@Pete Yes, I don't think we can do that right now - it's the wipe-then-fallback-to-original that we are missing.

What if it worked from the point of view of genres first - you could think of it as a table of genres, and then if you update that genre, all albums with that genre would be updated? That way you can change to the consolidated list of genres. It assumes that all albums for a genre want to have their genre changed in the same way.

I would like to be able to perform a global normalisation of my Genres, letting Bliss wipe all existing ones, and filling in a standardised offering - but with the option to reinstate the old one in the case of Bliss not being able to identify a suitable replacement. For this idea to work best I think it would need to run through and then provide a table of all albums, with the user being able to decide for each row item what they want to do (options for multi-selection of rows with batch checking/unchecking and sorting would be good). Did I mention "undo" yet ? :-)
At the end of this, a batch commit of all changes could then run through quite nicely.

For me this is better than normalisation to 8 or 10 broad categories. At present I don't think there's a way to (easily) "select all" categories available in Bliss and tell is to update all existing values ?

I don't understand why the custom genre column would be needed?

To throw something else into the mix & don't know how practical or easy this would be to implement, what about :

An extra column on the tag page called "custom genre"

This custom genre column is initially auto populated from the "original genre" that is found online.

Original Genre now becomes NON editable but custom genre is editable

The file is set to what ever is in the "Custom genre" column.

A new search & replace function is created just for the "custom genre" column to help with changing many files at once, so files genres are updated accordingly (otherwise mega typing)

On the settings page there is a button to reset all genres in the "custom genre" column back to "original genre" found, if required.

Thoughts on a post card
regards Ian

I also found out, that this would be a great help. Mapping one (or multiple) found genres could be mapped to a new on, which then would be applied to the songs with respective former genres.

Btw: I wonder, why the "genre tree" suggests "Electronic", if "Heavy Metal" is not an allowed genre...
:-)

Supported

It would be useful if, after an initial scan, a table could be presented showing which tags were in use and how many albums/tracks had each tag. This could then be used to allow the user to set up a substitution table which bliss applied in order to arrive at a consistent description.

I've often thought that there was a place for a universal shared database which could gather users' tags and provide ranked suggestions or semi-automatically apply the most preferred genre tag (the wisdom of crowds).

Hell yeah, this is so needed. I don't want 32 different flavours of pop, just pop. So being able to say "this and this and this are all pop" would be wonderful. It could, when saying that the detected (from online sources) genre isn't allowed, ask you which genre family it belongs to, and then all others of that same genre will be tagged as the right genre family instead.

Thanks. Internal to bliss there is a genre tree. It's here -> http://www.blisshq.com/app/genre-tree . When bliss encounters a genre not in the allowed list, it looks in the genre tree and looks up, parent by parent, until it encounters an allowed genre and suggests that.

Currently this tree is fixed, static.

For your case, this would imply Jazz parenting "Stride Piano" etc. It would also suggest a way of editing the tree itself as part of the configuration... or maybe simple "parent of" relationships between genres can be stored and shared by bliss users to make the genre tree both more accurate and more complete.