Music for the moment - A process for organisation of your music files to support recall criteria such as mood and occasion

The software needed to organize and recall your music based on the usual criteria of artist, title + mood, occasion, tempo

This post is for folks owning a large local (not in the cloud) music collection looking to clean up the tags in these music files. The music files can be of type mp3, flac or ogg (may be applicable to other file types as well). The final objective of the process proposed in this post is to support recall - to be able to play music for a particular occasion or mood without the listener having to frequently intervene and interact with the player by searching, creating playlists (smart or otherwise) etc. ...... and all this with low effort to support the players which aid recall - so the theme of this post is to support you to stop seeking, organizing music and start listening to what you have now.

Disclaimer: The author is not associated in any way other than being a user of the software MusicBrainz Picard, MediaMonkey & JukeFox that are mentioned in this post.

Step 1. Clean up the tags in your music files

This is possible with MusicBrainz Picard (it's free). It is possible to use acoustic fingerprinting to tag your music with this tool. This is extremely accurate as compared to other free tools that tag music only based on information already preexisting within the tags.

If your collection consists of whole albums, this is an ideal solution.

This documentation of MusicBrainz Picard details how one can tag one's music collection.

Step 2. Add additional tags such as genre, grouping, mood, tempo, occasions to support selective recall

To add the album cover art and tags such as genre, grouping, mood and tempo to your music files plugins have to be enabled within MusicBrainz Picard. These are the Cover Art Downloader plugin, Last.fm and Last.fm Plus plugins. Of course all this depends on how well the files are tagged within the MusicBrainz Picard Database - this is done by the community - so expect some discrepancies. This seems to be quite minimal though. And especially if your music collection is quite disorganized - something that supports recall is better than nothing at all. But MusicBrainz Picard does provide the user good control options to not overwrite some tags etc.

The options available to give one fine control over what goes into the genre,grouping, mood and occasion tags

Contributing to the community MusicBrainz Database
If you do not find listing for any tag data for some of the CDs that you own you can add them to the MusicBrainz Database by creating an account for yourself.

It is important to note that the data that goes into the genre tag from the Last.fm plugin are many times a list of multiple genres each separated by a semicolon. For example you will find So you will see a tag entry such as Beatles; Oldies; 60S; Pop; British; The Beatles; Rock; Classic Rock in the genre tag and Classic Rock in the grouping tag. This grouping tag, as the name suggests, groups a bunch of genres together. This is also another way for one to be specific or generic towards the style of music being played.

Performance of the Tool
MusicBrainz Picard works much better on Linux than on Windows. It might crash unexpectedly when adding a large number (>750) of songs for tagging on Windows 7. On Linux Mint it performed fine even with a large number (>3500) of songs.

Step 3. Use players that support these extra tags to selectively recall your music based on criteria such as mood, occasion etc.

Now for the best part .... to listen to the sweet sound of success!

Let us say your requirement is that you are working on a project that requires a lot of concentration. All you need is look for files with the tag occasion with value background and viola! songs that blend into the background will start to play.

The next step is to find players that leverage these extra tags found in your music files to 'automagically' give you what you want to hear at the moment.

On the desktop - one could use MediaMonkey which supports multiple genres, moods, occasions and tempo tags as shown in the picture below. MediaMonkey has a free and a paid version at the time this article was written and is available on windows only. One can run it with WINE on a Linux box.

The grouping, classification tree node in MM and what it can help you find

On an android device - A quick search on google for 'smart music player for android' the top hit is Jukefox (JukeFox on the Playstore). It is free and offers some neat innovative features for someone looking to play music to suit a mood or occasion. It learns your actions (play, skip, forward etc.) and associates it with what you want to listen to at the moment. For example - In one session of using the player in a shuffle mode, it learns what music you are skipping without listening to and stops suggesting songs of the same style, genre or artist to you. It seems to have lots of other smart features as well and is worth exploring. During the first import of your music into the player the software recommends (though I feel its a requirement for it to get smart) that you are connected to the internet so jukefox can infuse some more of its grouping smartness. During normal playing though it does not require an internet connection. The video below shows all the features at a glance.