Well as I get to the converting part, I often get stuck of where to place a Band/Artist.  ie...for example, I just converted Love - Forever Changes cd.

When you listen to the whole Album to me its what Progressive was all about in the late 60's/70s.  Bands moving away from Rock and Roll in the U.S. or the Mersey / Beatles sound in the UK.  When you look Love up in Wiki its says Pop, Psychedelic, Folk Rock, Acid Rock.  Here btw..they are not listed, perhaps rightly so, perhaps not.

Since I am a Progger at heart all my life, that sort of bothers me in categorization.  So I sit here wondering where shall I place them.  And this bothers me even more so now that I am entering them into my MusicBee as I want a simple life...grab a genre or two and just play random tracks if I am in the mood for it instead of having to manually pick every time what I want to listen to.

To me for example with Love, they are either Proto-Prog or the non existent category recently discussed in another post Progressive Pop... maybe they are Prog Related?

I am stuck like this with a lot of early artists.. ie.  where to put Donovan, Kat Stevens... in Pop next to Madonna?  LOL (Madonna is just an example of current music categorizations around the internet.)  How sad to have to place Donovan into a folder with Madonna!  lol.

Ah!  what confusion!

That's exactly , the complication I would want to avoid, because you end up having 100,000 different categories in your music player if you are like me you have an overload of music as result of 40 + years of buying and hoarding.

Music falls into moods that complement each other.  Therefore the last thing you want is loads and loads of categories.  Your example Psychedelic Pop Rock as a result now becomes Psychedelic, Psychedelic Pop,  Psychedelic Rock, Pop, Rock, Rock Pop = 6 genres.  The world now becomes a huge confusing unfathomable over complicated spaghetti :)

The Love sound is soft, relaxing progressive, melodic, musically not unlike a mood when listening to Moody Blues, Barclay James Harvest, or even Fairport Convention amongst many other soft prog bands listed here, if you take out the words like Folk etc.

Best regards

Pick a category and be done with it.

Exactly!  I have already decided to add Progressive Pop to my lot to keep it simple, but still separated.  At the end of the day I am happy with all the Prog categories and by just adding Jazz, Metal, Rock, Blues, Country and Classical, I am all set.  The girlfriend can have her Pop category as I will have my Cat Stevens, Donovan, Love etc in Progressive Pop... lol

That makes it 23 Prog plus 7 = 30 categories!

Darn that's still too many! 

It's either prog or it isn't and, to some extent, that's your personal opinion anyway (which is why my Toto albums sit defiantly in my prog collection and stuff anyone who doesn't agree.).

Works fine for me, no Camel next to Depeche Mode. 

the OP is talking about organizing his mp3 files/albums. It could be hard. 

For example alphabetical order does not work for me. Organizing by genre does somehow. 

I was replying to Zeph.

you thought the same thing before replying to him. 

Anyway, I put on my blue tooth headphones on and off I trot downstairs to work.

I don't know what you all use as headphones but I deliberated a while between Bose and Sony and went for the Sony and I am really happy I did as they sound great and are comfortable.  Also, I can walk around areas of my garden or take the trash down to the road and still for the most part get a good reception on them.  If I have a call to make or video conference, I tap the side of the head phone to pause the music and pick it back up when I am through.

I have albums by ALL of those great artists you mentioned.

You mentioning Toto reminds me of a short 2/3 year period we had where Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band, Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, Yes and Santana all came to Birmingham, Alabama.  That was a rare treat as no one ever comes to Alabama other than the usual Southern Rock Bands and the almost annual staples Kansas, Styx, Journey, Kiss, Motley Crue who come and play at the outdoor Amphitheater about 2 miles from where I live.

Anyway, Ringo Starr All Star Band lineup had Steve Luthaker, Gregg Rolie (Santana), Todd Rundgen, Gregg Bissonnette and Richard Page (Mr. Mister). In the set list they played Africa, Rosanna and Hold the Line.  Also fun was listening to their All Starr sound of Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen, Oye Como Va and Evil Ways.  About 3 weeks later Santana played so it was cool to compare the two sounds. 

Regarding Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters, that was a rare treat as they only played if I recall 3 concerts, in New Orleans, Birmingham and NY and that was it.  Plant wanted small theatre venues so the concert was in a small downtown theatre that only holds about 2000 if that and the tickets were sold out in less than a day. I figured that would be the case and made sure I got my tickets in as soon as they opened for sale.

Yes btw are coming here again May next year so I am going to have to see about getting a ticket... ooops  my bad that's in Birmingham UK :(  Grrrrr.

I just throw them all together into a musical gumbo.

 

So what you really want to do is group them by mood? My Sony Walkman MP3 player does that by analysing the tracks- it will classify music by quiet, relaxing, loud, dance etc etc and it works reasonably well. Maybe there's some other software that will do that?

The software won't do it automatically.  But, that is what I will most probably do once I am finished with converting the rest of my cd's.

It has two extra pop-down categories:  Moods and Occasion with pop down choices.  Looking at them "Occasion" might be the easiest way to go as a couple of the pop down choices do show "Work" and "Christmas"  which is useful so I can separate a band's seasonal album out of my daily listening but auto find them at Christmas.  As in for example Moody Blues "December" or JT's and Ian Andersons seasonal Christmas stuff.  I don't need them popping up in a playlist during the year!  "Live" and "Compilation" are probably two more tags that I will create so that with a click I can use or have removed in play lists.

All this sounds trivial but it really is a big deal if you have a big collection and you are putting them into a player and not wanting to spend half your time scrolling and picking what to play.

But there are benefits once sorted.  A couple of custom USB sticks for the road for me and a custom one for my life partner.  Unfortunately she cringes when she hears a lot of the prog, but fill a stick with Rammstein, AC/DC, Journey, Aerosmith, Album Rock, T'Rex, Bowie, The Sweet, etc and she is happy and no more nagging in the car lol.  She is all over anything that sounds like Till and I introduced her to T'Rex the same. She can't get enough of Marc Bolan. 

Just to put into perspective the work of converting, I finished Jethro and Ian Andersen last week and was shocked when I realized I had converted 51.

Then why not just create playlists of music that has similar "mood" that suits your purpose. I have several "work time" playlists, a "sleepy time" playlist, a "good grooves" playlist, a "classic prog" playlist, etc. Populate each playlist with songs or entire albums to suit your mood or activity. Any one song (or album) can be part of several playlists -- thus avoiding the anxiety of assignment to a single genre.

there  is not line, proto-prog is not a music genre but still progressive rock, I don't know how to put it into words. Just listen to something like Procol Harum's epic from Shine on Brightly, or Deep Purple's Anthem. Both songs from 1968. 

I didn't know there was such a genre as Proto-Prog until I arrived here.

This was a big debate on PA, coz there existed two meanings of proto-prog, one of which I'm kind of surprised you've never heard of.

UK Bands like Cressida, Raw Material, Indian Summer, Still Life, Room, Czar, Greatest Show On Earth, Tonton Macoute and a bunch more (usually or often released on the Dawn or Neon labels) were called Proto-prog, because of their rawer sound and less-refined compositions  compared to the classic prog bands. Needless to d-say that the "proto-prog" genre was a pure journalistic invention that was born two decades later (in the 90's), when the German label Repertoire unearthed them and made those album available on CD for the first time.

Our version (ProgArchives) of proto-prog refers more to a timeline, and everything that predates the release of King Crimson's debut album. This was originally to include bands like The Nice, Vanilla Fudge,  Procol Harum and the first three albums od Deep Purple, which were Psychedelic prog (or prototype of prog), but internal rivalries and lobbying made that The Nice and Prol were yanked away almost right from the start. Not that our version of Proto-Prog is any more legit than the other.

But journalist speak of proto-punk (which never existed then, but is widely accepted nowadays) for the Detroit late-60's se-cene (Stooges, MC5, Amboy Duke) and New York (Velvet Underground), and journalists also invented the jazz genre "post-bop", to describe 60's, 70's and modern "bop" music that wasn't released in nthe 50's and 40's , be they Bebop or Hard Bop.

The PA version seems to make the most sense to me TBH, but I'm certain if I were an avid listener of proto, I'd know the actual big picture much better.