GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 729036
Missing items in genre drop down menu
Last modified: 2014-05-05 18:24:20 UTC
The drop down menu does not seem to contain the following genres: 150: Baroque 182: Neoclassical
The LAME list of genres only goes up to 147, and the ID3v2.4 specification only lists 79 genres. What software adds a genre field which is greater than 147, and do you know of a list of genres which is used by multiple implementations?
According to Wikipedia, the latest Winamp v5.6 extends the list to 191. I thought (1) the ID3 standard as such only defined genres up to 79. All later extensions came with Winamp.
I am a bit hesitant to add those extra genres, unless software such as LAME will add support for them. Having said that, it is quite easy to do. Does any other software write and understand the same extended genre field?
I see your point, however we seem to be getting into a chicken and egg situation. Currently, it seems that ID3 tagging of classical music is a mess. I have a CD of JS Bach's Sonatas for solo violin marked as pop! Currently, I am using EasyTag to try and sort out the chaos in my collection of ripped CDs.
The better solution is to use free-form genres as in ID3v2, which can be as specific as necessary. The list of genres in ID3v1 will be forever incomplete, and displaying the genres depends greatly on ID3-reading software (be that audio players or tag editors) which must support text equivalents of the numeric tag. However, as long as there are no conflicts with numeric genres added by other software (which I would still be interested to know), I think it is fine to add support for the "WinAmp 5.6" genres, and I will do it in the next few days.
Thank you.
I just pushed an updated genre list for ID3v1 to both the master and easytag-2-2 branches. I also pushed a fix so that the genres are correctly read when using libid3tag (when writing tags as ID3v2.4 is enabled). If you use the new genres, I would recommend storing them as text only (for ID3v2, that is), which can be enabled in the preferences. If you are waiting for a new release, this change will be in an upcoming 2.2.2, due in a week or so.