Select by Genre

[Waggers58]

All my music has been assigned a genre. It would be nice to select by this and then by artist or album.

[jazzyisj]

I think this request could be grouped together with this one (Spotify categories/genres).

One of the issues will be that different providers may use different genre classifications. A song may be classified as Rock on Spotify but Alternative on Youtube and Heavy Metal in your own MP3 collection.

But it would definitely be a nice feature. I often play Spotify using a category (genre) instead of a playlist.

[DutchJaFO]

Genre classifications are by their very nature vague, which is why Music Brainz tends to assign multiple genres to a single track.
I know I used to simply pick 'hard rock' instead of trying to find the 'correct' sub-genre for any given song before I started to rely on the genres provided by Picard when I was re-tagging ...

Multiple sorts would help navigate large collections even faster.

[rvandet]

I have a lot of albums, both popmusic and classical music.
I want to see only one Calassical, my wife only Popmusic.
A Filter for Genre in Albums (and Artists) would be helpful.

[OzGav]

This feature is in the backlog to be added but as it is an enhancement is currently low priority. I am looking forward to this as well though!

[OzGav]

Related to https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/535

[flygekorren]

+1 for the genre function. Absolutely need this!

[kpoppel]

As is stated above, genres are generally a vague thing, and may even select only some songs on an album. I would like to see a more generalised method by building filters from which songs are played.
Examples:

• genre in (heavy, indie)
• year in range(1992,1995)
• year = 2008
• artist contains('mozart', 'Carl nielsen')

Think of this as dynamic playlists similar to the 'radio' feature.
The filters need not be dynamically evaluated as the content is unlikely to change unless the library is rescanned.

[marcelveldt]

I think ideally we should build something like a "dynamic playlists" feature where you can enter AND/OR condition based rules to create the list. I believe Kodi has something for this to create a playlist.

[DutchJaFO]

The Plex amp music player also features something like that.
OTOH ... the 'radio' option for playlists does generate a dynamic playlist already. It would be nice if we could save the results or export it as a playlist for future use.

[kpoppel]

For a UI there are many options. It could be like the filter function used in tools like Jira, but as I think this, the search domain is limited and well defined by the sum of available ID3 tags in the library.
A tab on the side or button og the playlist tab, which produces a page with a table of the available tags and options for each to select AND , OR, and a comma delimited list of terms. The terms would be lists of integers or strings.
To keep it simple not all ID3 tags are equally valuable and so album, albumartist, artist, original year, genre would be perhaps the most used contenders.
For a first iteration it is simple, and will not require an expression parser, nor having the user learn a query language. A Save button at the end to store the search result as a playlist. And under playlist an option to refresh this type of playlist, like rescanning the library. For the ambitious version input completion is possible because the library is already fully known.

[heibertelf]

I use Jellyfin, which is connected to MA, it has a selection by artist, album, track, and also by genre. In the interface it's just one of the menu items.

I think it would fit in this list with no problem.

[jcredland]

The problem I see with this is the UI aspect. If you have an idea how that could be implemented in a GUI that would be of interest.

So we've had a lot of experience doing UIs that sort by genre for audio samples. What we settled on was having multiple tags on each item for genre, and allowing the user to filter any view by genre. We also had a genre hierarchy so if you selected 'Rock' you also got 'Hard Rock' showing and we'd filter the tags down so you could select a sub category if you wanted to.

[DutchJaFO]

automated playlists per genre or decade would fit in quite nicely as wel.

[u8915055]

So im just curious. Im a new user of MA and i was coming from Logitech Media Server or now called Lyrion. I was surprised to see no option for genre.. SO maybe there's another way im not familiar with. I have about 1000 albums ripped and stored on a NAS. they all have clean tags (MP3 and FLAC) and the genre tags are accurate for my liking - meaning i may call something 'rock' and others may call it 'pop'. But anyway, so now i want to listen to some of my jazz but not sure what artist or album.. so i want to see all my jazz artists.. then i pick an artist and then i can see all the albums and i choose one.. HOw do i do soehtign like that in MA? I really dont want to sift through 1000 albums to pick out all the jazz artists etc.. I just dont understand how sorting by genre isnt a day-1 requirement. So I must be missing something. Any advice would be great..

[OzGav]

Priorities are set by the devs so your day one is not theirs. You can submit a PR to help.

[u8915055]

Totally understood.. i just was hoping that someone might have another approach to filter on genre somehow.. or maybe to tag all jazz albums so i can easily find them etc. Maybe MA is more for streaming services and not NAS users like me. Ill keep watching.

[badewanne1234]

So im just curious. Im a new user of MA and i was coming from Logitech Media Server or now called Lyrion. I was surprised to see no option for genre.. SO maybe there's another way im not familiar with. I have about 1000 albums ripped and stored on a NAS. they all have clean tags (MP3 and FLAC) and the genre tags are accurate for my liking - meaning i may call something 'rock' and others may call it 'pop'. But anyway, so now i want to listen to some of my jazz but not sure what artist or album.. so i want to see all my jazz artists.. then i pick an artist and then i can see all the albums and i choose one.. HOw do i do soehtign like that in MA? I really dont want to sift through 1000 albums to pick out all the jazz artists etc.. I just dont understand how sorting by genre isnt a day-1 requirement. So I must be missing something. Any advice would be great..

same here, I was quite surprised that Genre is not a filter type one can apply.
So the only workaround at this point is go into the folder structure (if you have organised your folders in "Genres" (like I did) but then you can only play a single track and not add the entire album-folder to the queue).

I was surpised how easy the setup of MA was and also the connection to the CIFS/SMB remote share went like a charm - however for now I unfortunately need to put MA aside, I heavily rely on the Genre filter option.
What a great work by the contributors though! :) I cant help in coding due to lack of skills, what a pitty!!

[soulstyle]

Just want to flag interest for this as well. Randomizing by genre is usually how I like to listen to my library.

Ps. You're doing awesome work on MA everyone!

[badewanne1234]

One plus for this, in my opinion its a must have - hopefully it will soon be picked up by the awesome devs who created this great product.
Thanks for what you do!

[Paul-Vdp]

Been waiting for this since I started using MA ;-)

[S-Starvey]

Yes!
I can't believe I've realized just now it was lacking :-D
MA is just awesome, and I understand the priorities, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the main (and for me, only) flaw.

One I can easily live with, though.

[dinyar]

+1 from me too on this feature (similar to the already stated reasons: I have a reasonably well tagged library and usually I feel like a certain genre and then select further from there)

[jozefKruszynski]

Just for some fun info in this topic. Tidal do not have genre as a field on any of the music on their service.
Instead Genre is an entity of it's own, and each genre has tracks, albums and artists as part of it. To me this seems like absolute madness, but it means that you cannot get the genre of a track when parsing it's data structure, crazy right?

[natefelt]

I'm just another user hoping for this feature to be added to Music Assistant.

[FurtiveD]

As a local NAS user, being able to launch a shuffle of a specific genre is the only major feature missing for me.

[screenagerbe]

As a local NAS user, being able to launch a shuffle of a specific genre is the only major feature missing for me.

I second this, and I also want to add some other remarks about MA (maybe they should not all be listed here)

For now I'm only experimenting with MA as I feel it's not yet ready to replace the tools I'm using now depending on the situation (JellyFin, Kodi, WinAMP). Most importantly I miss some features related to local music, not sure if MA has even the intention to become a Music Library of sorts.

• For starters, local metadata (ID3 tags) are not available in MA.
• Genres are not made available and that really is a shame.
  Sometimes you see them, but they are not corresponding with the ID3 tags of my collection.
  an example:
  
  Where are those genres/tags coming from? Not from my files... Probably from MusicBrainz or The Audio DB, but there is no reference what so ever (could/should be a link to the correct metadata provider).
  I reckon pretty much every person who's somehow doing things with music has his own genres or tags or whatever, but it's an essential parameter when managing large music libraries.
• Something else: Release Years.
  When sorting Albums on Release Year they are by default ordered old to new, no way to reverse it and show them new to old. 🤷‍♂️
• or Artist metadata. MA shows it, but where it comes from remains a secret. Why?
  
  I really like this, but no source reference?
• Some kind of smart playlist creation would also be nice (based on ID3 tags or other manageable metadata)
• I miss a scrobbling feature (i.c. last.fm)

MA does look promising, but for me it is not yet ready for daily use because of these missing features.

/edit: some typo's and and added the last feature, as it is pretty important to me but I completely forgot to mention it

[marcelveldt]

Feedback like this gets lost. Best is to give feedback one by one. This post is about genres.
There is also another feature request for scrobbling etc. etc

Remember that MA is a relative new tool which is still in development, so you cnat expect it to match your tools which esist for years or have a big company or dev team behind it.

[marcelveldt]

Genre support will come to MA eventually but if we do this, we want to do it right. Genres are horrible and not uniform across the industry and a complete disaster on streaming providers. My idea to this when implementing it, is to go all-in and make a matching pattern so you can decide what genres (from whatever bucket) merge into what final genre. Because MA has support for multiple music providers and metadata sources, this is not as easy as you may think.

We currently have some other stuff to handle higher in priority but I truly think the full Genre support is something that could potentially land in 2.6 or 2.7 so within a couple of months time.

[badewanne1234]

I'm very thankful to read this. Thanks for being so active in the development of MA!

[soulstyle]

Thats awesome! Thanks for the update :)

[heibertelf]

May be something "tiny" AI, that could determine genres and make recommendations playlists?

[TGrounds]

Genre would be awesome! I have a large CD collection that I have ripped to my NAS with all of this set and in my previous thick-client media player I loved to be able to play random tracks in a given Genre for a party, etc. Like holiday time being able to do this simply by playing random tracks in the genre vs. having to build a full playlist.

You are spot on when you mentioned aggregating genres from different sources is a nightmare. I think your approach is an excellent one where me as the end user can define the Genres I wish to use and then provide the mapping from the different music sources into the genres I wish to use is a elegant approach. I can see where you would build a Genera list from each music source (including local file shares) that you would periodically update would be the start, then allowing the end user to either 'keep the genre' which creates a direct mapping, or to map it to a different one. Then with each update of the music provider list, indicate new genres that need to be mapped, perhaps raise it as a notice of 'needs attention' so that the end user can stay on top of their mappings. Perhaps raise this as notices in Home Assistant? It could be a similar approach to tagging in Home Assistant.

[DutchJaFO]

I wish I could exclude specific genres from playlists, because I am getting Christmas songs when using a script that selects all songs from an artist.

I don't know if they have tags, because some of them are from Spotify ...

Same thing with tracks that are interviews of some kind.

For tracks I have in my local storage a work around would be too move those tracks to their own folder and then only enable that folder when I want them.
Streaming services don't have such options 😞

[Aesculapius]

Kinda of the same request as https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/4165 I was really surprised not to see such essential functionality not present in this otherwise rich project. Availability of metadata for sorting, filtering etc. should really be possible so a +1 from me.

[mist2t]

Navidrome / Jellyfin user here with a personal local music library (carefully tagged and maintained).

I'm just researching MA and wanted to post my 2 cents regarding Genres. A cool Genre support is one of the big shortcomings in all music servers I tried so far.

I have manually tagged genres for my library, they are pretty broad (house, rock, pop, rap, christmas etc) and are 100% consistent across all my library.

When I start a listening session I'm mostly thinking what I'm in mood for (genre-wise) then dig into the collections for that specific genre. It's like a book library: most of us think about a genre first when researching a new book or start reading a new one. We navigate the physical book library based on genres first ... and not other criteria.

I think a Music server should provide the same experience to music listening similar to a book library.

My wishlist for genre related features:

1. Full support for tagged genres within local collections (local music files)
2. Genre support for other stuff like Artists and Playlists (for the ability to aggregate those in the UI within a specific Genre).
3. Each genre should have a landing / "homepage" where it would aggregate a summary with all the content of that particular genre, showing Artists / Albums/ Songs/ Playlists ... all the content "type" of the particular genre (with the option to "explore" further each content type within the genre)

I think genres are, at least for me ... a multi-genre listener, the "foundation" of music listening experience.

I don't want Metallica mixed together with Vangelis or Enya and I pretty much know from the moment I open my music app if I'm in the mood for some metal ... or just chill on some relaxing music in the background.

That's why having a music navigation based on "old" paradigm of "Artists" , "Albums" , "Songs" pages that will show a messy soup of everything thrown together (with or without some filtering) .... is pretty meh

Anyway ... my 2 cents. Thanks for everything you guys do !

[flygekorren]

Couldn't agree with his more, this should be a standard approach. I never understood the non genre start when looking for a song. I may be old fashioned but I love the old Winamp style filter where you could start by filtering genres based on your own id3 tags and then further on filter down the albums, tracks and artists in those genres. Thumbs up for this post

[jozefKruszynski]

The problem is that there is no standard approach for genres when it comes to streaming providers.
It's all well and good saying that local music tagged properly can be standardised, but this is one tiny piece of the puzzle.
It is being actively discussed, but it's a very, very tricky thing to implement correctly given all the providers that have been implemented.

Having said all this, I agree it will be fantastic when we put it in place

[TGrounds]

I think about this like I do vendor item numbers in an e-commerce site. We have no control over the item number of our vendors, but do have the ability to do a cross reference in our own system. Similar with generes. We have no control over the generas of the streaming provider, however, we should be able to manage my own list of generes in Music Assistant. As part of that, be able to map the streaming providers genere into mine. It would need to be a one-to-many relationship where one genera in my world may map to many of the streaming provider if they are more 'granular' than mine are. This enables me to maintain the generes I want in my environment while easily translating to the ones of the streaming providers, or even my own ripped library. In a way it isn't much different than the structure of a playlist - but rather than referencing the specific song, reference the genere.

[mist2t]

Yeah, I think Genre mapping options between local files and those identified on streaming services could be the answer.

Roon does something similar i think

(https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/genre-setting)

I could choose to "link" a bunch of "external" identified genres (like those on streaming services) with my local identified ones.

[Paul-Vdp]

I'm willing to accept that 'there is no standard approach for genres when it comes to streaming providers', making it tricky to implement.
But then: is/was there a standard approach for ANYTHING when it comes to streaming providers ? I'd be surprised ...
And starting with an implementation just for local music files does not exactly sound like rocket science - whilst making a lot of us 'oldskool' folks very happy ;-)

[u8915055]

I also wonder why this couldn't just be done for local files. I currently use lyrion mainly because of the genre capability for my local files but really like the look of MA. The one big hangup is the same thing mentioned here, no genre. Lyrion does implement a genre functionality but as far as i can tell its only for local music. I dont know how implementing a genre functionality within MA makes sense for a streaming service for the reasons mentioned. Its not like id want ot play some jazz and expect the system to scan and filter every single available piece of music on Apple, Spotify, whatever to give me options. But for local music, this makes complete sense. To me this ONLY makes sense for local files.

MA is a great looking piece of software and maybe it was really geared towards streaming services.

Just my 0.02.

[marcelveldt]

This will come just be patient please

[Maco65]

I am supporting this.
Also having an option to build a playlist based on some criteria which are not solid and well standardized is the OPTION with clear info that the result is as is. Isn't it similar to filtering pictures based on metadata which also are not 100% correct.
Some users will not use it and some (like me) will be very happy! :)

[marcelveldt]

The work has already started on this but it's scheduled for the 2.8 release, so after 2.7 gets released tomorrow we'll start a new beta cycle with the genres support

[u8915055]

So so happy! As i said im on Lyrion but MA is just so clean and functional! A seriously beautiful piece of work.. with some sort of genre capability it will be even more amazing.. thank you for listening to all of us.. i dont envision this is a small piece of work and i thank you for your efforts.

[AkoreJepade]

Also looking forward to Genre support. Is there a way to play folders in MA? I have all my Latin in a separate folder but when I click the Play button I get an error: "No playable items found" but if I go into a subfolder in LatinMusic folder and click the Play button on one of the many folders listed it will play.

[rvandet]

Yes, brows by files, choose NAS, choose folder then clik on folder icon, select play.

[AkoreJepade]

Yes, It does seem to work for most of my folders. I have generic Music folder and then a Country folder and a Latin folder. The generic Music folder has the most amount of subfolders and music and it will play when I click on the play button way over on the right side but it takes it awhile to start playing but it will play. The Country folder has less subfolders and it also will play just fine. The Latin folder for some reason does not want to let me play it so no sure what is going on but I am checking permissions etc to try and figure out why MA does not like that folder.

After moving folders over one by one (by artist) into the LatinMusic folder and testing if it would play with no issues and I was able to narrow it down to one artist (Tony Dize) which caused MA to give an error when trying to play the LatinMusic folder and then I narrowed it down to one track (Mi AMor es Probre.mp3). That one track, which plays fine in VLC but struggles in Windows Media player was the one track out of 464 that was stopping MA from playing the folder. Must be a corrupt file.

[badewanne1234]

Genre selection seems now to be available in the latest beta, according to the RN. I have not yet updated though but will do so in the evening 👍🏻

[AkoreJepade]

It sure has!

[badewanne1234]

Finally the Genres are here, and its a beauty. I see it has some default Genres, and it created Genres which MA has found in the ID3 Tags of all the (mp3) files.

Now this is working nice and you can merge Genres etc, however, what I do not understand is, and maybe some devs can enlighten me:

I have ID3 tags for all files and the Gerne is pulled from there - however, the artist itself, is not marked with that Genre.
Meaning, if I go to the Genre, I can see all tracks, but not the Artist as a thumbnail. Yes I already found that I can add the Artist to the Genre, but given that I have hundreds of Artists, this is quite some work to do.

When you do the same in in for Example Foobar, the display logic is Genre --> Artist --> Album --> Track.
The same goes for Itunes / Apple Music, if you use smart playlists: Genre --> Artist --> Album --> Track

In MA, its Genre --> Track unless you add the Artist to the Genre by hand, then you will have Genre --> Artist --> Album --> Track

BTW, for example my logical folder structure in explorer is exactly like the displaying behaviour: Genre --> Artist --> Album --> Track.

My key question to the devs is, is there a way that you can change the scanning behaviour, so that Artists are added to a Genre if their tracks are marked for that Genre too, or is the intention that the user needs to do this by him/herself? (yes, one time job, unless you crash the MA Database)
I can see some artists added to the generic/default Genres, but I have no idea where this information is coming from.

After all, its a great addon and I really appreciate the effort that has been put into this, thanks heaps! 🚀 I also understand its not possible to solve all problems / serve all requirements. What I try to say is, there is huge work for the guys who have a big/bigger library - if possible, I try to minismise that.
Since its still in beta, I wanted to give some feedback, so that it might be changed - or is it only me who is having this problem. 😃

[badewanne1234]

Thanks to both of you for the fast responses and thoughts. Looking forward to see whats coming 👍🏻

[MarvinSchenkel]

Just wondering if bluntly 'copying track genres to the artist' is the way to go? I know a few artist that produce electronic music by nature, but have made some acoustic versions of their songs. If we would tag those artists as both 'electronic' and 'acoustic', playing either genre would potentially drag in their other songs in the queue as well (e.g. electronic music by them when playing 'acoustic').

[badewanne1234]

That is true, but you could always remove the genre by hand? I would argue that its probably a minority of artists and thus, the big chunk would be in one genre. As long as you can manually remove it, that should do. I think eventually, the aim should be to keep the manual work at a minimum and therefore, removing a few artists from a genre is by far less work than adding each artist to a genre by hand.
And if you add the toggle, that users do have the choice for this "copy action", you'll meet most use-cases in my opinion.

[marcelveldt]

Agreed, and we should only do it if there is no artist info in an NFO file in the artist folder

[jozefKruszynski]

An issue here is that assuming we remove a genre from an artist, we then need to implement some way of making that stick. Currently no such thing exists, which means that the next scan would add the genre right back.

Even if we copy the genre into the metadata, and then have some function the remove it, we still would need to add some sort of manual override mechanism to ensure it doesn't get copied again on next sync.

[jozefKruszynski]

@badewanne1234

Latest beta adds the option to derive genres for albums/artists from the track metadata for both local and remote file providers. The setting for this is in the provider settings.

You can also exclude genres from media items for times when the auto mappings are considered unwanted/incorrect.

https://github.com/music-assistant/server/releases/tag/2.8.0b19

[OzGav]

Have a look at your filters as 2.8.4 is working fine here.

edit: Also there is artwork in the banner for the default genres

[badewanne1234]

I figured it out. So looks like as it has been mentioned during the beta-testing, that musicbrainz and/or fanart scanning is kicking in. Whats happening is that the artists (and its albums) are being updated by musicbrainz and/or fanart scanning and then, the custom-genre is being removed and replaced with the genre from musicbrainz/fanart.

Having said that, I can find all artists and albums in the default genre, but not in my custom genre.
Shall I raise an issue for that or is this already being worked on anyway?
Thank you

BTW: nice with the artwork. I wish I could apply the default artwork to custom genres too! :)

[OzGav]

This doesn’t sound right as we don’t normally overwrite existing data. Are you using the local file system provider? If so, have you enabled the “Propagate track genres to albums and artists.”

[badewanne1234]

you are right, I forgot already that I need to set this :D I have set it and genres are now propagagted. Unfortunately, Artist Info and Artwork has been removed with that step, but at least, correct genres are now showing - thanks!
Update: not sure if all artwork has been removed, or only on some artists, or if it has been entirely removed but is being readded - scans are ongoing and I see a lot of artwork missing but some artists have artwork, so fingers crossed its being populated. I will monitor it and get back here tomorrow or so.

[OzGav]

Not sure what happened with the artwork but that will be slowly replaced in the background unless you have local artwork when it should be quite fast.

[rvandet]

Here is my use case:

• I use MP3TAG to organize my Tags for music files on my NAS;
• I have 150 files, for which I set Album Tag = "Funk";
• When MA sees new files, it will enrich the Metadata (fine);
• But now i have 10 Albums instead of the one set with MP3TAG (not fine)

How can make MA to use the Albums Tags as i have made them myself?

[rvandet]

I do not know hpw to find the Tags of Albums, so i made a screenshot:

[rvandet]

And here is the screenshot from MP3TAG:

[OzGav]

MA is working as designed here. The mistake is you have tagged the album with the album artist as the track artist name instead of ”Various Artists”

[rvandet]

Thx for pointing out how this works.

I have Classical music albums, and i think that works different in that genre.
As Artist I use the composer, so that in MA the Artist gives me all Mozart etc.
Then I Use Album, so i can search for "Symphony"et cetera.
The Albumartist are all involved for cross reference: composer, orchestra, singer, etc.

Maybe this helps you, to understand what i try to do and make it work for me.

Anyways, i really enjoy the Genres, it helps to find a specific genre from all the sources much more easy.
Keep up the good work. Applausse !

[OzGav]

Handling classical material is something we know we need improve.

[rvandet]

Here is another Use case:

• my playlist is assigned to Classical
• I manually assign it to Genre Pop
• it is now in two genres

how can i delete the genre Classical for this playlist?

[OzGav]

Right click or long press on the genre chip and select “exclude genre”. (I notice a problem with my iPad not bringing up the menu on long press so we will look into that)

[rvandet]

Found it. I excluded the genre that i wanted.

[rvandet]

I try to find my way, my feedback is based on my recent user-experience:
The Metadata functions are in several Menu-items:

System / Plugin (not able to switch off)
System / Metadata (switch use or not use)
Not in the Media source
Not in System / Genre

Would it make sense to concentrate this in one place?
Would it make sense to Switch on/off per Media source?

[OzGav]

The general advice is these providers should not be turned off as you then don’t get stuff like artist / album imagery or artist bios. The misunderstanding appears to be that there is some sort of manipulation of tagged information when this is not true. Only in the case of track titles and artist tags which contain multiple artist names are these processed to enable the item to be cleanly added to the MA database.

[rvandet]

So,
If TAG Album is equal;
And TAG Albumartist is different;
Then several albums are created.

I would prefer to keep the TAG Album leading.
Maybe the CD# could create another Album.
That would, for me at least, be closest to my CDs in the cupboard.

How do other solutions deal with this complexity?

[OzGav]

No a multiple CD album is still the one album. MA already shows the disc number and track number in the UI.

You cannot have the album tag as leading as that would mean the myriad of "Greatest Hits" albums would all get conflated.

I dont see the complexity. Just look at how Musicbrainz handles it as that is what MA generally follows.

[rvandet]

Quick question:

• is there a way to find albums / tracks that have not been assigned a genre?

[OzGav]

I don’t think so but @jozefKruszynski will confirm

[OzGav]

Please open a dedicated question about this as this post is about genres. When you do post a screenshot.