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

[flygekorren]

+1 for the genre function. Absolutely need this!

[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?

[TGrounds]

Genre would be awesome! I have a large CD collection that I have ripped to my NAS with all of this set and in my previous thick-client media player I loved to be able to play random tracks in a given Genre for a party, etc. Like holiday time being able to do this simply by playing random tracks in the genre vs. having to build a full playlist.

You are spot on when you mentioned aggregating genres from different sources is a nightmare. I think your approach is an excellent one where me as the end user can define the Genres I wish to use and then provide the mapping from the different music sources into the genres I wish to use is a elegant approach. I can see where you would build a Genera list from each music source (including local file shares) that you would periodically update would be the start, then allowing the end user to either 'keep the genre' which creates a direct mapping, or to map it to a different one. Then with each update of the music provider list, indicate new genres that need to be mapped, perhaps raise it as a notice of 'needs attention' so that the end user can stay on top of their mappings. Perhaps raise this as notices in Home Assistant? It could be a similar approach to tagging in Home Assistant.

[DutchJaFO]

I wish I could exclude specific genres from playlists, because I am getting Christmas songs when using a script that selects all songs from an artist.

I don't know if they have tags, because some of them are from Spotify ...

Same thing with tracks that are interviews of some kind.

For tracks I have in my local storage a work around would be too move those tracks to their own folder and then only enable that folder when I want them.
Streaming services don't have such options 😞

[TGrounds]

that is the challenge with setting genre at the album level. I tend to do it at the track. Have all racks adopt the genre of the album. Then with interviews or other tracks I created a genre called “Commentary”. So by playing by genre I’m able to exclude those. Get Outlook for iOS<https://aka.ms/o0ukef>

…

________________________________ From: Ron D. ***@***.***> Sent: Saturday, March 8, 2025 3:45:08 PM To: music-assistant/support ***@***.***> Cc: Tom Grounds ***@***.***>; Comment ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [music-assistant/support] Select by Genre (Discussion #562) I wish I could exclude specific genres from playlists, because I am getting Christmas songs when using a script that selects all songs from an artist. I don't know if they have tags, because some of them are from Spotify ... Same thing with tracks that are interviews of some kind. For tracks I have in my local storage a work around would be too move those tracks to their own folder and then only enable that folder when I want them. Streaming services don't have such options 😞 — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub<#562 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe<https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AJFO5NBZ47N4MFFYKN66BFD2TNQGJAVCNFSM6AAAAABK3DA4TSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTENBTGY4TMNY>. You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[Aesculapius]

Kinda of the same request as https://github.com/orgs/music-assistant/discussions/4165 I was really surprised not to see such essential functionality not present in this otherwise rich project. Availability of metadata for sorting, filtering etc. should really be possible so a +1 from me.

[mist2t]

Navidrome / Jellyfin user here with a personal local music library (carefully tagged and maintained).

I'm just researching MA and wanted to post my 2 cents regarding Genres. A cool Genre support is one of the big shortcomings in all music servers I tried so far.

I have manually tagged genres for my library, they are pretty broad (house, rock, pop, rap, christmas etc) and are 100% consistent across all my library.

When I start a listening session I'm mostly thinking what I'm in mood for (genre-wise) then dig into the collections for that specific genre. It's like a book library: most of us think about a genre first when researching a new book or start reading a new one. We navigate the physical book library based on genres first ... and not other criteria.

I think a Music server should provide the same experience to music listening similar to a book library.

My wishlist for genre related features:

1. Full support for tagged genres within local collections (local music files) and also those from music providers
2. Genre support for other stuff like Artists and Playlists (for the ability to aggregate those in the UI within a specific Genre).
3. Each genre should have a landing / "homepage" where it would aggregate a summary with all the content of that particular genre, showing Artists / Albums/ Songs/ Playlists ... all the content "type" of the particular genre (with the option to "explore" further each content type within the genre)

I think genres are, at least for me ... a multi-genre listener, the "foundation" of music listening experience.
I don't want Metallica mixed together with Vangelis or Enya and I pretty much know from the moment I open my music app if I'm in the mood for some metal ... or just chill some background relaxing music.

That's why having a music navigation based on "old" paradigm of "Artists" , "Albums" , "Songs" pages that will show a messy soup of everything thrown together (with or without some filtering) .... is pretty meh

Anyway ... my 2 cents. Thanks for everything you guys do !

[flygekorren]

Couldn't agree with his more, this should be a standard approach. I never understood the non genre start when looking for a song. I may be old fashioned but I love the old Winamp style filter where you could start by filtering genres based on your own id3 tags and then further on filter down the albums, tracks and artists in those genres. Thumbs up for this post

[jozefKruszynski]

The problem is that there is no standard approach for genres when it comes to streaming providers.
It's all well and good saying that local music tagged properly can be standardised, but this is one tiny piece of the puzzle.
It is being actively discussed, but it's a very, very tricky thing to implement correctly given all the providers that have been implemented.

Having said all this, I agree it will be fantastic when we put it in place

[TGrounds]

I think about this like I do vendor item numbers in an e-commerce site. We have no control over the item number of our vendors, but do have the ability to do a cross reference in our own system. Similar with generes. We have no control over the generas of the streaming provider, however, we should be able to manage my own list of generes in Music Assistant. As part of that, be able to map the streaming providers genere into mine. It would need to be a one-to-many relationship where one genera in my world may map to many of the streaming provider if they are more 'granular' than mine are. This enables me to maintain the generes I want in my environment while easily translating to the ones of the streaming providers, or even my own ripped library. In a way it isn't much different than the structure of a playlist - but rather than referencing the specific song, reference the genere.

[mist2t]

Yeah, I think Genre mapping options between local files and those identified on streaming services could be the answer.

Roon does something similar i think

(https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/genre-setting)

I could choose to "link" a bunch of "external" identified genres (like those on streaming services) with my local identified ones.

[Paul-Vdp]

I'm willing to accept that 'there is no standard approach for genres when it comes to streaming providers', making it tricky to implement.
But then: is/was there a standard approach for ANYTHING when it comes to streaming providers ? I'd be surprised ...
And starting with an implementation just for local music files does not exactly sound like rocket science - whilst making a lot of us 'oldskool' folks very happy ;-)

[u8915055]

I also wonder why this couldn't just be done for local files. I currently use lyrion mainly because of the genre capability for my local files but really like the look of MA. The one big hangup is the same thing mentioned here, no genre. Lyrion does implement a genre functionality but as far as i can tell its only for local music. I dont know how implementing a genre functionality within MA makes sense for a streaming service for the reasons mentioned. Its not like id want ot play some jazz and expect the system to scan and filter every single available piece of music on Apple, Spotify, whatever to give me options. But for local music, this makes complete sense. To me this ONLY makes sense for local files.

MA is a great looking piece of software and maybe it was really geared towards streaming services.

Just my 0.02.

[marcelveldt]

This will come just be patient please