love the combination of the iPod and iTunes on the Mac. It has rekindled my love for listening to music, which was previously seriously dampened by the CD-in-the-car-stereo-jewel-case-in-the-house phenomenon. This phenomenon led to the CD-in-the-wrong-case syndrome, which necessitates the biannual ritual of open-'em-all-up-put-'em-all-back-and-realphabetize-'em. And yes, you have to alphabetize them. I have 700+ CDs. I'd never find anything.

So, I have ripped (almost) all of my CDs, and crated them up. They are now simply backup disks. This is where digital shines. Get your music on your computer. You will soon be listening to favorites you forgot you owned.

Of course, if you have a large collection, you will need ways to catalog all this music. And it is this subject that really gets my brain going. If your music is not tagged with the appropriate metadata, you'll never be able to sort it by the categories that are really important to you. And so, I have designed a scheme for tagging my music files.

If you put R.E.M. under "Alternative", then you can't put them under "Rock." Well, that's just dumb. Is Santana a Blues band? Latin? Fusion? Well, they play all these things, but the genre is Rock, baby. Frankly, I find the "genre" classifications in most music cataloging software to be frustratingly limiting and at the same time ridiculously specific. Limiting because you can only choose one. Specific because, well, is Trip-Hop a genre of music? You may have a particular fondness for Trip-Hop, but let's not be silly. Trip-Hop is a pretty ephemeral term describing a style of music that falls under the genre of Electronica.

What you need is an arbiter to keep you from having these arguments with yourself. I use All Music Guide, AMG They divide Non-Classical artists into the following genres:

Avant-Garde, Bluegrass, Blues, Cajun, Celtic, Comedy, Country, Easy Listening, Electronica, Folk, Gospel, Jazz, Latin, New Age, R&B, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Soundtrack, Vocal, and World.

They distinguish between the following Classical genres:

Ballet, Band Music, Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Electronic/Avant-Garde/Minimalist Music, Film Music, Music for Keyboard, Musical Theater, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony, and Vocal Music. (I don't know the precise usages of all these Classical genres either. But hey, you can look it up!)

That's-what-35 genres? Not hundreds. And you'll probably use twelve. The beauty is: you don't have to decide. You don't have to worry about your own consistency over time. You just look it up on AMG.

Performers may occasionally jump from genre to genre or they may remain rooted in one for their entire career. But they almost always dabble in different styles. If you're categorizing simply by genre, everybody's going to end up in Rock, Jazz, Classical, R&B, Country, or one of 30 others. And the lines blur. AMG is here to help. Each genre may have dozens of styles contained within. Now it starts to get specific. "Swing" and "Bop" are both styles within the genre Jazz. It's crazy to have to kick Miles Davis out of Jazz just to associate him with Bop. "But that's all the genre pull-down lets me do," you say. So take the style info out of the genre.

Here's what I do. I categorize each artist by AMG genre. Then I put the styles they play into the Comments field. Now it's not a multiple-choice proposition. The logic is getting fuzzier. And if there's any logic fuzzier than the logic people use to categorize music, I'd love to see it, brother. But that's good, that's good. With the genre-only classification, we effectively had an Excel spreadsheet with each artist placed in one of the columns. But musical styles flow freely into one another. And now we have a style-based system that allows an elaborate web of relationships between our artists. It sounds much more...creative, doesn't it? Oh, yeah.

I also attach the AMG rating for the album to my songs. AMG uses a 0 to 5 star system, with half-star increments. I may not agree with all their rankings, but doing this gives me a nice option: I can scan my collection for music that has been praised critically, but that may have fallen off my personal radar screen.

There's some other information I want to attach to my song files. Here's a list of my tags:

• /AMG:rating/ The All Music Guide rating, expressed as a decimal: 0.0, 0.5, 1.0....4.5, 5.0
• /A:artistname/ Artist name. Used to associate a related artist, e.g. Tom Petty to the Traveling Wilburys.
• /C:bandcovered/ Indicates a cover song, with the name of the original artist
• /I/ Instrumental. Music without vocals.
• /I:instrumentname/ Indicates a specific prominent instrument. Django Reinhardt gets /I:guitar/
• /L/ Live performance
• /M:moodname/ Allows me to associate a mood with the song. I will admit that this feature is not fully implemented.
• /N:countrycode/ The band's country (N=nation) of origin, expressed as a two-letter ISO code.
• /T:languagecode/ Language (T=tongue) the song is performed in, expressed as an ISO code.
• /X/ Explicit lyrics. Not for the Finding Nemo crowd.

So, Cake's cover of "I Will Survive" gets this in its comment field:

Alternative Pop/Rock, Post-Grunge /AMG:3.0/ /C:Gaynor, Gloria/ /N:US/ /T:EN/ /X/

Here's where it really gets good. I'm an algorithm boy. I'd rather solve the larger problem once than twenty little instances of the problem. I love Smart Playlists, or whatever they call them in your music manager software. And now I have the metadata to build really smart playlists. You want to hear trumpet Jazz from 1938 to 1944? Bam. Irish Adult Alternative from the 90s? Bam. Covers of XTC songs performed by bands whose names begin with the letter Q? If I have it, I can get it for you.