Mp3 Tagging Headache
I know most people simply label their Japanese mp3's as either "J-Pop" or "J-Rock", however in my case, my entire collection consists of 95% Japanese music. As a result, only using "J-Pop" and "J-Rock" on these files loses its point because it really doesn't work well in categorizing the music. How helpful is it to have half your music labeled as "J-Rock", and the other half "J-Pop"? Not very, obviously.
I need more specific genre labeling.
But further breaking down the genre is very very troublesome. Should I assign the genres based on the individual songs or individual artists? If I label genres by songs, I'll never be able to finish with my entire collection because there are just way too many files to relabel.
If I go with artists, what about the artists who suddenly change their style? Take Amuro Namie, for example, she used to be pop, but now with the latest 2 albums, she's all of a sudden R&B. Or m-flo, I'd call them R&B back when LISA was still with the group, but these days, they're very obviously hip-hop/rap. Or there are some artists who are just so eclectic that I'm at a complete loss.
The genres aside, there's also a problem with the artists' names. First of all, most times there are at least 2 versions to their names, Japanese and romanization. Angela Aki is also アンジェラ・アキ, SID is written as シド officially in Japanese media. I saw from somewhere that HYDE's name, when referred to in his solo work context, should be written all capitalized. When referred to in L'Arc~en~Ciel context, his name is "hyde", all lower-cased.
Then, some artists like to change their names in the same manner a foreign language student can't make up his mind about his new name in the language he studies. 雅 is aka miyabi is aka miyavi is aka 雅-miyavi- is aka MYV. Gazette aka ガゼット recently started writing their name as the GazettE. Kagrra, went from Crow to Kagrra to Kagrra, to KGR (in a few instances, probably miyavi influenced). Stop messing with us, please. Just pick a name and stick with it.
This is not all. Some artists love to confound us with weird symbols in their names. Take 関ジャニ∞, what the heck is this infinity sign? Oh, it's actually the number 8? What, are you serious? Why can't you just write "8" instead of rotating the symbol 90 degrees?
Mp3 tagging for Japanese music is one huge mess. I don't know what to do with it.
Comments
Here's what I do - and I'll admit, I'm breaking the "official" rules for ID3 tag usage. I do all of this through iTunes, so I have no idea how other apps may or may not offer support for these tags.
First, I label NOTHING as "J-." I used to, but then decided, what if I just want to listen to rock, no matter the language? Also, of course, is the further breaking it down, as you mentioned. (I used to be against labelling each specific song as the proper genre, BTW, but now I'm sort of teetering on that. For now, I do it on a per-album basis.) Do I start doing things like J-hop, J-ballad, and so on? If not, then the "genre" tag is nearly worthless. If so, then things can get really messy and I could have a bajillion tags (once you start factoring in "K-", "C-", and so on.)
Instead, I use the "Grouping" tag. The exact use for that, I'm not 100% sure - I used to know, but have kind of forgotten - so since it was just sitting there unused, why not put it to work? I use Grouping to label a song with what language it is: English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Instrumental, and so on. That way, if I want all of my Japanese music, I make a smart playlist where "Grouping = Japanese" and I'm good to go. J-pop? Grouping = Japanese + Genre = Pop.
This, at least for me, solves many problems. For example, BoA: when she sings a song in Japanese, is she then J-pop, or still K-pop? This way, the song is labelled as being in Japanese, the song is Pop, and there we go. Of course, doing this then won't pic up ALL BoA songs if I make a list of Korean music, but that's the point - I want to be able to separate songs by the language they're in, if I'd like.
Naming is also tough, but here's what I do to solve some problems: for the artist name, I use whatever the most "official" romanization of the name is. (Except I always follow the Last Name First Name rule.) I then use the "Composer" tag to list the name of the artist in their original language. MAYBE 30% of my songs had the Composer field filled in at all, and to be honest, I don't care about the composer (if I do, I'll put it in the notes.) This lets me search for an artist either way, romanized or in their original language, and it's a nice way to have their original name on-hand if I need it.
Music tagging does indeed begin to totally break down when it comes to foreign music, though, and a revision of the ID3 tags desperately need to be made. What I'd like is a way to have multiple tags for the same field - Song Title, for example. Have the original Japanese name, and then the romanized version, and have iTunes (or whatever) have a drop-down menu where you can select which language's tags you'd like to display.
Ohhh! Good idea with utlizing the "Group" tag. I'll definitely try it out with my iTunes. Thank you. ^_^
Right now for artists, I just use the original Japanese names since I can more or less read them. I'll take your advice with Korean artists though. I'm completely illiterate since I can't read Hangul.Yeah, I can read Japanese as well (well, kanji starts to get messy for me), but since I also have a lot of non-Japanese music, for me it just makes more sense to keep all of the main artist names romanized. Plus, I just prefer the look that way, instead of having a whole mixture of artist names in different languages.
But yeah, try that with the Grouping tag - the more metadata available, the better, right? Like I said, I think it offers more flexibility in what you can then do with playlists, but your milage may vary.