Continuing my quest for ripping and metadata-izing my whole CD collection (currently midway though the D’s – getting through one letter a day). And I’ve come up against the dilemma of assigning genres.
There seems to be 3 camps: don’t use genres at all, use a limited number, or go all in and use hundreds. I’ve read a few interesting schemes as well, one being to use a limited number, then subcategorize using playlists. That was going to be my plan, until I kind of realized something.
Looking at the Rock genre, there is a very large collection of sub-genres under it. For example: Surf, Hard Rock, Hair Bands, British Invasion, Rock & Roll, etc. Reading this list made me realize that the “genres” are actually few and far between, but the sub-genres can nearly be classified by release year. Right? Rock is different in the 50’s, the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, and on and on. Yet, it’s all Rock. It’s the same with Heavy Metal. The metal of the 70’s is nothing like the metal of today. 70’s metal is many times tamer than modern rock.
So I guess my plan now is the same as it was, keep a very limited number of genres and the classify things further with playlists. But with my new insight, I can create smart playlists grouping by Year and get a pretty close approximation of a specific sub-genre.
In an semi-related topic, I had a hell of a time ripping one particular CD: The Digital Domain: A Demonstration. This is one of those CDs that you almost need to have in lossless because its entire purpose is to demonstrate the capabilities of digital audio. For some reason, every single track resulted in a read error when ripping with Exact Audio Copy. I got the great idea that I could copy the disc to ISO as data instead of as audio, then mount the ISO and rip from that. The first tool I tried, ImgBurn, hung during track analysis, so I ended up using Daemon Tools Lite, which I had installed already. The rip from the ISO went off without a single issue, and it was fast.
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