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Frequently Asked Questions

Everything you need to know about GenreFix and The Structural Ear.

Before You Buy

GenreFix analyzes every artist, album, and track in your music library and assigns each one a genre classification based on The Structural Ear — a proprietary classification method built around the actual architecture of the music rather than the marketing labels that typically get attached to it. The result is a library organized the way your ear actually hears it, not the way a record label decided to sell it. GenreFix delivers a detailed classification report and automatically rewrites your audio files' genre tags to reflect the new classifications.

Most music players inherit whatever genre tag was embedded in the file when it was ripped or purchased — typically assigned by a record label, a metadata service, or whoever uploaded the album to a digital store. These tags are inconsistent, often wrong, and built around marketing categories rather than musical structure. GenreFix starts from scratch, classifying every artist based on what the music actually sounds like rather than what it was sold as. The difference is most visible in large libraries where genre-based browsing has become useless because half the collection is tagged "Pop" or "Rock" with no further distinction.

GenreFix works directly with your music folder — no export, no library file, no player-specific format required. The Genre Classifier and Duplicate Finder both use your browser's built-in folder access to read your music files directly from your hard drive. This works with any music player and any folder structure, because GenreFix reads the metadata already embedded in your audio files rather than relying on a player's proprietary library format. The only requirement is Chrome or Edge on either a PC or a Mac.

The free trial classifies up to 25 tracks from your library at no charge. All you need is an email address — no credit card is required. The free trial gives you a representative sample of GenreFix's classification results so you can evaluate the quality before committing to a full library run. Free trial results include the same genre classifications and confidence levels as a paid report.

Pricing is based on the total number of tracks in your music folder. GenreFix performs a fast pre-scan that counts your tracks instantly and shows you your exact tier and price before any charge is made. There are no subscriptions, no recurring charges, and no surprise fees — you pay once for the work done on your library. See the full pricing table on our Pricing page.

Yes. Your music never leaves your computer — GenreFix reads your files locally in the browser and only the metadata (artist names, album names, track titles) is sent to our classification service over an encrypted connection. No audio is transmitted. The metadata extracted during classification is retained as part of our global classification cache to speed up future runs, but is not linked to your personal account after your session ends. We do not sell your data or share it with anyone except the services required to operate GenreFix (Anthropic for classification, Stripe for payments, Resend for email). See our full Privacy Policy for details.

No. GenreFix reads the metadata embedded in your audio files — artist, album, track title, and existing genre tags — not the audio content itself. Your music never leaves your computer. GenreFix runs entirely in your browser, accessing your folder only with your explicit authorization, and nothing is uploaded to our servers.

During and After Classification

GenreFix classifies based on the dominant structural architecture of an artist's overall catalog — the instrumentation, rhythmic grammar, and song construction that defines how their music is actually built — rather than the era they recorded in, the demographic they marketed to, or the genre tag already in your library. This sometimes produces results that differ from common assumptions. An artist widely described as "Alternative" might classify as Rock: Grunge if their catalog is structurally grunge, or as Rock: New Wave if the architecture points there instead. Every classification comes with a plain-language explanation so you can see exactly why a call was made. If you disagree with a classification, you can override it directly in your report.

Low confidence means the classification engine made a call but isn't certain — typically because the artist's catalog spans multiple structural families, because their output is genuinely genre-defying, or because the available information wasn't sufficient to make a high-confidence determination. Low-confidence classifications are flagged in your report with an explanation of what made the call uncertain. You can review these and override them if you have better information about the artist.

Unknown means the classification engine was unable to make a confident determination even after attempting an expanded search. This typically happens with very obscure artists, local or regional acts with no significant online presence, or artists whose catalog is too small or too varied to classify reliably. Unknown results are never cached — if you re-run your library after an Unknown result, the engine will try again. You can also manually override an Unknown classification directly in your report using the genre dropdown picker.

Yes. Every classification in your report has a manual override option — a dropdown picker with all 122 genres that lets you assign the correct classification yourself. Overrides are saved to the database immediately. If you override a classification that affects multiple tracks (for example, correcting an artist's primary genre), all affected tracks update automatically.

Classification time depends on your library size and how many artists are already in our global cache. Artists already classified by previous GenreFix users are returned instantly. New artists require an AI classification call, which takes a few seconds each. A library of 5,000 tracks with a typical mix of well-known and obscure artists usually completes in 10 to 20 minutes. The processing screen shows live stats so you can track progress in real time.

Classical music doesn't follow the artist-level logic that works for every other genre. A single Classical artist — say, a major orchestra — might record symphonies, concertos, chamber music, opera, and choral works across their catalog, each representing a different structural form. Classifying the orchestra as a single genre would be meaningless. Instead, GenreFix classifies Classical music at the track level using the title, composer, and form of each individual work, which is why "Beethoven: Symphony No. 9, Adagio" lands in Classical: Orchestral while "Bach: Goldberg Variations" lands in Classical: Solo Instrumental. The same track-level treatment applies to Symphonic music and compilation albums.

Compilation albums — "Hits of 1976," "Disco Gold," "Now That's What I Call Music," and similar — typically contain tracks by multiple different artists, each of whom may belong to a different genre. Applying the album title's implied genre to every track would produce systematic misclassifications. GenreFix detects compilations automatically (using the Compilation flag in your library file, an Album Artist of "Various Artists," or album title patterns) and classifies each track individually using its own per-track artist field instead of the album-level artist. When the per-track artist field is blank, classification uses the track title alone.

About the Methodology

The Structural Ear is GenreFix's proprietary music classification method, developed to organize music by its actual sonic and structural architecture rather than its marketing history, era, or demographic target. Each genre is defined by specific structural indicators — instrumentation, rhythmic grammar, harmonic language, and the relationship between those elements — rather than by when the music was made or who it was made for. In practice, a typical collection spans around 5 or 6 classifications with somewhere between 20 and 30 genres represented across them. You can read a full explanation of the method and browse all the classifications on our About page.

Because those tags were assigned by someone with a commercial interest in how the music was categorized, not a musical interest in what it actually sounds like. A record label calls an artist "Alternative" because Alternative was the radio format that would play them, not because Alternative accurately describes their musical architecture. GenreFix ignores existing genre tags entirely and classifies from scratch based on what the music is, not what it was sold as.

The most common reason is that The Structural Ear classifies by dominant structural architecture, which sometimes cuts across conventional genre assumptions. Era is explicitly ignored — an artist who sounds like a 1950s rhythm and blues act but recorded in 1990 still classifies as R&B: Early R&B, because the music sounds like Early R&B regardless of the recording date. Marketing labels are ignored — an artist marketed as "Country" whose catalog is structurally Folk will classify as Folk. If a specific classification surprised you, check the explanation attached to it in your report — it will tell you exactly what structural indicators drove the call.

This is one of the most important and frequently misunderstood distinctions in The Structural Ear. Hip-Hop is a producer's genre — it is defined by beat construction, sample architecture, and the groove infrastructure built underneath everything else. Rap is a vocalist's genre — it is defined by rhythmic, rhyme-driven vocal delivery. The two overlap constantly in practice, which is why they are often used interchangeably in everyday language, but they are structurally distinct. The test GenreFix uses is called the Mute Test: if you mute the vocals and the track still functions as a complete, self-sufficient rhythmic statement, it is Hip-Hop. If the vocal delivery is what the track is built around, it is Rap.

Christmas is not a structural genre — there is no such thing as a "Christmas sound" that defines the architecture of the music. Christmas is a listening function: people want to find their Christmas music together, regardless of whether it is a classical choral recording, a Jazz vocal standard, a Rock song, or a contemporary pop production. GenreFix handles this with a Christmas overlay — a Rock band's Christmas album is still structurally Rock, but it gets routed to Christmas: Rock so it lives with the rest of your Christmas music when you want it. Christmas has 16 genres, one for each structural family, so your Christmas library is organized by what it sounds like within the seasonal category.

Duplicate Finder

Your format preferences are the top priority — always. Before the scan runs, you set a First and Second preferred format. If one or more copies match your First preference, one of those copies is kept, full stop. If neither copy matches your First preference but one matches your Second, that one is kept. Only when no copy matches either of your preferences does GenreFix fall back to quality criteria: lossless formats (FLAC, ALAC, WAV, AIFF) beat lossy formats (MP3, AAC, OGG) regardless of bitrate; when both copies are in the same quality tier, higher bitrate wins; when bitrate is also equal, larger file size wins. The full reasoning for every decision — which copy was kept and why — appears in your results report.

No. Duplicate Finder never deletes anything. It moves lesser copies into a folder called !GenreFix Duplicates, created at the top level of your music folder. The "aaa" prefix ensures this folder sorts to the very top of your file listing so it is easy to find. You review the contents of that folder and decide what to permanently delete — GenreFix only moves files, never removes them.

It is a holding folder created by Duplicate Finder at the root level of your music library. Every file that lost a quality comparison during the duplicate scan is moved here. The folder is named with the "aaa" prefix so it appears at the very top of any alphabetical file listing — you will never have to hunt for it. Nothing in this folder has been deleted; the files are simply out of the way while you review them.

GenreFix works on the actual music files stored on your computer, an external hard drive, a thumb drive, or a local server (such as a NAS or Plex running on your network) — anywhere the real audio files are physically accessible from your machine. So the answer depends on how your music is stored:

Streaming won’t work. If your music lives in a streaming service — Spotify, Apple Music streaming, Amazon Music, and the like — there are no files on your computer for GenreFix to read or tag. You’re renting access to that music, not storing it, so there’s nothing for us to work on.

Online-only cloud files won’t work. If your files are kept in the cloud and only streamed down when you play them — for example, iCloud Music Library with “Optimize Storage” turned on, or OneDrive/Google Drive files that show as online-only placeholders — GenreFix can’t reach them, because the real file isn’t actually on your machine.

Downloaded music works perfectly — including music from a cloud service. If your files are synced and downloaded to your computer so they live on your drive, GenreFix works on them just like any other local music. The only requirement is that the real audio file is physically present on the machine you’re using.

In short: if you can browse to the folder and see the actual music files, GenreFix can work with them. If your music only exists as a stream or an online-only placeholder, it can’t — because there’s nothing local for it to touch.

GenreFix handles two missing-tag cases automatically. If a track has no album tag, it is placed flat under the artist folder rather than inside an album subfolder — so it sits at Genre / Artist / track.mp3 instead of getting buried in an "Unknown Album" folder. If a track has no artist tag at all, it cannot be reliably classified or placed, so it is moved to a folder called aaaUnsorted at the root of your music library. The "aaa" prefix sorts it to the very top of your file listing so it is easy to find. Tracks in aaaUnsorted need manual attention — add an artist tag to those files and re-run the GenreFix Tagger to place them correctly.

Your results report shows exactly which copy was kept and which was moved for every duplicate set, along with the reason. If you disagree with a decision — for example, if Duplicate Finder kept a FLAC file but you prefer the MP3 version for compatibility reasons — you can simply move the files yourself. The !GenreFix Duplicates folder contains everything that was moved, so nothing has been lost.

Account and Billing

Yes. Each scan is treated as a separate job. If you have added music to your library since your last classification run, simply point GenreFix at your updated music folder and it will classify it. Artists already in our global cache are returned instantly, so only genuinely new artists require fresh classification work. Each run is priced based on the total track count of the folder scanned, not just the new tracks.

All sales are final. GenreFix provides detailed descriptions of what each tier includes before you purchase, and every classification comes with a plain-language explanation and a confidence level so you know exactly what you are getting. If you believe there is a technical error with your results — not a disagreement with a classification call, but an actual malfunction — contact us at hello@genrefix.net and we will investigate and work to resolve it.

No. GenreFix has no subscription and no recurring charges. You pay once per library processed. There is nothing to cancel, no renewal to worry about, and no need to remember to unsubscribe from anything.

Use the contact form on our Contact page, or email us directly at hello@genrefix.net. Include as much detail as possible about your issue — your account email, the job ID from your dashboard, and a description of what went wrong. We typically respond within one business day.

Still have questions?

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