Versatile Artists' Filters for Variety in Music Playlists

I loaded my IPod with my collected music. As mentioned in my earlier post, I am yet to work on standardizing the mp3 tags so to structure and search my music better. But I thought I could listen to my entire collection. Another daunting problem surfaced, partly because of my swinging moods when listening to music. Consider the following playlist specifications that I would love to give:

• Listen to A. R. Rehman's compositions
• Listen to all Shahrukh Khan's songs
• Listen to songs sung by Hari Haran and Shankar Mahadevan.
• Listen to all songs of 1990's (1990-2000) time for old time's nostalgia.
• Listen to duets (sung by a male and female singer)
• Listen to songs sung by single artists
• Listen to all telugu songs sung by Chitra
• Listen to all tamil songs of Rajnikanth (yes, i listen to telugu, tamil, hindi and english songs)
  
• and so on. But you get the general idea, right?

I listen to songs in RealPlayer, ITunes, Rhapsody and WinAmp, but I am not aware of having the option to get such queries executed for a different playlist according to my choice. And in iPod too there's no such option.

Such queries might be tough right now because the mp3 songs do not have the option to have all such information. For my queries to come to life, we need extra information such as:

singers tagged with (male/female), language of the song, actors/actresses in the song, composed by or music director and comprehensive genre. The genre field in mp3 tags usually takes it just as a single value i.e. movie, inspirational and movie, blues are considered two different genres. But songs of these genres are movie songs, so when there's a query that asks for just movie songs, songs belonging to both these genres should be collected in the playlist. Genre should ideally have a taxonomy, something like a broad category as to what type of music it is (movie, pop, rock, jazz, classical), followed by language in which it is sung (can take one or more values: english, hindi, telugu, tamil), followed by mood of the song (blues, tragedy, philosophical, inspirational and so on).

Currently, ID3 tags do not offer such flexibility. But can we store something in the 'Comments' field and make it possible to run such queries to generate dynamic playlists. Ofcourse, we also need a software that can read the 'Comments' field (or whatever we choose to) and filter out the songs that satisfy the query. I wonder why this requirement of dynamic playlists has not come up yet. Or did it and I am not aware of it? Let me know, while for a good solution to this, I mine.

MP3 ID3 Tag Database for Indian Music - A must!

Every time I intend to sync music files with my mp3 player - I end up getting frustrated trying to edit and re-edit the tags of mp3 files. That set me thinking there should be at least one repository that maintains consistency through out in naming the artists (A R Rehman should always be A R Rehman, not A.R.Rehman, AR Rahman and so on), titles, albums and genre. Well, you know how the tags are usually for the Indian MP3 songs!
The high value addition I get out of this is when I want to listen to only Hindi movie songs or Ghantasala songs or Rock genre songs, I can do so seamlessly in my Mp3 player; also your music library can be easily organized.

On googling, I found that there are such online MP3 ID3 tag databases for English music. I did not find any for Indian music. Its time for us to have such a tag database. If there are already such online tag databases that I missed while googling, please let me know. Otherwise, visit this page again in two weeks' time. :-) The idea is to create a web-platform for people to add or edit MP3 tag information for various songs. When a user wants to edit the tag information of a particular album's MP3 songs, all he needs to do is download these new tags and sync them with those songs. Also, there's a lot of scope for AI, especially having some validation on the information entered by the users. Any suggestions are welcome, while I mine!