Select by Genre

[Waggers58]

All my music has been assigned a genre. It would be nice to select by this and then by artist or album.

[jazzyisj]

I think this request could be grouped together with this one (Spotify categories/genres).

One of the issues will be that different providers may use different genre classifications. A song may be classified as Rock on Spotify but Alternative on Youtube and Heavy Metal in your own MP3 collection.

But it would definitely be a nice feature. I often play Spotify using a category (genre) instead of a playlist.

[DutchJaFO]

Genre classifications are by their very nature vague, which is why Music Brainz tends to assign multiple genres to a single track.
I know I used to simply pick 'hard rock' instead of trying to find the 'correct' sub-genre for any given song before I started to rely on the genres provided by Picard when I was re-tagging ...

Multiple sorts would help navigate large collections even faster.

[rvandet]

I have a lot of albums, both popmusic and classical music.
I want to see only one Calassical, my wife only Popmusic.
A Filter for Genre in Albums (and Artists) would be helpful.

[OzGav]

This feature is in the backlog to be added but as it is an enhancement is currently low priority. I am looking forward to this as well though!

[OzGav]

Related to https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/535

[kpoppel]

As is stated above, genres are generally a vague thing, and may even select only some songs on an album. I would like to see a more generalised method by building filters from which songs are played.
Examples:

• genre in (heavy, indie)
• year in range(1992,1995)
• year = 2008
• artist contains('mozart', 'Carl nielsen')

Think of this as dynamic playlists similar to the 'radio' feature.
The filters need not be dynamically evaluated as the content is unlikely to change unless the library is rescanned.

[marcelveldt]

I think ideally we should build something like a "dynamic playlists" feature where you can enter AND/OR condition based rules to create the list. I believe Kodi has something for this to create a playlist.

[DutchJaFO]

The Plex amp music player also features something like that.
OTOH ... the 'radio' option for playlists does generate a dynamic playlist already. It would be nice if we could save the results or export it as a playlist for future use.

[kpoppel]

For a UI there are many options. It could be like the filter function used in tools like Jira, but as I think this, the search domain is limited and well defined by the sum of available ID3 tags in the library.
A tab on the side or button og the playlist tab, which produces a page with a table of the available tags and options for each to select AND , OR, and a comma delimited list of terms. The terms would be lists of integers or strings.
To keep it simple not all ID3 tags are equally valuable and so album, albumartist, artist, original year, genre would be perhaps the most used contenders.
For a first iteration it is simple, and will not require an expression parser, nor having the user learn a query language. A Save button at the end to store the search result as a playlist. And under playlist an option to refresh this type of playlist, like rescanning the library. For the ambitious version input completion is possible because the library is already fully known.

[heibertelf]

I use Jellyfin, which is connected to MA, it has a selection by artist, album, track, and also by genre. In the interface it's just one of the menu items.

I think it would fit in this list with no problem.

[jcredland]

The problem I see with this is the UI aspect. If you have an idea how that could be implemented in a GUI that would be of interest.

So we've had a lot of experience doing UIs that sort by genre for audio samples. What we settled on was having multiple tags on each item for genre, and allowing the user to filter any view by genre. We also had a genre hierarchy so if you selected 'Rock' you also got 'Hard Rock' showing and we'd filter the tags down so you could select a sub category if you wanted to.

[DutchJaFO]

automated playlists per genre or decade would fit in quite nicely as wel.

[u8915055]

So im just curious. Im a new user of MA and i was coming from Logitech Media Server or now called Lyrion. I was surprised to see no option for genre.. SO maybe there's another way im not familiar with. I have about 1000 albums ripped and stored on a NAS. they all have clean tags (MP3 and FLAC) and the genre tags are accurate for my liking - meaning i may call something 'rock' and others may call it 'pop'. But anyway, so now i want to listen to some of my jazz but not sure what artist or album.. so i want to see all my jazz artists.. then i pick an artist and then i can see all the albums and i choose one.. HOw do i do soehtign like that in MA? I really dont want to sift through 1000 albums to pick out all the jazz artists etc.. I just dont understand how sorting by genre isnt a day-1 requirement. So I must be missing something. Any advice would be great..

[OzGav]

Priorities are set by the devs so your day one is not theirs. You can submit a PR to help.

[u8915055]

Totally understood.. i just was hoping that someone might have another approach to filter on genre somehow.. or maybe to tag all jazz albums so i can easily find them etc. Maybe MA is more for streaming services and not NAS users like me. Ill keep watching.

[badewanne1234]

So im just curious. Im a new user of MA and i was coming from Logitech Media Server or now called Lyrion. I was surprised to see no option for genre.. SO maybe there's another way im not familiar with. I have about 1000 albums ripped and stored on a NAS. they all have clean tags (MP3 and FLAC) and the genre tags are accurate for my liking - meaning i may call something 'rock' and others may call it 'pop'. But anyway, so now i want to listen to some of my jazz but not sure what artist or album.. so i want to see all my jazz artists.. then i pick an artist and then i can see all the albums and i choose one.. HOw do i do soehtign like that in MA? I really dont want to sift through 1000 albums to pick out all the jazz artists etc.. I just dont understand how sorting by genre isnt a day-1 requirement. So I must be missing something. Any advice would be great..

same here, I was quite surprised that Genre is not a filter type one can apply.
So the only workaround at this point is go into the folder structure (if you have organised your folders in "Genres" (like I did) but then you can only play a single track and not add the entire album-folder to the queue).

I was surpised how easy the setup of MA was and also the connection to the CIFS/SMB remote share went like a charm - however for now I unfortunately need to put MA aside, I heavily rely on the Genre filter option.
What a great work by the contributors though! :) I cant help in coding due to lack of skills, what a pitty!!

[soulstyle]

Just want to flag interest for this as well. Randomizing by genre is usually how I like to listen to my library.

Ps. You're doing awesome work on MA everyone!

[badewanne1234]

One plus for this, in my opinion its a must have - hopefully it will soon be picked up by the awesome devs who created this great product.
Thanks for what you do!

[Paul-Vdp]

Been waiting for this since I started using MA ;-)

[S-Starvey]

Yes!
I can't believe I've realized just now it was lacking :-D
MA is just awesome, and I understand the priorities, but as far as I'm concerned, this is the main (and for me, only) flaw.

One I can easily live with, though.

[dinyar]

+1 from me too on this feature (similar to the already stated reasons: I have a reasonably well tagged library and usually I feel like a certain genre and then select further from there)

[jozefKruszynski]

Just for some fun info in this topic. Tidal do not have genre as a field on any of the music on their service.
Instead Genre is an entity of it's own, and each genre has tracks, albums and artists as part of it. To me this seems like absolute madness, but it means that you cannot get the genre of a track when parsing it's data structure, crazy right?

[natefelt]

I'm just another user hoping for this feature to be added to Music Assistant.

[FurtiveD]

As a local NAS user, being able to launch a shuffle of a specific genre is the only major feature missing for me.

[screenagerbe]

As a local NAS user, being able to launch a shuffle of a specific genre is the only major feature missing for me.

I second this, and I also want to add some other remarks about MA (maybe they should not all be listed here)

For now I'm only experimenting with MA as I feel it's not yet ready to replace the tools I'm using now depending on the situation (JellyFin, Kodi, WinAMP). Most importantly I miss some features related to local music, not sure if MA has even the intention to become a Music Library of sorts.

• For starters, local metadata (ID3 tags) are not available in MA.
• Genres are not made available and that really is a shame.
  Sometimes you see them, but they are not corresponding with the ID3 tags of my collection.
  an example:
  
  Where are those genres/tags coming from? Not from my files... Probably from MusicBrainz or The Audio DB, but there is no reference what so ever (could/should be a link to the correct metadata provider).
  I reckon pretty much every person who's somehow doing things with music has his own genres or tags or whatever, but it's an essential parameter when managing large music libraries.
• Something else: Release Years.
  When sorting Albums on Release Year they are by default ordered old to new, no way to reverse it and show them new to old. 🤷‍♂️
• or Artist metadata. MA shows it, but where it comes from remains a secret. Why?
  
  I really like this, but no source reference?
• Some kind of smart playlist creation would also be nice (based on ID3 tags or other manageable metadata)
• I miss a scrobbling feature (i.c. last.fm)

MA does look promising, but for me it is not yet ready for daily use because of these missing features.

/edit: some typo's and and added the last feature, as it is pretty important to me but I completely forgot to mention it

[marcelveldt]

Feedback like this gets lost. Best is to give feedback one by one. This post is about genres.
There is also another feature request for scrobbling etc. etc

Remember that MA is a relative new tool which is still in development, so you cnat expect it to match your tools which esist for years or have a big company or dev team behind it.

[marcelveldt]

Genre support will come to MA eventually but if we do this, we want to do it right. Genres are horrible and not uniform across the industry and a complete disaster on streaming providers. My idea to this when implementing it, is to go all-in and make a matching pattern so you can decide what genres (from whatever bucket) merge into what final genre. Because MA has support for multiple music providers and metadata sources, this is not as easy as you may think.

We currently have some other stuff to handle higher in priority but I truly think the full Genre support is something that could potentially land in 2.6 or 2.7 so within a couple of months time.

[badewanne1234]

I'm very thankful to read this. Thanks for being so active in the development of MA!

[soulstyle]

Thats awesome! Thanks for the update :)

[heibertelf]

May be something "tiny" AI, that could determine genres and make recommendations playlists?