Tagging Classical Music?

2004-03-13 15:24:46

I don't know if this has been discussed here before, and I don't really know what to search for, so here it goes.

Lately I've been ripping a lot of music from classical CDs of band literature and orchestra. One thing that I am wondering though is how does everyone tag their music? I absolutely hate the Various Artists tag because all my music goes on my iPod, so I like to have all my music under one Artist, since the way I store music on my PC and browse my iPod is Artist > Album > Song.

Now, please remember that the CDs I'm tagging are all recorded by the same person, just multiple pieces. For example, right now I'm ripping a CD where Dennis Brain plays a Mozart Horn Concerto, a Beethoven Sonata and then a Mozart Horn Duet. Each one of these has multiple movements, so one track's title will end up looking like this:

Beethoven Sonata for Horn and Piano: II. Poco Adagio. Allegro Molto

and that starts to get kinda long. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I should go about tagging my classical music like this? Please remember that I prefer to keep my music in the file structure of Artist > Album > Song without the use of Various Artists if possible, because after all, on a cd like I talked about above, the actual artist the same, just the composer is different.

Thanks for the help!

Tagging Classical Music?

Reply #1 – 2004-03-13 16:36:08

I don't know if this can help you, because my file structure is simply Composer (year birth - year death)> Opus [Artist]. For the problem you raise I go like this:

To keep it simple, let's consider for example a Maurizio Pollini recital cd, including Beethoven's last sonata and Boulez' second one. My first tagging is

CD Artist: Ludwig van Beethoven
CD Title: Sonata n. 32, op. 111 [Maurizio Pollini]

Title: I. Maestoso - Allegro con brio e appassionato    (track 1)
Title: II. Arietta. Adagio molto semplice e cantabile    (track 2)

.. and rip only this two tracks to its apposite folder. In this first ripping, EAC is considering this a cd of Beethoven's music, played by Pollini.  Then again, if we have a different opus from a different composer and / or ensemble, I change my tags accordingly before a second extraction of these tracks! e.g. the second

CD Artist: Pierre Boulez
CD Title: Deuxième Sonate pour piano [Maurizio Pollini]

Title: I. Extremement rapide                                    (track 3)
Title: II. Lent                                                          (track 4)
Title: III. Modéré, presque vif                                  (track 5)
Title: IV. Vif                                                            (track 6)

... so for this second rip EAC considers this a cd of Boulez' music. When playing them in Foobar, the only thing to change in its metadata is the # of the track. For their playing in your Ipod, you could insert a track number (1, 2...) before the title, like this: 1 - I. Extremement rapide..

Moreover, for your file structure you could reverse the tagging like this:

CD Artist: Maurizio Pollini
CD Title: Beethoven - Sonata op. 111
and
CD Artist: Maurizio Pollini
CD Title: Boulez - Deuxième Sonate

.. and so on...


Anyway, I know this has been discussed before, though not specific on classical music IIRC. Try a broader search in this section.

Tagging Classical Music?

Reply #2 – 2004-03-13 16:53:03

Wow! I had never though of that. That is an EXCELLENT idea. *heads off to iTunes to toy with fixing tags*

Thanks a whole bunch!!

Tagging Classical Music?

Reply #3 – 2004-03-13 20:04:52

I've got about 60 gigs of classical music ripped from my library so far.  I've totally given up trying to have ARTIST equal anything other than the composer's name.  But I'm composer centric, not artist centric, so this make sense to me. 

I'm storing my files with this scheme: genre\artist (i.e. composer)\album\trackno - title.

Essentially, this allows me to "encode" all tag info right in the pathnames of the files, themselves.  I can then use a mass tagging tool (I use MP3TagStudio) to retag multiple subdirectories and hundreds of files in a single pass.

This has worked well for me.  An example album would get stored like this:

f_German_Baroque\Bach, J S\Goldberg Variations BWV 988 - Leonhardt 1978\01 - Aria, Variations 1 - 15.mpg

f_German_Baroque\Bach, J S\Goldberg Variations BWV 988 - Leonhardt 1978\02 - Variations 16 - 30, Aria.mpg

In the above example, the "f_" prefix to the genre name is so I can keep my genre in some sort of chronological order, e.g my genre groupings begin with "a_Medieval" and "b_Renaissance" and go through "u_Post_Modern_ Aleatoric" and "v_Post_Modern_Minimalist".  This makes browsing by Genre on the iPod very easy.

I don't always keep album tracks stored together. I often split tracks into different folders as Treefingers suggested above.  Thus, my "o_Modern_Russian\Prokofiev, S\Piano Concertos" folder contains recordings of  3 of the 5 piano concertos, but by differing performers.  The individual tracks in that folder are named:

01 - Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra in Db, Op. 10 (1912) - 1 Allegro brioso.mp3
02 -  2 Andante assai.mp3
03 -  3 Allegro scherzando.mp3
04 - Concerto No. 3 for Piano and Orchestra in C, Op. 26 (1921) - 1 Andante; allegro.mp3
05 -  2  Andantino.mp3
06 -  3 Allegro ma non troppo.mp3
07 - Concerto No. 5 in G, Op. 55 (1932) - 1 Allegro con brio.mp3
08 -  2 Moderato ben accentuato.mp3
09 -  3 Toccata - Allegro con fuoco (piu presto che la prima volta).mp3
10 -  4 Larghetto.mp3
11 -  5 Vivo.mp3

With this scheme, browsing to a specific concerto on the iPod easy.  I also "indent" the subsidiary movements with two extra leading spaces in the title names.  I can't seem to get my post here to reflecdt that.  But again, this is an aid to browsing on the iPod. 

I usually encode fairly complete performer info into the comments tag field in each file.  You can't see it on the iPod, but on the computer, I can remind myself where a particular recording came from.

Sometimes, I include performer information in the album folder name and album tag: e.g.

"n_Modern_French\Debussy, C\Images et Études - Aimard"


Finally, if there is an album that contains works by various composers,  but I decide that I want to keep the tracks together (e.g. as a recital) then I have my ripping software (either EAC or Easy CD-DA) write the files out in this scheme:
genre\Various\trackno - Composer Name--Title.ext. 
I then use my tagging software to set all the artist tags equal to "Various" and set the Composer tag to the real composer name.

Tagging Classical Music?

Reply #4 – 2004-03-13 23:54:11

Intresting, I'd toy around with that, the problem is that i don't ONLY listen to classical music, so I want to stick to the artist based way of thinking. I might think about re-tagging all my classical music by composer though. It seems to make sense more and more in my head.