Genrelizer

Have you ever tried to sort your rhythm game charts by genre, and found yourself trudging through inconsistent and hyperspecific genre labels that are useless for actual sorting?

YARG's official content sticks to a standardized list of genres and uses the sub_genre tag to get into the nitty-gritty details about each song's sound. However, charts from other sources aren't bound to the same system, and many charters express a lot of detail in their genre tags without using the sub_genre tag. Genrelizer attempts to keep your library organized by mapping unofficial genre tags to a combination of an official, sortable genre tag and a mostly-untouched sub_genre tag that retains the charter's original intent.

For example, if a chart has genre = 12-Bar Blues, that's not an official genre. But Genrelizer recognizes it as a type of blues music, and this is the result:

Genrelizer also performs some light copy-editing, so that 12 Bar Blues, Twelve Bar Blues, and Twelve-Bar Blues all end up under the same 12-Bar Blues subgenre. We've taken great pains to make sure that subtle naming variations get merged into one sortable value, but even the slightest difference in sound between two subgenre names gets honored as two distinct things.

What Genrelizer is not

Genrelizer is not a tool for making new charts; it's a tool for categorizing old ones

If you're making new charts, you don't need to consult Genrelizer. Just pick an official YARG genre, then add any level of detail you want in the sub_genre field. Genrelizer is here to clean up external content where the original charter isn't around anymore to clarify their intent; it doesn't need to get involved with new charts.

Genrelizer is not a definitive list of how subgenres must be categorized

Genrelizer's mappings are only meant to be best-guesses when all we have is a single, nonstandard genre name to work with. We know it might be controversial to see Deathcore under Death/Black Metal, but that doesn't mean we think that that's the only way to categorize it. If you want your deathcore chart to be categorized under Metalcore instead, you can set the genre and sub_genre fields accordingly, and Genrelizer won't intervene. Heck, you could use Bubblegum Pop as a subgenre under Grindcore and Genrelizer wouldn't bat an eye. It's only when genre is unrecognized that Genrelizer starts making decisions about where things belong (with some minor exceptions; see below).

Genrelizer is not (usually) going to save you from updating your charts if YARG adds a new official genre

Say you have a polka chart, and you've set genre = World / sub_genre = Polka, but then we at the YARG team decide that polka music deserves its own entire genre tag. Since your chart still has a legitimate genre tag (World), Genrelizer isn't going to touch it. If you want to make use of that new Polka genre, you're going to have to update the chart yourself.

There are, however, two exceptions to this rule:

• If a chart has genre = Other, Genrelizer is willing to reassign it, since the charter seemingly wasn't satisfied with their options anyway. So while that World > Polka example won't be changed, a chart marked as Other > Polka would be moved over to the new Polka genre.

• Genrelizer is willing to push around genres when it recognizes a genre/subgenre pair from Magma, the compiler used for Rock Band songs, because Magma offers only a closed list of genres and subgenres. For example, Magma lacks a Metalcore genre, but it does have Core as a subgenre of Metal. If Genrelizer sees that exact pairing, it assumes that the chart was made by a Magma user who would have used Metalcore had it been an option, and reinterprets the genre as such. This only applies to a precise match of Metal > Core, because that's a telltale sign of Magma; Genrelizer will not recategorize Metal > Metalcore, nor Heavy Metal > Core.

Contributing

Genrelizer is crowdsourced! There are always more subgenres to account for, and you're welcome to contribute. See these resources for more information:

• How Genrelizer Works
• Rules for Submissions
• Frequently-Asked Questions