Audacity Forum

Dear Audacity developers,

when I just wanted to export my recordings with Audacity and was looking through the genre drop down window, I found the item "Negerpunk" listed in there.

I have to complain about this because:

1. Negerpunk is not a genre at all. It's just an unsophisticated derogatory word "describing" the actual genre of world music.

2. The word itself is racist (Neger = German for nigger) and socially discriminating (punk for expressing it's supposedly poor quality).

Therefore I ask the Audacity developers to remove that item from the list as fast as possible.


Thank you!

This is one of the reasons that Audacity doesn't come with an MP3 encoder.

Audacity can use the "lame" open source software MP3 encoder, but you don't have to use lame if you don't choose to. The default Audacity install comes with no MP3 software, but it does have a note suggesting that the customer can install lame later as a separate event.

The genre list comes with MP3 and is originally generated by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft who holds the licenses for MPEG1, Level III (MP3).

Because of this arrangement, all MP3 encoders get the same list. You can address your concerns to Fraunhofer. MP3 users all over the world will probably agree with you.

Koz

From Wikipedia:

Negerpunk is a musical genre tag listed in modern music player software such as XMMS and Easytag. It was not included in Eric Kemp's original 80 genres for ID3, but was added by Nullsoft as number 133 in their extended version. Negerpunk is German, Dutch and Scandinavian for "Negro punk" (a not known genre) and appears to have been added as a joke by the developers.

Not much of a joke given the racist intent, but there you have it. Personally I've always avoided adding genre to MP3 tags - quite a few of them really are funny, particularly when they apparently represent a real genre.

Hmm I'm not sure if it's correct the encoder adds these, or that Fraunhofer are responsible. ID3 was added onto MP3 after it was invented. Truer to say that most MP3 encoding software just uses the current Nullsoft genre list? In Audacity Beta the genre list can be edited, so you can get rid of any you don't want to see in there.

Gale

Thanks for that tip Gale - I didn't realize you could do that in 1.3

WC

Bit more: Koz is partly correct insofar as we have no control over the list where imported tags are ID3v1 - there the tag data is actually just a number that refers to a predefined list. But ID3v2 is more flexible and can store real names, hence the Beta (where the exported tags are always ID3v2) lets you edit the Genre list. As "Negerpunk" has been the subject of repeated complaints to us, it's now been removed from the editable genre list in the Beta Metadata Editor, so anyone installing the Beta who has never run it before won't see "Negerpunk" in the list.

Gale