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Topic: Tagging Classical Music (Read 42638 times) previous topic - next topic
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Tagging Classical Music

I have found lots of guides and suggestions. I have looked at what comes out of MusicBrainz and what is stored by dBPowerAmp. I have found several HA threads.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=92049
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....showtopic=85808
https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Classical_Music_FAQ
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Begi...de_To_Classical

I don't have that many classical CDs, but already it's a mess.


Half the people who express a preference suggest storing the composer in the ARTIST tag. This makes sense to me. Most tools are written for pop music. In pop music, the artist is usually the most important thing. In classical music, the composer is usually the most important thing. Sticking the composer only in the COMPOSER tag means your collection is nearly useless on many devices. Not good. Hence artist = composer. Works fine for track artist, and works no worse or better for album artist than the comparable situation in pop music. Fair enough.

There's also a fairly common suggest to store the "work" in the ALBUM tag. Otherwise it can be more difficult than it needs to be to find a particular Piano Concerto (for example). So, for example, this CD...
http://www.allmusic.com/album/just-listen-mw0001857084
...becomes two "albums", one a Tchaikovsky concerto, another a Sibelius concerto. I'd store them in a single folder under the original CD title, but tag-wise they would be two albums. Hmm - not 100% sure about this. Some things use consistent album tags for album grouping - won't this approach break that?

Then you hit one or two obvious problems: if the artist is now the composer, and the album is now the work, where do you store the actual artist and the actual album name?

You also hit some subtle problems: follow the above with classical compilation albums (e.g. http://musicbrainz.org/release/c4014398-4e...3f-22c0c4b820fd ), and you'll have a lot of single track "albums" of bits of works. Don't follow it, and you can never easily find those bits of works.


I like solutions that work both with Vorbis Comments tags and ID3V2.3 tags. I like solutions that let me dynamically generate the folder+file names I want solely from the tags. I like solutions that work well in rockbox, in fb2k, and via dumb DLNA servers. All that said, I like easy solutions that can be automated.

I usually use my music by browsing folders/files, and only use proper tag-based searching to finding something non-obvious (e.g. a track which is on some unremembered compilation album).

Has anyone got any insights into all of this?

Cheers,
David.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #1 –
Well, I have pondered on this one as well and my requesitions match yours pretty well.

Here is what I do:

Artist: Composer's last name (Mozart)
Album Artist: Performing Orchestra or the conductor, whichever is more important (Berliner Philharmoniker) or (Karajan, Herbert)
Album: Composer's last name - Album title (Mozart - Overtueres)
Composer: Composer's full name (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus)
Title: Full identification of the work (KV 348, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Act 1 - I. Overtuere)
Comment: Any further notes on Solists, conductor or orchestra (if not mentioned in the artist tag), choirs etc.

The files are named: ARTIST - TITLE (Mozart - KV 348, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Act 1 - I. Overtuere.flac)
Now it may become obvious why I am using only the composer's last name in the Artist tag - I want to avoid the file names from becoming too long.

So, where does this get me?

If I have a server or a device that supports the composer tag, I am obviously well prepared. The composer tag is populated.
If this is not the case, I can still look for the works of a particular composer by browsing the albums.
If I want to look for a certain work, I will have to use the search function. What helps here is the fact that I have included the catalouge no. of the work in the title tag. So even if the title is stored in a different language (Entführung aus dem Serail vs. The Abduction from the Seraglio) I will still be able to identify it unambiguously.

Hope this helps.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #2 –
I have quite a lot of classical music in my collection, and I tag them in the 'old-style Musicbrainz' way. http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/History:Classical_Style_Guide

For example, I have a recording of Gustav Holsts the Planets. As 'a bonus', there is a piece of Ligeti added as well. The first few parts are tagged like this
ARTIST = Gustav Holst
ALBUMARTIST = Gustav Holst
TRACK = The Planets: Mars, The Bringer of War
ALBUM = The Planets / Lux Aeterna (Boston Symphony Orchestra feat. conductor: Willian Steinberg)

The last work on the album is like this
ARTIST = György Ligeti
ALBUMARTIST = Gustav Holst
TRACK = Lux aeterna
ALBUM = The Planets / Lux Aeterna (Boston Symphony Orchestra feat. conductor: Willian Steinberg)

So, the artist-tag holds the name of the composer, the album holds the name of the works and the performer, the track holds the name of the (current) work and the part of it. However, it not always that clean cut. I have a few promotional CDs with recordings from different CDs. These are tagged like this
ARTIST = Antonio Vivaldi
ALBUMARTIST = Various
TRACK = Concert in g, RV 577
ALBUM = Jonge Mensen In Concert 1989
In this instance, I didn't add the performer, but I would add them to the track name like TRACK = Concert in g, RV 577 (Orchestra A feat. conductor: B)

Finally, as if this wasn't bad enough, some pieces are divided into parts. For example, I have a CD with recordings of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Petroushka. In that case, I get something like this
ARTIST = Igor Stravinsky
ALBUMARTIST = Igor Stravinsky
TRACK = Le Sacre du printemps, Part I, L'Adoration de la terre: Les augures prinaniers. Danses des adolescentes
ALBUM = Le Sacre du printemps / Pétrouchka (Isreal Philharmonic Orchestra feat. conductor: Leonard Bernstein)

So, as there are two works on this CD, the trackname holds the name of the work, the partnumber, name of the part (L'Adoration de la terre) and the name of the 'track', which in this case is two different 'pieces' in the score, Les augures prinaniers and Danses des adolescentes. Names can get really long this way.
Music: sounds arranged such that they construct feelings.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #3 –
I don’t share the pessimism about the composer tag.
Support is growing but I agree, one has to pick one’s media player carefully.
In my case, JRiver on Win and UPnPlay on the Android phone both support it.

Most players do support both Artist and Album Artist.
You can use one for composer and the other for performers.
Often only one support multiple values and the other not. Use the latter for the composer.

Keep all the tracks of 1 CD in one folder.
Be careful not to break it.
Especially when you use Album for composition you might have a hell of a time to locate missing tracks or do an internet database lookup.
If you don’t have the artwork embedded, moving files around might destroy the relationship with cover.jpg etc.

In the past I put Composition in Album.
Use a media player supporting custom tags and make sure these tags are stored in the file as well. This allows you to create a custom tag like AlbumOriginal.
This requires a media player allowing you to customize the interface.

Today I use custom tags for Composition, Opus/catalog and Year of the composition.
On the portable I take the Album for granted.

Tagging classical is a big job.
I use MusiCHI tagger almost exclusively for tagging classical.
It offers all kind of tricks to parse the in general unstructured mess of the internet databases (not to mention the downloads of record companies).
Its reference database is a big help.

I compared a couple of media player from the perspective of classical. Maybe this link is of use: http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/TG/MediaPlayer.html

A bit about the MusiCHI tagger can be found here: http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Play.../CHI_Tagger.htm

Best of course is to listen to pop music only, then you don’t have this problem
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #4 –
I'm very interested in how you tagg classical music.
At the moment, for example for Beethoven piano concerto, op. 61 I have a few cd, some of them with different composers which title is (for example) best of Beethoven/Chopin concertos.
So, I separated each composer in a folder, I change the album title and each interpreter is in a different folder.
Tags:
Artist name: Daniel Barenboim (pno)
Album title: Beethoven: Cto pour piano en ré majeur, op. 61
Composer: Beethoven (Ludwig Van)
Performer: Daniel Barenboim (pno)
Conductor: Daniel Barenboim (English chamber orch.)
Album Artist: Beethoven (Ludwig Van)

The same for other performers.

More difficult is for opera. In this case artist name is Giuseppe Verdi
Album title: Rigoletto - (P. Domingo, P. Cappuccilli, I. Cotrubas)
Composer: Giuseppe Verdi
Performer: Plácido Domingo (ténor); Nikolaï Ghiaourov (basse); Piero Cappuccilli (baryton)
Conductor: Carlo Maria Giulini (Wiener symphonik)
Album artist: Giuseppe Verdi

in each track there is the performer(s).
With Foobar I find it very easy to find by composer, performer, album title or track.

But if I search on music into server Synology, it is not so easy and I should change the tags.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #5 –
If you are a foobar2000 user, I think this post of mine from Apr 20 is worth a look, here [hydrogenaudio.org]

As you can see at that post, I insert the "full work title with track title" as string value  of each Track Title tag.
This may be a more tedious approach, but you get multiple advantages:
— You have the luxury of creating advanced display features if using foobar2000 or any other player which can do the same things.
— If you drag the files into a music player which is not like foobar2000, at least you can identify the work by looking at the track title albeit the string may be long.

Personally, I don't think it is possible to have an automatic generic one-click one-size-fits-all solution which can help curate a perfect digital classical collection on a computer.
File naming is a very personal and eclectic thing. Tagging is the same. Same goes for display preferences in the player.

My advice to anybody wanting the perfect presentation system for playback of a digital Classical collection using computers would be this:

— Create a folder at the root of the hard drive using a minimum of text characters ( eg: 'C:\Music (Classical)\<Album Names>\<File Names>' )
    because file name strings may be very long and Windows has a 255 char path length limit.

— Make a portable installation of foobar2000, and copy its directory to here:  'C:\Music (Classical)\foobar2000\'  and make a shortcut to foobar2000.exe on your Desktop

— Configure the foobar2000 Media Library ..... add this path:  'C:\Music (Classical)'  and it will end up being monitored as this relative path:  '..\Music (Classical)'

— Customize this foobar2000 installation to present Classical music ONLY ... ie, do not use this foobar2000 for presenting any other genre of music,
    and create a tagging system for yourself using the advanced tagging and formatting and display features built into foobar2000 (with a selection of third-party components, see my other post).

— I have no idea how in the world it is possible to do all this in any other music player (including the stuff I mentioned at the other post) .....does DeadBeef (Linux) allow all this?

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #6 –
I usually do this:
Artist Name : Royal Concertgebouw, Haitink
Track Title : Op. 67 Movement I - Allegro con brio
Album Title : Beethoven, Symphony No. 5
Date : 1987

or for a collection of works, like this:
Artist Name : Kronos Quartet
Track Title : Arvo Part - Fratres
Album Title : 25 Years Disc 1 - John Adams, Arvo Part
Date : 1998

I put performers & conductor in Artist tag, composer and work/collection title in Album tag, and opus/catalog number with movement title (and composer if necessary).
I avoid Genre, Composer, Performer, and Album Artist tags.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #7 –
I appreciate all this advice (though some of it will take some time and several re-reads to sink in), but I should add that I'm very wary of being tied to one player, wary of long filenames, and quite wary of long tags. I don't mind a non-standard overall solution, but it's got to be reasonably portable, and the standard part of it has got to be useful.

I don't think I can leave most of the information only in the TITLEs. If I'm looking for a particular Mozart Piano Concerto, that means going to Mozart, then having a list of every single movement/part to trawl through. I feel the fact it's Piano Concerto No.23 (recorded by whoever, where I have multiple versions) needs to be at a higher level. Having the name of the entire work at a higher level than the track TITLE is even more important when the work consists of 10-50 tracks (as some do, across multiple CDs).


The MusiCHI tagger pages took me to their blogs...
http://blog.musichi.eu/
http://blog.musichi.eu/post/2874852211/the...rt1-the-anatomy
etc
...some good advice there too, but on first reading I spotted a couple of places where they too casually suggest that you can ignore certain standards.


btw, several places suggest using ALBUMARTIST for orchestra (which mapped into the ID3v2.3 world just restores TPE2 back to its original meaning), but won't that cause problems on a disc with different performers in SW that interprets ALBUMARTIST in the modern (iTunes) way? Might still be the least bad option.

Another btw: I've seen some good and well organised data in MusicBrainz (though in tying into the spirit of the original release they swap between artist=composer and artist=really important soloist or orchestra in a way that can confuse someone/something trying to grab the data automatically - I bet there are ways around that though) BUT on some releases (website lookup and dBpowerAMP lookup) the entries are in the original language of the composer, rather than the original language of the CD issue. I can live with that for German composers, but getting data for tracks by Russian composers back in a Cyrillic alphabet is pretty hopeless for me. Am I missing some kind of language selection somewhere?

Cheers,
David.

P.S. EDIT derty2, I have thought about storing all the proper information in (mostly) custom tags like that, and then populating the regular tags in a least-bad way that works across other players. It's that second part that's a bigger challenge (I think).

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #8 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
I appreciate all this advice ....

btw, several places suggest using ALBUMARTIST for orchestra (which mapped into the ID3v2.3 world just restores TPE2 back to its original meaning), but won't that cause problems on a disc with different performers in SW that interprets ALBUMARTIST in the modern (iTunes) way? Might still be the least bad option.

......


ALBUM ARTIST should always contain the Sorting critereon which you would apply if you were sorting physical CD's or vinyl. This applies to both popular and classical music. So for classical it should indeed be filled with the performing orchestra (maybe + the conductor). If you have several orchestras on one album this tag will become "Various Artists".

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #9 –
My system is as follows:

ARTIST = Beethoven
ALBUMARTIST = Beethoven
ALBUM = Symphonies - Harnoncourt
TITLE = Symphony No.2 - I. Adagio molto - Allegro con brio
COMMENT = Chamber Orchestra of Europe - Nikolaus Harnoncourt

If I have the same work by the same conductor, (in this case Herreweghe recorded Bach motets twice, in 1985 and in 2011) then it is as follows:

ARTIST = Bach
ALBUMARTIST = Bach
ALBUM = Motets - Herreweghe (1985)
TITLE = Jesu meine Freude
COMMENT = La Chapelle Royale, Collegium Vocale Gent, Orchestra of the Chapelle Royale - Philippe Herreweghe

Though the actual performers which I put into the COMMENT tag could go to the PERFORMER tag.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Blaubaer on
ALBUM ARTIST should always contain the Sorting critereon which you would apply if you were sorting physical CD's or vynil. ... So for classical it should indeed be filled with the performing orchestra (maybe + the conductor).


I agree with your first sentence, but disagree with the second. Yes ALBUMARTIST should be the criterion you sort CDs.
I doubt, however, that anyone wanted to sort his collection by orchestra: Berlin PO, Chicago SO, London SO, Vienna PO etc., rather they would do by the composer (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler etc.) And I don't think most people would choose a Mahler symphony on the basis of the orchestra playing it, rather they would choose it on the basis of who is conducting.
This applies, however, to mainstream orchestral music.
Opera recordings, or recordings of earlier music (Baroque and earlier) might, however, need a different treatment.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #11 –
Quote from: testyou on
I usually do this:
Artist Name : Royal Concertgebouw, Haitink
Track Title : Op. 67 Movement I - Allegro con brio
Album Title : Beethoven, Symphony No. 5
Date : 1987


Well, if this works for you, then all right. This system has a weak point, it produces a very large number of albums.
E.g. I have two two-disc albums containing Haydn's symphonies 82-92 directed by Sigiswald Kuijken.
In your system this would yield two Artists, since the performing orchestra is not the same:
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, S. Kuijken, and La Petite Bande, S. Kuijken.
Then within the first artist it would create 6 albums, for the second 5, so 11 albums altogether.

In my system there is only one Artist: Haydn, and only one album: Symphonies - Kuijken.
I, however, need to give proper Track Numbers to the pieces, and then I have
Symphony 82 - I. Vivace assai
...
Symphony 92 - IV. Presto

But as I said, for everyone what works for him/her.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #12 –
This is a black-box topic.
I am getting the impression that this topic is useless without a standard definition of the interface.
Every exercise after my previous post is attempting to describe presentation of strings in an undefined interface whose features are unknown to the observer.

If foobar2000 was specified as the interface, then every tagging preference so far described, can be configured to a custom level for perfect display in various ways.
If the poster's do not specify which audio player is processing these tags, and what are its capabilities and limitations, then describing string choices in tags is a very narrow exercise.

For me, this topic is shedding light on something else, namely the massive chasm in features between different audio players and the different levels of ignorance which come from that.

Logically, if you were given software whose interface was 100% customizable, if you could input, process and output strings any way you wanted, and the player allowed you to have total control of the display paradigm, then with such a software you will always fundamentally be right with your tagging at any point in time of your judgemental exercise of presenting infinite possibilities onto the 2-dimensional space of a computer monitor.

There is no wrong way in such a system because the longer you use it the more insightful things become. This is just like life itself.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #13 –
Quote from: derty2 on
This is a black-box topic.
For me, this topic is shedding light on something else, namely the massive chasm in features between different audio players and the different levels of ignorance which come from that.


Completely correct.
Media players differs tremendously in functionality.
Most of them are rather limited (iTunes, WMP) and already people are struggling.
Others can be configured like JRiver, Foobar

A simple problem is long titles, very common in classical as most of the time it is a description.
Took me considerable time to find a media player on my phone able to render long titles correctly.

Another obvious one is that our needs are different.
I like to have a tag Opus/catalog simply because it allows me to check for (in)completeness of my collection.
It is also a very powerful way to normalize the compositions.
As they come different sources, they are spelled different but in general the opus or catalog is always spelled the same. Well at least the number because one will encounter Op 4, Op.4, op 4, etc
But that is me.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #14 –
Quote from: derty2 on
This is a black-box topic.
I know you can do whatever you like with flexible SW (e.g. fb2k) and flexible tagging (Vorbis comments or TXXX fields), but I also mentioned rockbox and dumb DNLA servers. That bounds the problem considerably. To be clear, these usually allow browsing by folder structure, artist, album title, track title, and sometimes genre, date, album artist and composer too (in descending order of likelihood IME). You can often search by these fields too.

Quote from: Blaubaer on
ALBUM ARTIST should always contain the Sorting critereon which you would apply if you were sorting physical CD's or vinyl.
I've generally followed this so far (even abusing it sometimes), but agree with imre_herceg's reply to you: for classical, this would mean it contains the composer, bringing us back to the problem of where to put the soloist and orchestra. The involved people list sound like a reasonable solution, but I wonder how useful I'd find it.

It's dismaying how much work this all is!

btw, thanks for TheWellTemperedComputer.com Roseval. I know you clearly prefer some players of others, and some of the reviews are for slightly older versions, but it's still extremely useful. You didn't mention under VLC that it can sometimes re-pitches music in a rather horrible way.

Cheers,
David.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #15 –
Hi David

Some parts of the my website are a bit dated indeed.
Don’t have the time to keep it up to date

Thanks for the kind words.

DLNA
Indeed forget custom tags.
The only one I know taking care of classical is MininServer (http://minimserver.com/ )
It displays composer, composition, genre, conductor, orchestra and soloists.

Quote
It's dismaying how much work this all is!

Yep
I once started with Movements.
Halfway I give up, too much effort.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #16 –
I've got "composers" working in Servio - but anyone who thinks that single step is useful hasn't got a pop music collection which contains hundreds of tracks with hundreds of different composers!

I'm almost thinking about putting ~C before the classical composer stored in the ARTIST tag just to get classical composers sorted together in the artist list. Almost everything I've ever used will happily jump to the end of a list by one click "up", so "~" is a convenient hack to sort last and therefore easy to find.

Cheers,
David.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #17 –
That is a problem I encountered too when using streaming.
In case of direct playback (PC > DAC)  I solved it by making different views in JRiver (Classical, Pop, Jazz, Blues).
You can’t do this in case of DLNA.

An option is to reverse the whole recommendation.
In case of pop put the composer in the Artist tag and clear the composer tag in this case.

Another option is to use the album tag for recorded compositions so
Composer: composition - performer
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #18 –
I guess I really want to know if anyone else has abused the album tag (and therefore created much smaller "albums"), and whether it's caused them any problems.

If anyone knows how to make all music brainz results english, that would also be helpful.

Cheers,
David.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #19 –
If you want to do a look up against an internet database of a CD you have a problem if you don't submit the entire CD.
If you keep all the tracks in a single folder you probably can circumnavigate this problem

If you push it to far e.g. each 450 Schubert Lied, each sonata by Scarlatti become an "album" you get a bit cluttered interface.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #20 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
I guess I really want to know if anyone else has abused the album tag (and therefore created much smaller "albums"), and whether it's caused them any problems.
If by “[abuse] the album tag” you mean tagging each work as an album rather than each CD as an album, I do this.

Rationale: So what if (say) two concertos came on the same CD?  Why do I care?  For example, I have a CD of Stephen Kovacevich playing both Schumann's and Grieg's piano concertos, yet I don't feel a great need, after listening to one, to listen to the other.  What, then, do I gain, by keeping them together?

In all, I'm very, very happy with the result of making each work its own “album”.  The hierarchy looks roughly like this:
Code: [Select]
Dvořák, Antonín
        12 Silhouettes [Poroshina]
        A Hero's Song [JPO: Kuchar]
        Album Leaf B. 158 [Poroshina]
        American Suite [Poroshina]
        American Suite [RuPO: Yablonsky]
.. and so on.  Instead of:
Code: [Select]
Dvořák, Antonín
        Solo Piano Works Vol. 1 [Poroshina]
                Theme and Variations: Theme
                Theme and Variations: Variation 1
                ...
                Polka for piano B. 3
                12 Silhouettes: 1. Allegro fuoco
                12 Silhouettes: 2. Andantino
                ...
        Solo Piano Works Vol. 2 [Poroshina]
                Two Furiants: No. 1
                Two Furiants: No. 2
                Eight Waltzes: No 1
                ...
                Four Ecologues: No. 1
                ...
        Tone Poems [JPO: Kuchar]
                A Hero's Song
                The Wood Dove
                ...
To me, the second gets very unwieldy.  If I'm doing a search, it's less of a problem, but if I'm scanning my album list, I can't just see, at a glance, what's available.  In the first scheme, “12 Silhouettes” is just one entry (with 12 tracks that need not be expanded), whereas in the second scheme, you need to see all 12 entries if you're going to see anything, unless you just happen to remember that the 12 Silhouettes are in "Piano Works Vol. 1".

The hardest part was convincing myself that I didn't need to know that two works came from the same album.  But since the switch, I have never needed that information.  Worse comes to worst I still have the CDs packed away somewhere.

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #21 –
Dear All,

this is all very interesting. I would say this is not only a matter of how well organized is your media drive, how fast you find things, but it's also about how compatible you are with various technologies and how quickly you can adapt to new ones.

As safeguard I include composer, orchestra, soloits as vorbis tags. It is not important  that most players won't get them, but you noted it. By the way,  that there is growing number of players that allows to set/read custom tags, and most media managers allows for bacth operations on a huge number of files. In the near future, when needed, you can always bacth over the collection  to adapt your cataloging to new techs.

I go a bit further. Dreaming a time where I connect to some server and I get all information about the precise release of record I own (Discogs is almost there), I also store catalog and barcode tags. Again most player don't support it... now, but in the future you don't know. I think these are important, because is the unique way to define a robust one-to-one identifier that matches 100% sure what you have in your hard drive with what was realed. Sometimes I own three releases of the same record because different masterings sound different.

Nice guide to identifiers:
http://www.discogs.com/help/quick-start-gu...elCatalogNumber



Although I put a lot of effort in this, I rather pessimistic anything will work! I think we'll never find a solution and in we are condammned to confusion. From a collector viewpoint there is a need for  standards, but this need to be imposed by a panel... otherwise there always be somebody doing it "better". Unfortunatley there is no interest in high quality standards, becasue the music business look at teens whom  usually have a "buy-listen-and-forget" attitude, the majority of them  just don't care about cataloging, knowing and understanding.

Best
Pasqualino

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #22 –
I'd share my view of the "Black Box Art" with a cuesheet in a folder called "q:\Music\Classical\Rostropovich plays Cello Works (Warner)". I use Foobar2000 only.

Code: [Select]
REM GENRE Classical
TITLE "Mstislav Rostropovich plays Cello Works"
REM REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN +1.93 dB
REM REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK 0.999969
FILE "cd5.lossy.flac" WAVE
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "André Jolivet: Cello Concerto No 2 - 1. Allant - Vivement - Cadence"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); Orchestre National de l'ORTF / André Jolivet"
    REM DATE 1969-04
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN -0.94 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.999969
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "André Jolivet: Cello Concerto No 2 - 2. Aria -"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); Orchestre National de l'ORTF / André Jolivet"
    REM DATE 1969-04
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN -0.07 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.972351
    INDEX 01 15:39:60
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "André Jolivet: Cello Concerto No 2 - 3. Animé"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); Orchestre National de l'ORTF / André Jolivet"
    REM DATE 1969-04
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN -1.49 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.995941
    INDEX 01 19:33:59
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No 1 in E-flat, Op 197 - 1. Allegretto"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); London Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa"
    REM DATE 1987-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +4.45 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.807404
    INDEX 00 21:37:04
    INDEX 01 21:40:63
  TRACK 05 AUDIO
    TITLE "Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No 1 in E-flat, Op 197 - 2. Moderato"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); London Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa"
    REM DATE 1987-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +6.59 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.822571
    INDEX 00 28:01:64
    INDEX 01 28:03:03
  TRACK 06 AUDIO
    TITLE "Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No 1 in E-flat, Op 197 - 3. Cadenza"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); London Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa"
    REM DATE 1987-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +8.63 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.396423
    INDEX 01 38:02:08
  TRACK 07 AUDIO
    TITLE "Shostakovich: Cello Concerto No 1 in E-flat, Op 197 - 4. Allegro con moto"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); London Symphony Orchestra / Seiji Ozawa"
    REM DATE 1987-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +3.02 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.963257
    INDEX 01 43:05:71
  TRACK 08 AUDIO
    TITLE "Norbert Moret: Cello Concerto - 1. Chanson pour passer le temps"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); Collegium Musicum de Zurich / Paul Sacher"
    REM DATE 1989-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +4.48 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.962830
    INDEX 00 47:45:28
    INDEX 01 47:50:62
  TRACK 09 AUDIO
    TITLE "Norbert Moret: Cello Concerto - 2. Chanson d'amour"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); Collegium Musicum de Zurich / Paul Sacher"
    REM DATE 1989-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +8.07 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.561310
    INDEX 00 56:52:59
    INDEX 01 56:54:66
  TRACK 10 AUDIO
    TITLE "Norbert Moret: Cello Concerto - 3. Chanson du vent d'ouest"
    PERFORMER "Mstislav Rostropovich (vc); Collegium Musicum de Zurich / Paul Sacher"
    REM DATE 1989-11
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN +5.08 dB
    REM REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK 0.604279
    INDEX 00 65:32:42
    INDEX 01 65:35:63

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #23 –

(Of course, if you are so inclined, you could make a separate tag for the "album" title, but I prefer putting the catalog # in the label tag over going with album titles.)

Addendum: all of the (quasi-)official tagging formats that I've seen are terrible or stupid, and they encourage you to throw away or not include (potentially) useful information. As such, I've just developed my own system. I stream using foobar. (~40k tracks, 26 weeks.)

Tagging Classical Music

Reply #24 –
Bit surprised Work Title is "String Quartet No.12" only
There are some many composers having a string quartet no.12
Why did you leave out tonality and Opus/catalog?
Curious to know.
TheWellTemperedComputer.com