I would love to see the instrument tuning information stored in the metadata for a song.

The primary benefit of having this information is being able to create playlists to jam along by selecting songs that match the tuning of my instrument.

Especially in Rock/Metal and the plethora of the subgenres they contain, many if not most songs do not use the classic guitar tuning (EADGBE) for the electric guitars (and basses).

The guitars vary in number of strings and length of scale which leads to a plethora of possible tunings.

The only currently ongoing effort in this direction I found is this:

https://gtdb.org/

I intend to tag my library with the tuning and was wondering if there is a broader interest by the community to have this information in a well standardized form so eventually apps could support it as well.

The simplest form would be to add a field to write a well formatted string into. My proposal would be to make it quite explicit and build on the scientific pitch notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_pitch_notation)

•  E2 - A2 - D3 - G3 - B3 - E4 (Standard)
• C#2 - G#2 - C#3 - F#3 - A# - D#4 (Drop C#)
• A1 - E2 - A2 - D3 - G3 - B3 - E4 (Drop A - 7 String)

Each note defines how a string is tuned, the order matches the strings, the number of notes matches the number of strings. Here I used " - " as the separator. This is applicable to other string instruments:

• G4 - D3 - G3 - B3 - D4 (Banjo, Open G)
• G4 - C4 - E4 - A4 (Ukulele)
• E1 - A1 - D2 - G2 (Bass)
• G3 - D4 - A4 - E5 (Violin)

Technically, one would also need a reference tone to fully define the notes (normally A4=440Hz). But this is another thing completely and probably a separate issue.

I would like to start a discussion on this topic to feel out if there is a general interest in having this information or if it is just me.