We play on metal pads and most of my social group aren't high-level players. I'd like to discuss song library management in the context of playing SM socially with people who aren't 'SM / DDR nerds'. Many of us here have fairly large SM song libraries. I have about 5000 songs installed, for example, and that probably isn't even close to some of the larger collections people on this site have. This presents a problem when it comes to social gaming with non-SM nerds: The 'typical' non-nerd will tend to gravitate towards wanting to play songs that they know from 'real life'.

Even I, as a semi-SM-nerd, enjoys playing songs that I know outside of Stepmania. Why is this a problem? It's because of how song library managment is handled in Stepmania. For a party setting, it takes way too long to flip through thousands of songs, browsing for something you recognize. I've personally made a point of keeping as many songs as possible that I've found in packs which are relatively 'mainstream' or 'normal' music that an everyday person may know because these are the kinds of songs that non-SM nerds tend to gravitate towards. The problem is finding them in a sea of obscure remixes to also obscure songs, anime themes, hardcore techno, K-pop, etc. that one typically finds in SM song packs. Casual players, as far as I've ever seen, don't hear a random song on SM and think 'oh, that sounds cool, I'll play it'. They say to themselves 'I don't know this. I'm going to look for something I've heard of'. With large collections, that's an absolute nightmare. The #GENRE tag is, in theory, a fantastic tool for solving this problem. The issue? Almost nobody who releases a song pack USES this tag and it didn't even always exist for Stepmania - the older packs can't use it without converting their. ssc files.one song at a time! The event hoster would need to #GENRE tag every song in their collection manually, which is extremely tedious. I can't even fathom how long that would take to tag. I actually just finished manually-tagging all 5000 of my songs. One thing that would make the #GENRE tag more practical to use for managing large libraries would be to allow players to edit the #GENRE tag right on the song wheel. By pressing some key combination, a 'edit #GENRE tag' option could pop up.

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