Exclude in smart playlists

[blamm]

Hi,

How do I exclude stuff from a smart playlist. I want to prevent my “all” playlist from selecting my christmas stuff.

[CCRDude]

How about assigning an additional genre like “Christmas Songs” or “XMas” to those songs, and adding a ( … ) AND (NOT GENRE = ‘XMas’) (from memory, syntax doesn’t have to be 100% correct) to the smart playlist?

Hmmm… does the Firefly database support multiple genres for files? I only recently started updating my tags thus and haven’t looked it up yet (if not, you can always use the christmas genre as the main genre for the files).

[rpedde]

@CCRDude wrote:

How about assigning an additional genre like “Christmas Songs” or “XMas” to those songs, and adding a ( … ) AND (NOT GENRE = ‘XMas’) (from memory, syntax doesn’t have to be 100% correct) to the smart playlist?

Hmmm… does the Firefly database support multiple genres for files? I only recently started updating my tags thus and haven’t looked it up yet (if not, you can always use the christmas genre as the main genre for the files).

What application lets you specify multiple genres? And how?

Seems like id3v2 allows multiple id3v1 byte-tags using a format like:

(1)(15)(30)

to specify multiple genres with id3v1 lookup, but it doesn’t specify how to do multiple ad-hoc genres.

I’ve personally been doing it like:

electronic/christmas/death metal

and then use:

genre !includes “christmas”

which works to exclude that. I have an awesome electronic christmas death metal collection, btw.

— Ron

[blamm]

Ta.

Currently have a smart playlist that selects all my christmas stuff. I was thinking I could simply re-use the select criteria in a new playlist but exlude it instead?

[CCRDude]

Actually, there’s a difference in how the tags can be defined internally (I read the specifications some time ago to write my own tagger application):

ID3v2.3 (see 4.2.1) allows as many ID3v1 number genres as you want, plus one custom one:
(1)(15)(30)MyOneDescription
If you want more custom ones here, you can separate them like in ID3v2.4, hoping that apps will recognize that, the standard says that everything after the first zero byte should be ignored though.

ID3v2.4 (see 4.2.3) allows an unlimited amount of genres, all separated by a zero byte:
Pop$00Rock$0015$00MyCustomGenre$00AnotherCustomGenre

The problem is that many taggers do this wrong – some read only one genre, some mix up these two standards, etc..

ID3-TagIT does the zero byte to separate even for ID3v2.3, for example, but was for some time the only one I knew.

TagsRevisited supports a method that (I hope) follows the standard quite well; inside the GUI, you can specify multiple genres by separating them with a semicolon, which will upon saving be converted to the representation of the chosen ID3v2 version. In ID3v2.4, it’ll save each category as text, not a number through, since some applications like SlimServer seem to cannot handle the number representation in ID3v2.4.

[mas]

Nice and interesting overview CCRDude.

The v2.4 version with the 0 bytes is likely the most future save. It remains to be hoped that more programs will sooner or later support it.

I just tagged my songs with ID3 tagIT v3 and made use of quite some multiple genres.

[grommet]

Just be careful… ID3v2.4 is not commonly supported (ID3v2.3 is the de facto standard, and all signs point that it will continue to be)… and folks will often run into compatibility problems. (Not to mention most applications have no concept for multiple names or genres in their UI.)

Personally, for Genres… I’d just use a single entry with slashes or semicolons between the Genres like Ron does. That way it’s compatible with everything… and, if Ron adds his data massaging feature, the multiple genres could officially be parsed into discrete entries for his “next generation” database using “/” (or whatever you pick) as a delimeter.

(Trivia: The ID3v2.3 informal standard defines “/” as the official delimiter for multiple names in artist related fields… Artist, Composer, Conductor, etc. But everyone ignores this, except a handful of applications.)

Better solution? Use formats that have always supported multiple names/genres natively. FLAC, OGG, WMA, etc. Of course, applications still need to support it, too. But at least you get one thing out of the way… 🙄

[CCRDude]

ID3v2.4 isnt that badly supported at all imho. Firefly, iTunes (and thus iPods), WinAmp, Foobar2000, Slimserver, ID3TagIT, TwonkyVision, mp3Tag, TagsRevisited… everything I have around that can play mp3s knows it. Some not perfectly, but perfect enough. I don’t know any tagger that supports encryption or compression, but those are not that needed imho 😉

ogg and flac both use VorbisComments… which are so limited. Album art support only since 1.1.3, but some people introduced a standard-violating workaround in 1.1.2 that makes album art between different handlers for those formats incompatible… VorbisComments also have a fixed position inside the file, while ID3v2.4 finally supports unsynchronization, which means they can be anywhere inside the file without harming the signal at all (good for streaming – you can even update the tags on the fly if you want, e.g. for huge one-file archives containing a full album, a some people like to store their music – with a new tag at the beginning of each track). VorbisComments may have the advantage that they’ve been planed along with the file format, but if you have a tagger that writes rubbish, you’ll not just destroy a few milliseconds like with ID3 in mpegs, but the whole file.

Slashes are not compatible to everything at all… in most apps, you’ll have a very ugly list then which makes grouping difficult (“Rock” and “Rock/Hard Rock” won’t be in the same category). Since ID3v2.3 just stops reading after the first zerobyte break, that method would still at least allow grouping by primary genre.

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