Better tag filtering: Add genre delimiter & copy genre tags to relative song's album/artist

[Rand0mB0y]

I tag my media files that corrispond to multiple genres with a backslash (example: a Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon song may have progressive rock\psychedelic rock in the genre field). Then in the Jellyfin's music library, I have it set so that it recognise my custom tag delimiter, like so:

This allows for much better experience when it comes to instant mix, because now a Dark Side of the Moon song can pull songs from the progressive rock OR the pschedelic rock catalogue... instead of just songs that are progressive rock AND psychedelic rock (only, and in that order).

Ideally, I'd love if the MusicTags plugin could recognise the delimiters and create multiple genre tags when an artist has multiple genre tags in the media (therefore: GENRE:progressive rock and GENRE:psychedelic rock instead of the single tag GENRE:progressive rock\psychedelic rock). Unless there is something else I am missing... here are my plugin settings:

Another issue I have is that the genre tags are only being applied to the songs, but not to the correspondent albums and artists. I tag my genres per song, which is great when it comes to instant mixing, but having music genre tags also, on the album items, would be great (like Jellyfin already does for genres). The same would be useful for the artist page, too.

Why would these feature requests be usable?

Administrators would now be able to allow or block songs/albums/artists by genre for every users via the parental control server settings (please check out the similar LanguageTags plugin for inspiration, and as an example of how tag filtering can be used). Genre tag filtering with delimiters would increadibly simplify folder structures, and improve users experience to tailor the collection to their tastes.
If a parent (album/artist) does not carry the MusicTags from the songs, then the users will still see a blank album item even if the correspondent genre was blocked on their profile via parental control.

I'd imagine that tag filtering wasn't the initial intent of this plugin, as the idea is to be used in combination with the SmartPlaylist plugin to sort of bypass the instant mix feature entirely, but I feel like filtering can still be a great secondary benefit of MusicTags.

I, also, understand that these are two separate feature requests. I thought about combining them, because the end goal is the same (tag filtering), but I can open a separate issue for each of them if needed.

Many thanks for the great work btw!

[jyourstone]

Thank you for the detailed information.

I understand the first part, that you would like to be able to set custom delimiters to separate the audio tags into multiple Jellyfin tags, instead of just one tag containing everything. That shouldn't be too hard to implement and I'll look into that.

I don't quite understand the second part though, genre tags only being applied to songs. This plugin only fetches the tags from the audio file and adds them as Jellyfin tags to the audio item. There's no way to know what the artist or albums should have as tags. Or maybe I'm simply misunderstanding you?

[jyourstone]

To clarify, I'm confused how it would be beneficial to for example setting the same tags to the album as the song, since an album can contain different songs with multiple genres (for example).

[jyourstone]

Actually, after reading your initial post again, I think I understand the use case for it now. Basically, you it would for example mean that albums would be hidden completely, instead of showing up but being empty.

I'll look into adding two options for this, applying tags to parent artist and parent album.

[Rand0mB0y]

To clarify, I'm confused how it would be beneficial to for example setting the same tags to the album as the song, since an album can contain different songs with multiple genres (for example).

Because I believe that if the artist and album aren't also tagged with the same song's genre tags then the parental control blocks will most likely not work correctly. The whole album may be filtered out if you use Allow items with tags, or appear even if you use Block items with tags.

This is also the reason why I linked the rather similar LanguageTags plugin, so that you could take a look at how it works when it comes to parental control filtering. In LanguageTags even if only one episode of a series has a language_tag, then season, show and any eventual collection will also have to take the same tag. The creator of the plugin stated this as a necessary workaround in this comment, and I am assuming the same would apply for music items. After toying around, my guessing is that also both artist and album artist should take the tag. Also, if a song is part of a playlist or collection, those should get assigned the tags too, otherwise those playlists may be filtered out. Collections may not be needed by most, and could be forgotten about.

Besides, if you think about it, this is already how the native Jellyfin's music genres genre currently works. If I navigate to Pink Floyd I see the progressive rock and psychedelic rock genres, same story if I navigate to the Dark Side of the Moon. So, in the end... when it comes to genres, it may be actually easier and faster to extract Jellyfin's genres from its internal metadata and turn those into tags, rather than retrieving the original media's genre tags.

Perhaps I am wrong about it all, and I hope not to send you to the wrong track, but I was simply hoping to speed up your coding time by offering a heads up regarding what can possibily go wrong if you ever decide to implement this (and if you do... thank you so very much!).

P.s. If I explained terribly all the above, I am happy to rephrase everything perhaps with some screenshots.

[Rand0mB0y]

Actually, after reading your initial post again, I think I understand the use case for it now. Basically, you it would for example mean that albums would be hidden completely, instead of showing up but being empty.

I'll look into adding two options for this, applying tags to parent artist and parent album.

Sorry, I've read this too late. Yeah you got it!

[jyourstone]

I've released version 10.11.1.0 with this new functionality included, please try it out and let me know if it works as you intended.

[Rand0mB0y]

I've released version 10.11.1.0 with this new functionality included, please try it out and let me know if it works as you intended.

A huge thank you. It seems to be doing the trick very well. I'd imagine many others will benefit from this new feature, when the word is spread. Too bad that since upgrading Jellyfin to the 10.11.0 server, music in general is so slow, but that's nothing to do with your plugin.

I have tested: songs, albums, album artists and artists with the block parental filter and everything seems to be working great. Only the playlists didn't receive propagated tags from their children, but I personally don't use them much (at the moment). I, also, didn't test collections, yet.

Also, nice work to reword the readme file with the new features... everything seems to be clear and well explained (which isn't an obvious thing).

Speaking of which, one thing struck me though since the first time... in the readme/settings-page you refer to AB:GENRE and AB:MOOD. It really took me a while to understand these are AcousticBrainz related tags 😓 The thing is that I'm not a big fan of MusicBrainz Picard, so I was unfamiliar with the AB:tags naming. I'd imagine that, although a minority, there may be other MP3tag users like myself that could get confused by the AB: prefixes, so perhaps you may wanna specify that GENRE and MOOD can still be used in the instructions?
Once again, I know this has all being worded with the SmartPlaylist companion in mind (plugin I also wanna try soon), and that SmartPlaylist goes alongside AcousticBrainz's tagging... but I think a few MusicTags-only users that just want filtering may be unfamiliar with AB:GENRE and AB:MOOD, and perhaps even being put off by them due to overthinking (I initially thought it had something to do with A/B comparisons of genres when creating smart playlists 😂).

Thanks for your work once again btw! Thanks to you, the music library in our household is now nice, clean and tailored.

[Rand0mB0y]

P.s. you should submit an issue to Awesome Jellyfin and report your plugins there, so more people can be aware of them 😉

[jyourstone]

Good to hear that it seems to be working well!

You raise a valid point regarding the AB: prefixes, I'll make sure to update the README to clarify this and include other examples as well.

Thank you for the Awesome Jellyfin tip 🙂 I'll report my plugins there.

[jyourstone]

Oh and I didn't include playlists or collections because that would make it much more complex and performance heavy. Hopefully albums and artists will be enough for most use cases.