Preface

I am sure many people do not care what my musical interests are. Having said that, this is a key element of my life outside of work. That is, tagging, and categorizing music.

Genres

Akin with coffees, I find that many genres of music have subtle and nuanced elements to what makes their music unique. Specifically, we have artists that are within a genre such as hip-hop, that are within the sub-genre of underground hip-hop. Now underground hip-hop can vary from southern rap & texas rap, through to ambient & experimental (instrumental and non) hip hop. Beyond that, there are also increasingly deep levels of sub genres within. In the example of the former, we have a vast difference between something like Memphis Rap with Project Pat and Chopped & Screwed Hip-Hop with DJ Screw.

I tend to enjoy instrumental hip-hop, specifically harmonius and melodic stuff.

As a means of identifying what this looks like for example:

  • Hip-Hop
    • Instrumental Hip-Hop
      • Experimental Hip-Hop
        • Ambient
          • Sixtoo
        • Trip-Hop
          • Sneaker Pimps
    • Non-Instrumental Hip-Hop
      • Experimental Hip-Hop
        • Cannibal Ox
      • Downtempo
        • Sneaker Pimps
        • Portishead
      • Chopped & Screwed
        • DJ Screw

Tagging Music

As a result of some of these obscure genres, I began working on a music tagging library so that I can programatically tag local files (FLAC, MP3 [primarily v0 & 320kbps], etc.) and figured I would share it here. While it is not complete yet it is worth identifying the simplicity of working with these through MusicBrainz, an open source music encyclopedia, as an API, and the low-latency elements of C++ as a language. In terms of the C++, what I found interesting coming from high-level languages is how we must include librarys like Boost as a means of traversing directories, whereas in Ruby this is relatively straightforward. Anyways, I call it la_musicca.

For transparencies sake, I originally built this with a combination of beets in python, and a bash script, in a private repository. Having said that, my goal here is working around python and doing this directly within C++.

Having said that, identifying how I built this within python, my dotfiles have different files for each aspect of my system. This includes:

  • python,
  • bash,
  • ruby, &c.

So, when I start on a different machine, I fetch my repository, and it goes through calling each script, generating appropriate files and installing specific modules. In this example I install pip, along with beats, etc., then from a configuration YAML file, I traverse my directory with preconfigured structure (e.g. differentiating compilations from artist-only files) programatically writing ID3 tags within each MP3, so that things are well-ordered within my directory structure.

Conclusion

In sum: music has distinct elements of categorization that we can work with for eloquently organizing music.