Browsing genres, genre styles and genre categories

Introduction

Helium Music Manager implements a hierarchic structure for organizing genres .
The structure contains the following three levels:

• Genre Categories which are the topmost level in the hierarchy.
  Genre categories are often a global definition for a specific style.
  Examples of genre categories are Rock, Blues, R & B and Electronica.

• Genre Styles is a sub-level for a genre category.
  Genre styles adds more detail than a genre category, but it is still a more global level than a specific genre.
  A genre style is always related to a parent genre category.
  
  Examples of genre styles are (genre category in parenthesis): (R & B) Hip-Hop/Urban, (R & B) R & B/Soul, (Rock) Hard Rock, (Rock) Pop/Rock, (Electronica) Techno, (Electronica) Dance and (Electronica) Trance.

• Genre is the lowest level in the hierarchy and adds the most detail to their definition.
  This level uses data from the genre field in your database/file tags.

When adding tracks to your Database, Helium Music Manager automatically tries to group known genres into genre styles and genre categories, with the result that if you are working with well-known genres, hopefully a lot of manual work won't be required.

It's strongly recommended that you learn and use genre categories and genre styles, because it will allow you to locate an item of a specific type much faster. The Genre Grouping in the Media Library will by default take advantage of known genre categories and styles when it is grouping its data.

Working with the Genre Overview page

The Genre Overview page can be selected directly from the Left Sidebar in the Music Information Browser. You can also access it from the Start-page, where it's link is available from the top header.

The genre overview page lists all the unique genres contained in your database, grouped into genre categories. Each genre category group will be grouped into a tree with two levels, where the first level represents the genre style and the second level is the genres connected to this genre style.

At the bottom of the genre overview page all Uncategorized Genres will be listed into its own group.

Browsing detail pages
All texts inside a genre category group are clickable. They link to a detail page showing more information about the selected genre category/genre style/genre.
These pages can contain a detailed definition of the genre category/genre style or genre.

The pages also show: artists/group highlights, album highlights and more information related to the specific page.

Working with genre categories/genre styles.

A specific genre can easily be categorized into a specific genre category and genre style if necessary.

When you have located a specific genre that needs to be categorized, click the "Add/edit Genre Definition..." link.

This will open a new dialog where you can select which genre category and genre style the selected genre belongs to. Remember that you must select a genre category to have the list of genre styles populated with the appropriate entries.

If you need to create new genre categories and/or genre styles, click the button located to the right of the genre category/style input control.