Genre Tagging — Pollux vs. TuneUp

Maybe I’m more anal than I thought. Since putting the song scrubber comparison together, the genre tagging has begun to eat at me more. I mean, if you ever want to take advantage of Smart Playlists, it would be helpful to have decent genre tagging, right? Trying to evoke a certain mood is going to fail miserably if the bulk of your tags are the same general value! With that in mind, I decided to put together a table that compares the tagging produced by Pollux and TuneUp. What you’ll see is that Pollux is, for the most part, very generic. TuneUp, on the other hand might be too granular.

Below is the table. I tried to cross a variety of genres to give a representative sampling of the tagging that takes place. My process was:

1. If the song already has a genre, clear it.
2. Use Pollux to update the tags.
3. Record the value from Pollux.
4. Undo the tag update in Pollux.
5. Drag the song into TuneUp.
6. Record the value from TuneUp.

You can be the judge for yourself. For me, erring on the side of too granular seems more useful.

Update

Apparently, the EYES of TuneUp is everywhere! Tiffany from TuneUp Media posted a comment that linked to a method for controlling the level of genre tagging in TuneUp. I have looked for similar functionality in Pollux but don’t find it. For the record, it is under preferences.

If you right-click on the TuneUp window, you get a pop-up that allows you to set preferences. Under the “Clean” tag you’ll see that there are three levels of genre assignment. Although it isn’t clear how the levels are determined, you can certainly loosen up (or tighten down) the number of genres available from Level 2 (the level at which the above table was generated). Thanks, Tiffany!