My personal lastgenre roadmap. Thoughts?

[JOJ0]

I have drafted most of these ideas for the plugin already. I'm planning to implement them in this order (order might change in the process):

• lastgenre: Move file loading to helpers #5979

• Some fixes to the default genres-tree.txt and genres.txt
  PR: lastgenre: Some whitelist and genres-tree updates #5977

• Add a --pretend option (only show what would be tagged in dry run) lastgenre: Add --pretend option for previewing genre changes #6008 lastgenre: Refactor genre applying and pretend mode #6021

• lastgenre: Plugin tuning log (-vvv)  #6007

• Improve the artist genre matching (Problems with multi-artist albums (artist 1, artist 2)
  PR: lastgenre: Use albumartists field to improve last.fm results #5981

• Genre aliases, (a last.fm genre dnb should be automatically handled as drum and bass)
  PR:

• Blacklist (global and artist-based; also came up as an idea during this discussion: Possible better genre tree #5721 (comment))
  PR: lastgenre: Global and artist-based genre blacklist #5744

• Support genre delimiters other than the configured one (lastgenre.separator) since other plugins might use different ones (eg. MusicBrainz default ;) - currently those get lost!
  PR:

• Complete type annotations throughout the plugin
  PR:

• Performance improvements / refactor of some older parts of the code
  PR:

• Better use of all the features of the last.fm get_top_tags API's https://www.last.fm/api/show/album.getTopTags, https://www.last.fm/api/show/artist.getTopTags
  PR:

[halloleo]

Just curious: Are you planning to use the MusicBrainz genres at all?

[JOJ0]

it's all a matter of in what order genres are put together before canoncializing/resolving ("old + new" or "new + old". Currently it is actually implemented the other way round if we look at this test case. Existing genres are prioritized:

7b2a682#diff-01f4da9a1d0527d89c1220b54edd6dfef8416bd14fd125bdd09d40269fe5269eR490-R511

[JOJ0]

I just clarified the current keep-existing precedence in the docs: 5dba983

maybe I leave it that way, I suppse it is the more "expected" behavior for an option named keep-existing, what do you think?

[halloleo]

Totally agree: prioritizing existing genres is the right thing to do (if there's no option for it to change the behaviour).

Great that you clarified it in the docs!

[emiham]

It would be neat to have a more general genre plugin that could pull from multiple sources, but maybe that is way out of scope for this plugin.

[JOJ0]

you can try whatlastgenre but it's somewhat unmaintained. it uses discogs as source as well. I stole some ideas from there to be honest 😅

[emiham]

Some fixes to the default genres-tree.txt and whitelist.txt

Two small issues I've found in these:

• genres-tree.txt has country rap under country, but country-rap under hip hop.
• genres.txt (is this different from whitelist.txt?) has industrial hip-hop as the only genre with a hyphen in hip-hop

[JOJ0]

following up on this, see my latest PR

in any case, and after researching on last.fm more, the aliases feature gets even more important in my head....

[emiham]

I only even started trying lastgenre in the last few weeks, which lined up nicely with this effort! I agree that aliases are very important. My impression from the docs was that essentially this is what canonicalization was for, although I haven't gotten it to work yet so maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

[JOJ0]

yes you could use canonicalization for that but it will take many takes to get it right. there's quite some variations in genre names on last.fm. with some smart regexes that gets much easier...and that feature will come with a useful amount of them already. batteries included ;-)

[JOJ0]

@emiham have a look, this is a draft of the aliases pattern file that will ship with beets then: https://github.com/JOJ0/beets/blob/all_in_202508/beetsplug/lastgenre/aliases.ini

[emiham]

At a glance I think it looks great, I don't have much time to run a test version right now but I will definitely write a PR if I think it could be improved once I try it out!

[emiham]

I thought I had posted about this somewhere, but I can't find it so I'll try here.

It would be cool if lastgenre were able to add tags as well. If you don't overwrite tags this is not important, but if you want to start from scratch you're probably having to do some work manually, and it would be nice to contribute those tags to Last.fm so that others can use them.

https://www.last.fm/api/show/album.addTags