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I have to wonder if the problem exists partly because most people don’t care? As a musician myself, I care a little bit. But as a user, I haven’t updated metada

I have to wonder if the problem exists partly because most people don’t care? As a musician myself, I care a little bit. But as a user, I haven’t updated metadata on a music file (other than the ones I create from my own music) in probably 2 decades. What I get from the music services I download or stream from seems decent enough. I’m not a collector of rare or obscure songs or versions of songs. I mostly stream music, and have an older catalog from my CDs (which are now in my attic). I don’t have time to hand-curate the tags or databases or whatever for my music, TV Shows, movies, etc. What the services currently offer mostly works OK for me.

Stealthisbook 4y ago
Librarians really care about it since they have to get the exact thing a patron is looking for. Most people also do care occasionally. Everybody has the moment when they want to find a specific track, maybe from a live album that featured that one drummer they like. Having a service that serves everybody means every day having to fulfill thousands of those individual once in a decade requests
JohnFen 4y ago
Some care. I care a whole lot, because when I play music, I'm deliberately selecting specific music for a specific reason, so I want to be able to find it in my collection. But I don't use music streaming services at all -- I run my own media server and stream from that. So what I started doing years ago is to ignore any existing metadata (even song and album titles) and enter it all myself. I've developed a system that meets my needs. But it also means that every time I buy a new album, I'll be spending 15 minutes or so entering all the metadata for it. That sucks. I'd really prefer it if the online music databases got their act together and tagged everything at least in a consistent manner. None of the fields in the databases can be trusted completely, but the worst offender of all is "Genre" and similar.
- Tylast 4y ago
  Regarding the "Genre" tag, Apple Music make that problem 1000% worse as Apple Music does NOT allow multiple separate Genres per track. When selecting multiple Genres, it concatenates the names into a unique Genre thus defeating the purpose of trying to tag a track with multiple Genres. It is the only musics database that I've seen do this.
  - gvurrdon 4y ago
    This is indeed a total pain. I’d like to find some other means of handling music in Mac and iPhone to get around it.
  - janc_ 4y ago
    Metadata tagging in the mp4 container format used by Apple is very rigid, and IIRC it doesn't support multiple fields with the same name, or multiple values within a field, so they can't really implement it. (They could implement it for most other formats, of course, but that would make their own formats look bad...)

Stealthisbook 4y ago

Librarians really care about it since they have to get the exact thing a patron is looking for. Most people also do care occasionally. Everybody has the moment when they want to find a specific track, maybe from a live album that featured that one drummer they like. Having a service that serves everybody means every day having to fulfill thousands of those individual once in a decade requests

JohnFen 4y ago

Some care. I care a whole lot, because when I play music, I'm deliberately selecting specific music for a specific reason, so I want to be able to find it in my collection. But I don't use music streaming services at all -- I run my own media server and stream from that. So what I started doing years ago is to ignore any existing metadata (even song and album titles) and enter it all myself. I've developed a system that meets my needs. But it also means that every time I buy a new album, I'll be spending 15 minutes or so entering all the metadata for it. That sucks. I'd really prefer it if the online music databases got their act together and tagged everything at least in a consistent manner. None of the fields in the databases can be trusted completely, but the worst offender of all is "Genre" and similar.

Tylast 4y ago
Regarding the "Genre" tag, Apple Music make that problem 1000% worse as Apple Music does NOT allow multiple separate Genres per track. When selecting multiple Genres, it concatenates the names into a unique Genre thus defeating the purpose of trying to tag a track with multiple Genres. It is the only musics database that I've seen do this.
- gvurrdon 4y ago
  This is indeed a total pain. I’d like to find some other means of handling music in Mac and iPhone to get around it.
- janc_ 4y ago
  Metadata tagging in the mp4 container format used by Apple is very rigid, and IIRC it doesn't support multiple fields with the same name, or multiple values within a field, so they can't really implement it. (They could implement it for most other formats, of course, but that would make their own formats look bad...)