By: frickitickitavi

New feature and crowdsourced repo: Genrelizer

YARG Nightly just got a new feature, and it needs your help!

If you have a big collection of charts from various sources, you probably know the pain of trying to sort through an unstandardized list of genre names, It's great that charters can express any hyperspecific genre they want, but it's no good for sorting and filtering. Our solution is simple on the surface level: a genre metadata tag that pulls from our official list of genres, and a freeform sub_genre tag that lets you express whatever nuance you want. Official YARG content already uses these tags, so you can go see some hand-crafted descriptions of your favorite setlist and DLC songs in the Nightly music library.

But you might be wondering - how does this help my sprawling library of customs with crazy genre tags and no sub_genre tags? That's where the new Genrelizer repo comes in. Just like OpenSource, this is a crowdsourced GitHub repo that YARG reads from at launch. It contains mapping files for YARG's official genres, each containing lists of dozens to hundreds of recognized subgenres to use in categorizing your charts. Have a custom with genre = Symphonic Technical Death Metal? That's not an official genre, but Genrelizer recognizes it as one of the subgenres for the Death/Black Metal genre, and your chart ends up with genre = Death/Black Metal ; sub_genre = Symphonic Technical Death Metal. Charter intent is preserved, but your charts get neatly categorized.

We're very proud of the breadth of subgenres we've covered, but Genrelizer is always open to new submissions! If you have a chart with a genre that Genrelizer doesn't recognize and dumps under Other, please submit a pull request to add a mapping for that subgenre!

FAQs

For gory details about how Genrelizer works and how to contribute, see the docs in the Genrelizer repo. But up front, here are a few FAQs:

I don't want my genres getting messed with - can I turn this off? - Yes! Go to Settings > Songs and clear the Standardize Genre Metadata toggle. You'll need to rescan any time you change this setting.

Does this edit my chart files? - Nope; this all happens inside YARG. Your chart files will never be edited.

I don't like that Genrelizer categorizes as a subgenre of genre . What if I want my chart to have subgenre but genre instead? - No worries; Genrelizer isn't here to police your subgenres. If you fill out the sub_genre field, Genrelizer will honor it - you can make a Grindcore chart with the Bubblegum Pop subgenre and it won't bat an eye. It kicks in to categorize charts with unrecognized genres and blank subgenres, not to correct the subgenres that you explicitly provide.