So like many of you I have been frustrated by the limited flexibility of the media player in the MS. For example, I have a directory structure of music from the 1960s but there is no way to listed to a random song from this directory structure because there is one folder per artist inside my 1960s folder. I can choose the "Oldies" genre but then it gets other music as well.
So what I found out is that the MS supports the ID3v2 TCON tag and uses that for the Genre (but only if there is no ID3v1 info present, see below). The neat news is that the TCON tag allows you to use arbitrary names for your genres, so you are not limited to the official set of them. So you could have a "Driving Fast" genre if you wanted to
So basically I was able to put all of my 1960s files in the "1960s" Genre and now it shows up when I go into Genres in my MS. At a high level the process is simple if you have the ability to use any sort of automated tool for ID3v2 tagging:
1) Add or update the ID3v2 TCON value to the "genre" string that you want
2) Delete the ID3v1 info completely from the file (you probably want to make sure it already has ID3v2 artist and such set)
The one downside is that even though ID3v2 allows a song to be in multiple genres, the MS only seems to use the first one. So each of your songs can only be in one "genre" playlist. But since we can also play by artist and directory it should allow for some good flexibility on what you listen to.
For the Linux people in the room I can give you the steps I used to do this, using the Linux CLI tool "id3v2".
1) First convert v1 tags to v2: id3v2 -C <filename>
2) Next add TCON Genre: id3v2 --TCON "Whatever You Want" <filename>
3) Finally, delete v1 tags: id3v2 -s <filename>
Note that whenever this particular tool adds the TCON tag it recreates the v1 tags as well which the MS uses instead of your TCON tag. So for me the last step has to be to delete the v1 tags. Other tools might work differently.
If you have a directory structure like me and you want to update the genre for everything in the directory, just do this:
So what I found out is that the MS supports the ID3v2 TCON tag and uses that for the Genre (but only if there is no ID3v1 info present, see below). The neat news is that the TCON tag allows you to use arbitrary names for your genres, so you are not limited to the official set of them. So you could have a "Driving Fast" genre if you wanted to
So basically I was able to put all of my 1960s files in the "1960s" Genre and now it shows up when I go into Genres in my MS. At a high level the process is simple if you have the ability to use any sort of automated tool for ID3v2 tagging:
1) Add or update the ID3v2 TCON value to the "genre" string that you want
2) Delete the ID3v1 info completely from the file (you probably want to make sure it already has ID3v2 artist and such set)
The one downside is that even though ID3v2 allows a song to be in multiple genres, the MS only seems to use the first one. So each of your songs can only be in one "genre" playlist. But since we can also play by artist and directory it should allow for some good flexibility on what you listen to.
For the Linux people in the room I can give you the steps I used to do this, using the Linux CLI tool "id3v2".
1) First convert v1 tags to v2: id3v2 -C <filename>
2) Next add TCON Genre: id3v2 --TCON "Whatever You Want" <filename>
3) Finally, delete v1 tags: id3v2 -s <filename>
Note that whenever this particular tool adds the TCON tag it recreates the v1 tags as well which the MS uses instead of your TCON tag. So for me the last step has to be to delete the v1 tags. Other tools might work differently.
If you have a directory structure like me and you want to update the genre for everything in the directory, just do this:
Code:
cd <directory>
find . -name '*.mp3' | while read file ; do
id3v2 -C "$file"
id3v2 --TCON "New Genre" "$file"
id3v2 -s "$file"
done
