Hello, and welcome.

I was once a musician. I never went on to play professionally, but I never lost my love for it either. Over the years I amassed a large electronic music collection — one I was constantly fussing over, always doing this or that to get it just right.

Then, a few years ago, I lost it all to a faulty hard drive. All of it. Gone.

As I set about rebuilding my collection (big thanks to Carol, Greg, and a few others who came to the rescue), I ran headfirst into a problem that had always frustrated me and occupied an immense amount of my time: the metadata baked into these files — the information that's supposed to describe the music — was, at best, wildly inconsistent. And the genre tags, which matter to me more than almost anything, were worse than inconsistent. They were marketing. They told me nothing real about the music itself.

Take "Easy Listening". What is that? If it's Barry Manilow, some people find him "Easy" — and others find him "Painful". So, what does "Easy Listening" actually mean? Nobody knows. (And I'm not dumping on Barry; for the record I'm a Fanilow.)

That frustration sent me down a long road — years of evaluating, analyzing, and organizing music, not by what a record label decided to call it, but by what it actually is. By listening for the real architecture underneath a piece of music: its structure, its bones, the elements that genuinely define it. That discipline became a system I call The Structural Ear℠.

Here's the idea. Under The Structural Ear℠, every piece of music lives in a category — and almost all of them will be familiar to you: Rock, Classical, Folk, World, Blues, Jazz, and the rest. Those are the top-level classifications, the neighborhoods. But the real work — and the real magic — happens within them. Because "Rock" tells you almost nothing. Is it the driving architecture of Classic rock, the angular nervousness of New Wave, the wall of Hard Rock, the sprawl of Progressive? Those are different musical worlds, and a single word, like "Rock", flattens them into nothing. The Structural Ear℠ hears the difference, and it files each piece where it truly belongs — by how the music is built, not by how it was once sold.

I believe The Structural Ear℠ is the most comprehensive and accurate method for organizing music available today. And I don't say that lightly: it blows away Spotify, Apple Music, and all the rest — because they're still handing you the marketing label, and I'm handing you the truth about the music.

So, here's what GenreFix does for you. It takes The Structural Ear℠ and points it at your collection. It listens to what you actually have, classifies every track by its real structure, and writes clean, meaningful, consistent genre information straight into your files. The zillions of hours it would take to pour over a whole library by hand, correcting tag after tag after tag — GenreFix will do it for you with minimal effort and minimal investment.

And once your music is organized the way it was always meant to be, everything downstream gets better: sorting, searching, building playlists, discovering what you'd forgotten you owned, and — most of all — simply enjoying it.

I built GenreFix to be genuinely useful and a great experience for everyone who uses it — but so far, I've only ever seen it through one person's eyes: my own. That's a real limitation, and I know it. So, I want your feedback, and I welcome it. Tell me what works, what doesn't, what's missing, what would make this better for the way you live with your music. I'm already working on new ideas to expand what GenreFix can do — one of the first is finally getting rid of that useless "Various Artists" tag and putting the real performer back where it belongs. But the best ideas are going to come from you.

Before we begin, one acknowledgment. The artwork on the landing page is "Rainbow Symphony," by Paul Laoria, and I can't think of anything more fitting for this website. Painting and music are both genres of Art itself — and here is the chaos and abstraction of sound, taken up by an artist and neatly organized into something we recognize and love. That is exactly what The Structural Ear℠ sets out to do with your collection. Paul was generous enough to let me feature his work here, and I'm grateful. You can see more of it at laoria.com.

So let's get to work. Let's clean up your metadata, let's clear out the clutter of duplicates, and let's fix your genres.