I have this problem too. I find it completely useless to have tags like genre=Post Rock Jazz Fusion" or whatever with basically one band in each genre.

The other thing I've never quite got right is how to deal with classical music and popular music with multiple pressings. A lot of the tagging structure seems oriented around popular music with just one pressing. But I have like 10 different recordings of The Planets and several versions of Red Hot Chili Pepper's Californication, for example.

I assume lastgenre with canonicalization[0] enabled is what you need, along with count=1 if multiple genres are an issue.

[0] https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/lastgenre.htm...

I think I'm using that already.

Limiting to one genre I don't think will fix it - what I want is to define the allowable values for genre, and then limit to one.

It's probably better with the limit one though!

Set whitelist to a file path and then add a file with each genre that you want to keep on a new line. You can use the top-level genres in this file to base it off (except the whitelist isn't YAML, just a genre per line): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/beetbox/beets/master/beets...

Be sure to enable canonical so it converts the specific genres into their parent genre.

There's a whitelist option. Just read the docs, really, lastgenre is very configurable.

I use lastgenre plugin with a short whitelist.