Nectarine

Let's talk about which songs should be tagged Long, Short, Polarising, Cringe, FemaleMoans, Explicit, Gay, TruckDriverGearChange, FakeBit, NectaScene, etc.

Give your thoughts here, and eventually we'll make it into a FAQ entry, and/or a short note on the song-edit page to help other users.

Some opinions:

Tags are intended to help all users to find things, so they should be objectively true, as far as possible. Personal taste (Cringe, Stupid, Boring, Amazing) should not be done with tags. Do it with your personal votes and comments.

If Short and Long are to have empirical, measurable meanings (like x number of seconds) then, ideally, they should be added and removed automatically. No point wasting users' time with something purely mechanical that they could get wrong. Also potentially true of Polarising, based on some kind of statistical roundup of the votes!

FakeBit (Wiktionary): "A style of electronic music that uses modern software synthesizers to simulate the sound of early 8-bit computers."

Not sure about NectaScene. It was probably intended to mean "created as part of Necta activity", like our old competition entries, or the Preamp musicdisk done by Necta members. But it might potentially mean "it has Necta as a topic" (e.g. Nectarine is 0xDEAD , Nectarinization ) or "it has a special reputation around here" ( He-Man ) or even just "it has some connection with Necta users" (but you can usually tell that from whether the artist has a linked user account).

Some things like Year (1994 etc.) should already be in the song's Year field: it's just that we don't have a way to search by that field at the moment... And we have a special separate flag for Explicit too (but does it mean swear-words, or could it include sexy moans too?).

I agree subjective opinions like the ones listed by mirrorbird should not be tags.

Personally, I tag tunes with a length below 1 minute as Short and tunes above 8 minutes as Long.

Until we can search for the year of a tune, I will keep adding tags for that, even if it duplicates a tune's year field.

Tags like TruckDriversGearChange are cool to have, but they need an explanation in a FAQ.

It would be great if a description would be displayed above the related tags on the detail page of a tag. I would be willing to provide descriptions for a set of tags.

I think some subjective stuff in tags can be ok. Like the tag "Epic". I don't think there are any objective criteria for that, but it's still fun to have. Weird tags like "anal" or "animal" mostly exist for amusement value as well.

"Explicit" is a slippery one; basically I think it goes on tunes which contain profanity or sexual lyrics. If a tune has swear words in its title, but has no lyrics, I wouldn't mark it explicit. Sexy moans are a bit of a problem case. I guess it depends on how suggestive the moaning is? Lol.

"Short" can be attached automatically. "Long" I'm not so sure about, as what we think of as a "long" tune varies with genre. 7 minutes is "long" for some power-metal module, but a 7-minute trance tune would be considered typical, and wouldn't seem long to me. Even 10 minutes. But a 10 minute metal mod? LONG lol.

I don't see Epic as a purely subjective tag, because it isn't "epic" in the slang sense (meaning "really cool"), but means "this sounds like an epic" i.e. heavy orchestral work that suggests heroes and struggle. The same would apply to stuff like Medieval or Jazzy: of course those are subjective judgements, but people probably won't get them very wrong. It's not a generic judgement like "crap" or "amazing".

If we automate Polarising (or Polarizing, whatever spelling): I would suggest that a song is polarising only if: (i) there are at least 15 votes, and (ii) at least 70% of those votes are either 1-star or 5-star. (Update: 70% and 15 doesn't divide nicely, so you could pick some nicer numbers; but I think this is the right "ballpark".)

Remember that any automatic tagger must also remove the tag from a song if the condition is no longer true. Presumably you could attach it to the relevant events, like votings and reuploads. (For Short and Long, remember that a song replacement/reupload can change the length!)

I sometimes use the AwfulGuitarSample tag and am wondering if I am doing it correctly: There is a handful of guitar samples that were used a lot in modules from the 1990's. I recognize these samples instantly. They sound... kinda awful to be honest. But they have a certain retro charm.

Is the AwulGuitarSample tag intended to be used differently?

Accidental: that's basically my understanding of the tag, though of course other "awful guitar samples" can also get that tag.