ppy
Increase the variety of languages and genres available
in light of the recent update that allows mappers to set their own genres and language, it is widely known that the number of both of those are fairly limited, and some songs have to be classified into "other" or "novelty", while there could be much more accurate genres to describe them
Some of the new genres could be:
- Metal (https://github.com/ppy/osu-web/issues/5851)
- Classical
- Speedcore
- Breakcore
- Folk ...
(will expand this list with community input)
Some of the new languages could be the ones available in the page (https://i.imgur.com/oyJGQpn.png)
this has been apparently suggested alrdy: https://github.com/ppy/osu-web/issues/5153 Russian: https://github.com/ppy/osu-web/issues/3376
adding more broad genres would be nice, but i don't think we should try to delve into more precise ones, mostly looking at electronic genres. if we add dnb, dubstep, breakcore, people might wonder why we don't add drumstep, riddim, mashcore, or other genres like techno/house/etc.
more genres = good, too many precise genres = bad
makes sense, what broad genre should we add that encompasses multiple electronic subgenres?
currently "Electronic" is a little ?? because you can pretty much stuff anything in there that is not recorded in a studio
At its current state I think the suggestions only contain "Vocaloid, Metal, Classical / Orchestral, Breakcore" as the rest can fall into more general categories, and not that common for now.
I think Metal, Classical, Folk would be good additions for musical genres a lot of folk and classical stuff currently get categorized weirdly due to lacking categories, and metal gets thrown into rock for lack of better tag. Some of electronic's weirdness is a result of lacking tags for piano pieces as well.
I agree it shouldn't be too specific unless the genre system was revamped entirely - allowing the user base to add the genre tags, easily accessible genre trees, allowing more than 1 genre to be assigned to a map, etc. Not really sure how beneficial that would actually be.
Vocaloid would be kind of weird since it encompasses all genres, and Vocaloid itself is presently dying down in favor of other singing synthesizer programs (CeVIO, piapro, synthesizer V, NEUTRINO, etc). We'd be better off recategorizing existing Vocaloid tracks to other genres appropriately.
I'm not sure about how common "Classical" and "Folk" are but almost everybody seems to be agreeing that "Metal" should be separated, from both discussions internally and from this issue alone. If the thing about "Vocaloid" is also correct (I've heard that @dorothy3242 listens to vocaloid a lot) then it can be removed from the additions.
Metal, Classical and Folk seem like the best additions, all the others seem too specific or just a very minor sub-genre.
We've been intending to flesh out genre lists for a while, but have never conclusively sat down and hashed out what genres are worth an individual classification.
As Realazy mentioned, a list that is too specific is just as useless as one that isn't specific enough. Electronic is a good example of this given it covers dozens, if not hundreds of classifications of music.
We should probably sit down in #modding and have a big brainstorming session sometime and hash this all out.
Heyo, we held recently held a meeting about this topic in osu dev server's modding channel, refer to the pins to find the discussion, here is the meeting document
From there we concluded a set of ideas that we think would work well and would like to push forwards.
Baseline Changes we consider necessary or highly useful in the current state of Genre and Language settings.
Improving current Genres and Languages
- Add genres Metal, Classical, Folk, Jazz. These don't fall under any existing genre.
- Add Languages: Russian, Polish, Conlang. Russian and Polish are popular languages for beatmaps, conlang covers made-up languages.
- Remove genres Anime, Video Game. These don't refer to an actual genre and rather to the source material.
To cover categorizations that refer to the type of song or to the source material, we'd like to add an Extra Category field alongside Genre and Language.
- It would contain the following items:
- Anime
- Video Game
- Vocaloid
- Nightcore
- Unspecified (default)
A filter list for these items should be displayed on the beatmap search, just like for genres and languages. When unspecified, this field shouldn't be displayed on a beatmap's page to regular users, but should be displayed to anyone with the permissions to set it.
To match these changes, some automatic refactoring will be useful to save lots of manual work.
- Refactor beatmaps with 'Genre: Anime' and only 'pop' in tags to 'Genre: Pop' + 'Additional Category: Anime'
- Refactor beatmaps with 'Genre: Anime' and only 'rock' in tags to 'Genre: Rock' + 'Additional Category: Anime'
- For the remaining beatmaps, keep Anime and Video Game as genre, but don’t allow them to be set. This way they can be fixed manually.
These changes should affect Beatmap Nominators in the following ways:
- Allow them to set Genre, Language and Additional Category on
- Pending maps (with and without nomination)
- Qualified maps
- Prevent Beatmap Nomination when both
- Genre is set to Unspecified
- Language is set to Other
This way we can ensure that Genre and Language is always set before nomination. The same rules should affect the Nomination Assessment Team as addition their existing permissions.
Additional Changes These are changes we consider very useful, but either depend on the baseline or don't take priority over it.
-
Allow adding multiple genres/languages/additional categories to a beatmap page rather than a single one. This allows for genre combinations like Pop-Rock, songs with multiple languages and various combinations of Extra Categories.
-
Add the following items to Extra Category, these are useful filters but would cause conflict without being able to add multiple categories.
- Doujin
- Featured Artist
- Cover
- Remix
- Movie
- Television
-
Allow all available languages on the website to be set, but only display the 10 most popular ones in the beatmap search, refer to the original suggestion at the end of #5153
-
Display Genre/Language changes in a beatmap discussion’s History tab, allowing easy tracking of who changed which field to what.
Extra These are ideas that have been suggested but weren't fully considered.
-
Display genre, language, categories on a beatmap's card like this. This allows easy recognition of a map's contents before visiting its respective page.
-
Subgenres were discussed, however consensus deemed them more appropriate in tags due to having high variety and being less defined. They should definitely still be a consideration for the future though.
-
Revamp the entire tag so that all possibly tags are typed and databased. This was originally suggested by @cl8n , to allow a more powerful search engine with synonyms, typed search, autocomplete, etc. While appealing, it also somewhat exits the scope of this discussion.
so.. all my video game maps no longer have a genre? Or they’re all set to Electronic? Electronic is WAY too broad. It can cover anything from Kobaryo speedcore, to r3 music box, to video game music.
Very disappointing. Video Game music is a genre. There are certain things that are near universal to all video game songs, especially BGM. Nearly all video game background music is meant to loop infinitely, and so the music is designed with this in mind.
You suggest to prevent nominating if language is set to "Other", thus I wonder if song would be in some unavailable language, would it mean it's unnominatable?
- Prevent Beatmap Nomination when both
- Genre is set to Unspecified
- Language is set to Other
What kind of name is "Extra Category"? Is this based on any existing service? I would hope there was some existing premise..
In my opinion electronic is a horrible way to classify a songs genre as electronic refers to the way it is produced, as opposed to the musical techniques and conventions a song adheres to. More suitable would be to add more options like electronic hardcore/EDM/electro pop/house/trap/breakcore
@peppy Extra Category thing is meant to categorize songs according to source or something I believe, like in fact Anime or Video Game isn't a song genre. That would require adding another row along with genre and language, wouldn't be so hard to implement I think.
Yes I understand the concept. I'm looking for premise. I don't believe we are making something new here so we shouldn't be making something new here.
I was under the impression "extra category" was a placeholder name because in the discussion we weren't sure exactly what it would contain until the end
the entire extra category thing is rather a proposal for now I believe, would make more sense to have it as a separate issue imo
It's mainly like that because it also includes things that don't refer to the source (eg. Remix, Cover, Nightcore). We did have a hard time coming up with a better alternative, other suggestions were "Song Category" or "Suggested Search Terms" A better term could be helpful yeah
Great, so now you have a "cover" of a "vocaloid" song from a "video game". How does this fit?
Electronic, at l
so.. all my video game maps no longer have a genre? Or they’re all set to Electronic? Electronic is WAY too broad. It can cover anything from Kobaryo speedcore, to r3 music box, to video game music.
Very disappointing. Video Game music is a genre. There are certain things that are near universal to all video game songs, especially BGM. Nearly all video game background music is meant to loop infinitely, and so the music is designed with this in mind.
Big agree. The way Electronic will be used now is not as a genre, but as the recording medium. Plus as a musician, not putting Video Game Music as its own genre is ridiculous. While Video Game Music can vary ALOT, it still has a WAAAYYY different vibe than music that was made to be listened to separately and not in a game medium. I understand that sometimes you have to use umbrella terms to describe types of music that don't fall into specific genres, but electronic is a way too big term. Also, having Video Game music be labeled as electronic is even more stupid, Is this electronic?, what about this?, and this?. It doesn't make any sense. However, thank you for finally adding Metal, that I am very happy with.
@nl-tatatat @TheDefaultGuy can we not have this discussion if the intent is to repurpose Video Game to a different field, it's not gone or lost.
@peppy If you meant "how does this fit into the same group remotely", then uh, good point. The main idea here is to have these filters because they are things that appear commonly within the game and within players' interests.
A "Song Type" field could alternatively work by changing references to source to mean a typing instead? You'd rename Video Game to Game OST or similar, and maybe Anime could become like "Anime Opening" "Anime Ending" (or even "TV Release")?
May I suggest those are just left in tags, and we add common tag filters as shortcuts if that's what people want..?
That's definitely an improvement, though having it as a visible field on the beatmap page is preferable. This gives players the option to find songs of a similar type through simply clicking on the respective link on the beatmap page. Works the same as genre and language in that sense.
Tagging is not ideal for a bunch of reasons. Tags have a variety of uses, causing clutter to anyone wanting to use them to search efficiently. They also get cut with ... in case they're too long. Tags are also hardly consistent across all beatmaps of all times, and it seems there is no existing functionality to edit them on the new site. Should this be the approach we take then ^ will appear in separate issues.
couldn't certain tags be somehow highlighted though (e. g. on beatmapset card as you proposed)? believe it's possible and would work nicely here
Preventing the nomination is not a good solution when the content does not suit what it has already. A music might fall into a category that fits to none. Why would picking "other" would prevent the nomination then? What even is the point of having that for instance if not making the beatmap prepared for nomination rather than leaving it "unspecified"?
Great, so now you have a "cover" of a "vocaloid" song from a "video game". How does this fit?
idk why this was skipped past so quickly in the meeting, some people brought up the concern and the only real response I can find is
[12:56 PM] yaspo: yeah we kinda need the option to have multiple at this rate
so then it would seem super pointless to put them in the same 'category' because they're unrelated and you can set multiple.
"common tag filters as shortcuts" is what I'd been getting at during the meeting, but if you use the plaintext tags field to do this you run into the problems yaspo mentioned above, and you also need to rely on mappers and modders being aware of these "common tags" because the filter wouldn't be very useful if it didn't catch all of the maps that it applies to.
instead of special genre and language and 'extra category' and common tag filters I think it would be a lot more straightforward to database as many tags as possible and add types to them so they show up in the right place and can be made optional/required as necessary (like booru). it's definitely not the same scope as the OP of this issue but that meeting highlighted a bunch of issues that could be solved this way
@frukoyurdakul note the "both", it'd only be limiting in the case of Unspecified - Other, which with making Genre/Language as broad as possible ideally never happens (you'd have to really try)
Fully support @cl8n's idea as well, in general it seems an improvement to describe information rather than keeping a collection of non-descript tags around and hope the user will somehow make use of it. This especially goes for the beatmap page where they're visible. The addition of 'Extra Category' or 'Song Type' aims to improve that in a way that's a bit less far off.
Alright, back on track, feels like this didn't entirely go as it should've. I took some time to reconsider some of the points made regarding "Extra Category". The main goals we want to reach are categorization, searchability and correctness + visibility of these categories. These are to support the evergrowing list of beatmaps by allowing for more defined filtered lists, efficient searching, and improving discoverability in amount and accuracy.
you have a "cover" of a "vocaloid" song from a "video game"
Taking this sentence as a base, the main issue in the original "Extra Categories" list is combining items that are semantically different into one list; "is (a)" versus "from (a)".
So, I'd suggest to split these up into "Type" for "is (a)" and "Source" for "from (a)". Source is evident, Type is fairly natural to use. For example "types of food" and "x is a fruit/vegetable", "y is meat". This results in the following categorizations:
-
Type
- Unspecified (default)
- Vocaloid
- Nightcore
- Doujin
- Cover
- Remix
-
Source
- None (default)
- Anime
- Video Game
- Movie
- Television
This should resolve the naming issue.
As for common search terms, I think they're a nice idea but they don't answer to the need for categorization. It'd also be weird to put down static recommendations, since generally any storefront seems to generate recommendations dynamically based on common search behavior. So personally I'd recommend against using common searches to replace our suggested improvements; they should be their own thing. Same thing for clayton's proposal.
Does this address your concerns @peppy ?
We already have a source field. We can't add a second one it will just get confusing. Why not call it "medium" or something more appropriate?
And oh god this is just too complicated. Why can't we leave this stuff to tags? I mean what is the benefit of this