There are a number of “Explicit” tags fields that exist, the “rtng” & “ITUNESADVISORY” fields exist to denote tracks that are explicit.
I think the support to read a tag like this & then show the infamous 🅴 (negative square E) within the UI of the app Along side those tracks would prove useful. This could even be further utilized by denoting tracks that are radio edits or “cleaned up versions” with a 🅲 (negative squared C)
Problem solved:
Quickly Identifying music content that is deemed Explicit
Brought benefits:
Many streaming services implement this feature on their platforms. Bringing this feature to offline music players would be practical & convenient while also keeping those who play offline music from losing a feature by not using a streaming service.
Other application solutions:
Some applications grab the rating information for tracks from online sources & these “explicit” denotations can be removed by altering a setting. I think a simpler approach would be to read this information from music metadata. This way there is no need to scrub the web for this information.
Additional description and context:
rtng in MP4 files is the most widely used tag field for explicit ratings
ITUNESADVISORY is the most known pre existing tag field associated with explicit ratings
Vorbis Comments tags have no official tag field however, creating custom tags in Vorbis Comments has never been an issue
For this reason I think piggybacking off the ITUNESADVISORY or rtng mappings may be the easiest approach.
Field Values could be as follows
0 = Not Explicit / No Rating
1 = Explicit 🅴
2 = Clean / Censored 🅲
The negative square characters could then be added in the UI in front of Track Titles or Artist names as can be seen on other streaming platforms.
I think this could be useful as well but the main focus is on the options above
3 = Instrumental 🅸
I do not disagree, I think much of this comes from a lack of understanding & possibly a lack of consistency amongst varying platforms. To even find what explicit tags exist & how they may function I had to scour the internet…the sea of misinformation.
I think if this were implemented there should firstly be an option for on or off & then to combat the abuse of the tags users simply need documentation on how the app officially handles these tags.
Now if a user is confused…“look at the documentation”
Maybe the user thinks “you’re wrong that’s not how these tags are supposed to work”
…you don’t have to use the feature, it can be turned off, furthermore alterations to rating or explicit tags can be very quickly changed in batch across even massive libraries with very little sweat.
Now if there is merit to their complaint that’s another story, for another day.
If you tell us how it works we can utilize it just like any other tag field
We could also maybe use a custom field for Symfonium (grasping at straws here)
Is this one of those deep sigh as you look out the window into the foggy distance type of decisions?
Is it worth it, does anyone care, did she ever love me?
Should i be attempting to get people to support this idea? Or shall I remain seated at the window thinking of what we, I mean Symfonium could have been?
I know this feature will be implemented in the next builds, but you can achieve this with the mp3tag format value function. Filter your explicit tracks (F3), select them all, open actions (quick) (Alt+Shift+6) and select Format Value
Field: TITLE
Format String: %title% 🄴 (or the explicit symbol that you want)
Repeat for your Clean and Instrumental tracks. Done.
This is precisely what i currently do. I manually add "²🅴 " to my artist fields.
The ² is because im using the 🅴 as a delimiter so the 🅴 is ignored but in order for it to be a delimiter it needs to breakup two pieces of info. Unfortunately thie means there is a fake artist “²” but (it is what it is)
In this recent update im able to use "²🅴 " as the delimiter even though its at the beginning of the field which is great because i no longer have a fake artist being created on each track.
You may ask why add it to the artist instead of the title. (My last player did not support titlesort) so there was no way of using this special character while also being able to ignore it on the backend besides using it as a delimiter.
With Symfonium i can push these characters to my titles giving me another way to achieve my goal
BUT
If this app could support what im already trying to do natively i dont need the ghetto workaround & this app has yet another stand alone feature further seperating it from the other music players.
Yeah, just had nowhere else to place them before. Ironically I was planning to move them to the titles & setup title sort tags. I figured id make the changes to my instrumental tracks as im assuming those may not be included in the explicit tag implementations but ill wait to see how the next update unfolds.
Is it worth it, does anyone care, did she ever love me?