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by niklaslogren 5027 days ago
I feel your pain. I have also stopped caring about music classifying, for much the same reasons you listed. Nowadays I use only Spotify, and I trust in their tagging abilities, and in Last.FM's auto-correcting ability.

My main concern when I used foobar used to be how to handle multiple artists on the same album, which always resulted in the album being split up when displayed in a list. I was unbelievably happy when I discovered the "Album artist"-tag, which unites all songs in an album under the same banner, while still preserving (and scrobbling) the original artist name.

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Last.fm and Spotify generally give me terrible recommendations and no discovery at all. I think this is because they use machine learning on the person <-> track graph to determine which tracks are related, so they're very good at finding you DragonForce or IOSYS, but very bad at finding you Hammers of Misfortune, Gallowbraid, Umbrella, or m’s. Of course, if you listen to music that Last.fm thinks is adjacent to IOSYS or DragonForce, you've probably already heard of IOSYS or DragonForce.

Pandora doesn't have this issue because they use human analysts to determine the properties of the tracks and give you similar tracks rather than tracks that are listened to by similar people. Unfortunately their music library is pretty limited. Google Music's automatic playlist feature does something similar without the human analysts, but this only works if you already have all the music you want and it fits onto your Google Music account. They don't seem to provide an option to pay for extra space.