Server Version#: Version 1.18.0.1846
Player Version#: Version 4.8.3
Just trying out the new music scanner. My music library is well tagged, with every release having album artist, artist, album, year, title. Almost every release has multiple genres, too, sourced from Discogs or added by me.
Still, I thought I’d use Plex’s in-built genres, having recalled an old setting that allowed ‘fine grained’ genre listings of 400+ genres or something. I can’t find that option now, but thought I’d give the control of genres over to Plex to see what it comes up with.
Well, I tried it across three different artists: Andy Stott, JuJu & Jordash, and Claro Intellectico.
Each are tagged, unhelpfully, as ‘Electronic’.
It seems that there is only one genre for anyone that uses a synthesiser or drum machine, no matter f they play techno, house, garage, bass music, ambient, IDM, glitch, drum & bass or any of many other genres of electronic music that sound vastly different.
Is this going to be fixed in the future? Was it just overlooked by developers that don’t listen to electronic music? Or is it just the early days of the new music scanner?
Having genres this broad make the feature almost useless: I’m not going to create a genre-based playlist that stacks some filthy glitchcore next to some downtempo ambient. Why wouldn’t I just use the library radio feature if I didn’t care about what mood the music throws at me?
Ah cool: just noticed that the three artists I updated with the new metadata now have style associated with them. Not sure why it required a different label than genre, but grateful to have it there. Thanks!
The differentiation between genre and style comes from AllMusic, one of the online sources that Plex now uses for metadata (actually, Plex connects to MusicBrainz, and MusicBrainz gathers info from other sources, including AllMusic).
I went to see if I could submit some genre and mood data on releases where it was missing and it turns out AllMusic in turn gets their data from TiVo:
Errors to written content like reviews and biographies, tagged metadata like Genres, Styles, Moods, Themes and Similar artists are on the end of our data provider, TiVo. You may submit artist- and album-related corrections to TiVo editors using Submit Corrections links available in the sidebar on artist and album pages, and corrections related to other types of data via our feedback form. TiVo prides themselves on accuracy, so please include your information source in your submission. Please do not contact AllMusic about the status of data corrections; we don’t control which data is corrected or how long it takes to apply corrections, and we can’t move up your correction in priority or within a specific time frame. /TiVo appreciates the time you take to send this information to them, but due to the immense volume of correspondence they receive, they’re unable to directly respond to most of your submissions.
Unfortunately, it looks like there is no way to do user submitted data directly to the database.
So how do you change the Genre field on the artists page to Style? Since the Genre field is no longer useful as 90% of my collection is Metal and it is now all listed as Pop/Rock. And the other 10% is Synthwave/Dubstep and is now all listed as Electronic. So I have 486 Artists that are broken up between only 2 Genres.
