Super Search Suggestion

[trythil]

would it be hard to implement a moderations tool like that of audioscrobbler?
http://www.audioscrobbler.com/mod.php

Or even just use their database?

The better database is at MusicBrainz; indeed, AudioScrobbler encourages use of MusicBrainz to do tagging. MusicBrainz still has some flaws (like no Unicode support), but it's not too bad.

One thing I do like about the system is that they don't bother with something as impossible to define as genre :)

[nokvok]

I suggested that before, but people did not comprehend that this Option needs not to be Perfect (hell, non of the others are, either) and needs not to be Istantly added to all Videos... I rather have a 10-20% failure rate when searching for "Punk" or "Classic" than to scroll through hundrets of Entries searching for songs which sound like they would be the kind fo musik i am searching for...

[BasharOfTheAges]

Er...wait. Actually, it is, because people can't even get THAT right. Here's an example. The string for "Dance Dance Revolution 7th Mix - Look At Us Now" is wrong: the artist is Sarina Paris, the track name is "Look at Us", and it's the DDR cut.

Ouch. yea.. i wasn't to sure exactly what was to go there, or if the spicific cut/edit took presidence over the original artist.

[trythil]

I suggested that before, but people did not comprehend that this Option needs not to be Perfect (hell, non of the others are, either) and needs not to be Istantly added to all Videos... I rather have a 10-20% failure rate when searching for "Punk" or "Classic" than to scroll through hundrets of Entries searching for songs which sound like they would be the kind fo musik i am searching for...

This system does not have to be perfect, nor does it have to be instantly added to all videos.

Neither excuse, however, is an escape from the problem that genre, unlike song title or artist, is completely subjective. The basic problem is that what you think is not what everyone else thinks.

If you want to see the kind of disaster that a free-reign genre labeling system can produce, go look at freedb's genres sometime. They've divulged into all sorts of categories, and these days, it's useless.

If you want to go the restricted categories route, you run into the questions I asked in my previous posts, which have yet remained unanswered.

[nokvok]

I suggested that before, but people did not comprehend that this Option needs not to be Perfect (hell, non of the others are, either) and needs not to be Istantly added to all Videos... I rather have a 10-20% failure rate when searching for "Punk" or "Classic" than to scroll through hundrets of Entries searching for songs which sound like they would be the kind fo musik i am searching for...

This system does not have to be perfect, nor does it have to be instantly added to all videos.

Neither excuse, however, is an escape from the problem that genre, unlike song title or artist, is completely subjective. The basic problem is that what you think is not what everyone else thinks.

That doesn't matter, since it is not about what i am thinking but what i am telling other peoples, it is a matter of Communication and Communication is and cannot be free of misunderstandings and divergenting Images of the Subject... Vulgo: It is natural to misunderstand each other, that is true for Music Genres, too. People can deal with it, people do that each and every day...

Music Genres are not completely subjective, they are a matter of consensus cause they are part of the categorizing system humans created to communicate... saying those categories are useless for communication is like saying the word "Human" is useless to communicate cause everyone defines Human shleigthly different

If you want to see the kind of disaster that a free-reign genre labeling system can produce, go look at freedb's genres sometime. They've divulged into all sorts of categories, and these days, it's useless.

It is not a good thing to let thousands of people name the search-relevant criterias themself, true. But that should be obvious, since any Search engine has the natural limitations of Formal Languages and cannot search for Contextual similarities but only for literal ones.

If you want to go the restricted categories route, you run into the questions I asked in my previous posts, which have yet remained unanswered.

There are ways and methods which can work.
One springing to mind is a Categorisation tree, which links subcategories to the more general Categories (like if you are looking for Metal you also search for Black metal, Death metal, etc. but you could also look just for Black metal (and thus black emo metal, black growling metal, etc.), this in conjunction with an Addition, purely describtive field for an optional Costum made Genre name (to satisfy the fundamentalists) should be able to provide a solution to most of your problems.

[Kalium]

Ugh... to make things simple and easy to maintain, I'm going to say genre=BAAAAD.

This is, of course, just my opinion - but the opinion of someone who cringes in fear just thinking about the current mess that music is.

[trythil]

I suggested that before, but people did not comprehend that this Option needs not to be Perfect (hell, non of the others are, either) and needs not to be Istantly added to all Videos... I rather have a 10-20% failure rate when searching for "Punk" or "Classic" than to scroll through hundrets of Entries searching for songs which sound like they would be the kind fo musik i am searching for...

This system does not have to be perfect, nor does it have to be instantly added to all videos.

Neither excuse, however, is an escape from the problem that genre, unlike song title or artist, is completely subjective. The basic problem is that what you think is not what everyone else thinks.

That doesn't matter, since it is not about what i am thinking but what i am telling other peoples, it is a matter of Communication and Communication is and cannot be free of misunderstandings and divergenting Images of the Subject...

So what's the point of "genre", then? Self-expression?

Would that not make a genre classification system useless? After all, the point of any sort of shared systematic labeling system is to provide a common ground for describing things on objective criteria.

Music Genres are not completely subjective, they are a matter of consensus cause they are part of the categorizing system humans created to communicate... saying those categories are useless for communication is like saying the word "Human" is useless to communicate cause everyone defines Human shleigthly different

This is precisely the problem! When we attempt to use unclear words, we get controversy. (So, yes, I would argue that "human" is useless for all communicative purposes involving classification. It still works fine for invoking imagery, but that is not classification.) Since you brought up the topic of "human", I'll bring up a high-profile case to illustrate my point: Was Terri Schiavo, before her death, still "human"? (I realize that you are not a US citizen, but considering how gruesomely the USA media vultures fed upon Schiavo, I consider it fair to assume that you heard some information about her situation.)

Of course, precision in inclusion and exclusion with genre classification does not carry nearly as much weight as it did in that case. However you need some sort of universal basis for deciding what is in a given category and what is not. If you do not provide that basis, then we have the proliferation problem; if you provide a basis that is too open, you have the same problem; and if you provide a basis that is too strict, then you have the same problem. Each of these situations contributes to the uselessness of genre as a classification system. This gets me to the real point:

If you want to go the restricted categories route, you run into the questions I asked in my previous posts, which have yet remained unanswered.

There are ways and methods which can work.
One springing to mind is a Categorisation tree, which links subcategories to the more general Categories (like if you are looking for Metal you also search for Black metal, Death metal, etc. but you could also look just for Black metal (and thus black emo metal, black growling metal, etc.), this in conjunction with an Addition, purely describtive field for an optional Costum made Genre name (to satisfy the fundamentalists) should be able to provide a solution to most of your problems.

The primary problem is not one of organization; that part is relatively easy, and a categorization tree such as you proposed might work (although you must take into consideration the ability to link one track to multiple genres). The big problem is deciding who makes the rules.

[Scintilla]

Since you brought up the topic of "human", I'll bring up a high-profile case to illustrate my point: Was Terri Schiavo, before her death, still "human"? (I realize that you are not a US citizen, but considering how gruesomely the USA media vultures fed upon Schiavo, I consider it fair to assume that you heard some information about her situation.)

Don't underestimate the power of lack of exposure to the news media.
I'm a US citizen, and *I* had never heard of Terri Schiavo before someone mentioned her in his LJ a week ago.

[derobert]

Personally, I think genre would be useful. While people may disagree on genres sometimes, I think those are the exceptions; the vast majority of music is fairly easily classified. We shouldn't the small minority that are exceptions prevent us from doing something that'd work for the vast majority of works.

I, however, agree with AD: Have fun classifying all bignum songs. I see two methods we could proceed with:

a. Consider the musical genre a property of the video, not the song. This seems rather broken, but might work. We'd never run into conflicts any more than we do with what makes an, e.g., "sentimental" video.

b. Consider the musical genre a property of the song and who says so. Basically, put together a system where every member can somehow say, "this song is genre X". From this we either tally votes to determine genre, or, more complicatedly, determine which members agree with your genre nominations the most. Then use that similarity to determine what genres you'd call a song.

(a) is probably fairly simple to implement. (b)(1) is too, but it really seems like we'd need to un-break the song list first (e.g., by removing duplicates). (b)(2) seems neat, but sounds like a PITA, and possible CPU-time hog.

Personally, I'd love to be able to filter results by genre. However, mainting the music database that'd be required for option (b) seems quite far from the actual purpose of the site; we'd surely need to cooperate with someone like MusicBrainz for that. That'd take major work.

So, what do people think of (a)? And are there any volunteers?

PS: "Human", at least as referring to homo sapiens, is quite well defined.

[downwithpants]

for suggestion a: would that mean the creator enters the music genre? that seems like an ok idea, until you realize that if the org has so many videos with the "unknown artist" or "unknown song" the accuracy on genre probably isn't going to be better.

for suggestion b: it seems very time consuming, but probably would work better.

a few more considerations:
-would a video with multiple audio sources get multiple music genre designations?
-music genre has varying degrees of specificity (example: metal)- how specific should genres be? should we implement a hierarchy of genres (a la allmusic.com)?

i would like to see music artist/song cleanup. that too has some more considerations:
-can we implement a multiple artist listings per song (example: evanescence featuring paul mccoy -> evanescence; paul mccoy, which appears under search for evanescence and for paul mccoy
-when performer != song writer, list as artists: performer for covers, remixes, pop production, and parodies; song writer for performance (classical, jazz, showtune, soundtrack, score) music?
-for commercials and trailers, list as artist: production company or sponsoring party (ex: "Warner Bros." for Matrix trailers, "ADV" for a dub from Evangelion, "Friends of George Bush" for a Bush ad?)
-how to denote different versions of the same song - radio edits, live recordings, acoustic recordings