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Topic: Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001 (Read 5903 times) previous topic - next topic
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Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Another issue that comes up is what to put in the Album and Album Artist fields for singles. For example, if singles have data populated in the Album field, then when displaying music by Album in whatever software one uses (i.e. XBMC) then you get a lot of "Albums" displayed that when drilled down into, only actually contain one song, which is a bit annoying. So what I tend to do now is fill Album and Album Artist with "Single" for singles/non-album tracks and then at least they're all grouped together when displaying by either field.

Then again, it can be nice to be able to look up which Album a particular single was originally from, even if you don't want to show this in your Media Player, so perhaps it's a good idea to enter/move any Album data into the Comments field so at least it's available but of course, there may be something else that I haven't come across yet that also might need to use this field.

I haven't found a quick and reliable way of automatically filling in the Year for singles yet and it's too long-winded trying to look this information up and enter it manually (Albums are no problem), so I'm thinking I'll just fill those that aren't already populated with "0000" to at least keep them together and avoid any issues with software that doesn't cope well with blank data.

Oh, I'm also using MP3tag. I've found that some programs seem to have their own database or something, so it can look like the tags are populated but when checking in MP3Tag they're empty, which is obviously annoying as then you have to go through and do them all again, so it seems best to stick with MP3tag for creating/editing tags at least.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #1 –
I'd like to add something about internet radio broadcasting (having been in front of and behind the mic sort of speak) for a decade I can tell you that for royalty reporting the artist and the title are the only things that can be relied upon and is used. Although album should have been passed a long, shoutcast v1 at least never does, and album release could also be a best of release or a various artists release so that could get messy quickly. (no two DJs on our station label their stuff the same way, and if they rip stuff from different sources then album could get very messy.

Heck. Even artist and title can be troublesome at times.
It is usually passed/tracked as:
ARTIST - TITLE

That's "space dash space", but there are situations where there are also a dash in either the artist or title and it may have spaces around it. Right now I can't recall if Shoutcast v2 even have that issue solved.
And that has caused issues with parsing for example over the years.

So the issue is machine readable vs human readable.
The ideal per the OP is that it should be machine readable/mappable. While the reality is that it's only human readable (and sometimes managing to mess that up as well)

And then there are format limitations or tagging limitations. MP3 for example, ID3v1 and ID3v2 may not always be possible to map to/from each other without actual data loss. (ouch)

I wonder if the mp3tag dev is on these forums, if anyone knows a lot about tagging it's him, get him and foobar2000 and other software devs (the EAC dev etc.) and HA folks together and I'm sure the common stuff get mapped out quickly and some consensus could be made on the rest and have the software updated to match the new "standard" of tag names.


Quote from: doveman on
so I'm thinking I'll just fill those that aren't already populated with "0000" to at least keep them together and avoid any issues with software that doesn't cope well with blank data.

You might want to re-think that and leave it blank instead.
Why? Because some software might treat 0000 as 0 or 00 and numerically speaking could interpret that as being 2000
While I can't recall seeing two digit years, its' possible, as it is just a text field after all.
At least with blank you can still sort them, and it would reveal odd behaving software that do not handle empty year fields.

Also note that I've seen full dates in the year field as well. In the wild I think I've even seen one with the time.
I guess if the field length in the tagging/file formats out there allow it then the year field could be "changed" to accept a ISO 8601 date (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 )
And if no timezone is indicated then Zulu should be assumed.
THe current year only field would be somewhat compatible, the issue though is dates. And I have seen in the wild that / has been used which is not supported by ISO 8601. And then there is the international vs US way of month-day vs day-month ordering.

If anything is ever done to standardize the year/date field then my suggestion is make it ISO 8601 compliant.


@2bdecided Sorry man, if this is weering way off your intended track, not really my intention per se.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Rescator on
You might want to re-think that and leave it blank instead.
Why? Because some software might treat 0000 as 0 or 00 and numerically speaking could interpret that as being 2000
While I can't recall seeing two digit years, its' possible, as it is just a text field after all.
At least with blank you can still sort them, and it would reveal odd behaving software that do not handle empty year fields.

Also note that I've seen full dates in the year field as well. In the wild I think I've even seen one with the time.
I guess if the field length in the tagging/file formats out there allow it then the year field could be "changed" to accept a ISO 8601 date (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 )
And if no timezone is indicated then Zulu should be assumed.
THe current year only field would be somewhat compatible, the issue though is dates. And I have seen in the wild that / has been used which is not supported by ISO 8601. And then there is the international vs US way of month-day vs day-month ordering.

If anything is ever done to standardize the year/date field then my suggestion is make it ISO 8601 compliant.


You might be right about leaving the dates blank. I was only thinking of using "0000" as the software I use (MediaPortal) didn't like blank Album or Album Artist fields so I wasn't sure if it could handle blank dates properly either. I guess I should check for sure before I decide what to do.

I've seen full dates in there as well but personally I don't see the need for anything more than the year of release.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #3 –
Quote from: doveman on
So what I tend to do now is fill Album and Album Artist with "Single" for singles/non-album tracks and then at least they're all grouped together when displaying by either field.
This is way OT, and there are plenty of threads about this, but you can either put (or something equally unique) at the start of each album name where the album is in fact a single (there will still be lots of them, but they'll sit at the end or start of most lists, so can easily be skipped), or you can have the Album name as "Singles" (I wouldn't change the Album Artist myself, but that's up to you). Then you can go totally OCD and use discnumber to organise an artists singles in chronological order - which is exactly what you'd have if you bought a retrospective boxed set of singles anyway.


Anyway, I was trying to look at tag mapping in this thread. I know tagging schemes and choices influence this mapping, but some decisions transcend flac/ID3/APE so don't cause a problem here.

Cheers,
David.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #4 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
This is way OT[…] I was trying to look at tag mapping in this thread. I know tagging schemes and choices influence this mapping, but some decisions transcend flac/ID3/APE so don't cause a problem here.

David’s first statement is, of course, totally correct. The unrelated posts above have been split to this new thread from their original location. Please keep the previous thread for discussion of its stated purpose: mapping and interoptability of metadata, not personal preferences for it.

“And another thing”, as Douglas Adams would say: I feel the staff might be overly charitable allowing discussions of tagging in General Audio so often. I think General Music Discussion might be a much more fitting location. But I don’t feel like shifting the established status quo today, so meh.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #5 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
This is way OT, and there are plenty of threads about this, but you can either put (or something equally unique) at the start of each album name where the album is in fact a single (there will still be lots of them, but they'll sit at the end or start of most lists, so can easily be skipped), or you can have the Album name as "Singles" (I wouldn't change the Album Artist myself, but that's up to you). Then you can go totally OCD and use discnumber to organise an artists singles in chronological order - which is exactly what you'd have if you bought a retrospective boxed set of singles anyway.


Anyway, I was trying to look at tag mapping in this thread. I know tagging schemes and choices influence this mapping, but some decisions transcend flac/ID3/APE so don't cause a problem here.

Cheers,
David.


As far as I can see, Album Artist is only really useful if you have an Album with a lot of collaborations on, so the Artist field for each track might be different, Arthur feat. John for example and you want to put Arthur in the Album Artist field to be able to sort by his Albums. I might be completely missing the point of this field though.

It's probably best to just put Singles in the Album field, otherwise as you say I'll end up with a load of entries starting with at the top of my list that I'll have to scroll past before getting to the actual Albums. I can move the Album references to Comments to preserve them in case I ever want to check.

I've actually got a ton of Rare Groove files in this hierarchy

Series Name\Volume001...Volumexxx

and need to find some automated way to put "Series Name Volume x" in the Album field, as it's going to take forever doing it manually with MP3tag. It did have the original album the tracks were from in the Album field for a lot of them but that's obviously not very helpful when displaying/searching by Album as again it results in hundreds of entries each with only one track in, so I've moved that data to Comments and need to put this other data in the Album field to be able to sort them usefully, so if anyone knows of a way to achieve this please let me know.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #6 –
MP3Tag has quite a lot of automation tools. I would be confident that it can populate a field of your choice automatically.
You may very well receive help here, though you would need to provide exact information as to your current tags and / or file structure. Exactly where the needed field data currently is located and exactly what field you want to populate. Also, there is an active forum on their website.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #7 –
Quote from: tpijag on
MP3Tag has quite a lot of automation tools. I would be confident that it can populate a field of your choice automatically.
With the zeal of the new convert, I will say "certainly it can!"

filename > tag will do it. There's also a guessing feature.

Cheers,
David.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #8 –
Quote from: doveman on
As far as I can see, Album Artist is only really useful if you have an Album with a lot of collaborations on, so the Artist field for each track might be different, Arthur feat. John for example and you want to put Arthur in the Album Artist field to be able to sort by his Albums. I might be completely missing the point of this field though.
Exactly that use is described in the fb2k wiki...
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...d_Tag_Standards
...however, others have suggested that this field is useful for defining whatever it is you want to sort albums by - the main artist, the main composer, maybe even something else. In various players it works well for this. Looked at that way, it's always worth filling it in even on single artist albums. Various rippers populate it correctly automatically, and it saves having to drop down to the (track)artist tag when there's no album artist. You then have a list of major albumartists, and a much longer list of (track)artists which can include some unique combinations.

I'm not saying you should use it this way, just that it has some benefits.

Cheers,
David.


Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #9 –
iTunes has a really good way of using the Album Artist and Artist fields to sort and display artists. It took me some time to grasp it and it's kind of hard to explain, but it combines both fields to generate the Artist filter for browsing, and it prevents cluttering by excluding artist names that only appear in Artist field but not in any Album Artist. And you can do clever grouping where songs appear under their respective artists, but also under a "grouped" album artist (for example selecting Jimmy Somerville shows you all his songs including Bronski Beat and Communards, but selecting Bronski Beat only gives songs by that group). It's very useful once you understand how it works.

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #10 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
Quote from: tpijag on
MP3Tag has quite a lot of automation tools. I would be confident that it can populate a field of your choice automatically.
With the zeal of the new convert, I will say "certainly it can!"

filename > tag will do it. There's also a guessing feature.

Cheers,
David.


Thanks. I'd been using filename -> tag to convert filenames to tags but didn't think it could use paths as well. I used my own guessing feature and worked out that this did the job for me

%album%\%album%\%dummy%

to combine the last two sections of the path (Series Name\Volume) and put them in Album, whilst ignoring the filename (at least I think it has, maybe I'm actually populating a hidden field named Dummy!)

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #11 –
Quote from: Goratrix on
iTunes has a really good way of using the Album Artist and Artist fields to sort and display artists....
And yet the iPod itself cannot seem to allow for albums such as Quardrophenia by The Who, and it excludes all the song specific artists when selecting it via "The Who", so I get the Who only tracks of the album.  I don't know whether they fixed that post iPod Video, but it annoys me greatly

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #12 –
And yet what? Goratrix pre-empted exactly that behaviour:
Quote from: Goratrix on
it prevents cluttering by excluding artist names that only appear in Artist field but not in any Album Artist.
There might be a way around it, but I’ve never spent much time adapting to the way iTunes does things, so I don’t know.
 

Personal approaches to tagging, part 9001

Reply #13 –
What I wrote applies only to iTunes on the computer, unfortunately iPods don't do the intelligent grouping. What I do in those cases is set the ITUNESCOMPILATION tag to 1, which makes the album appear only in the Compilations menu on the iPod and not the Artist->Album menu (unless you have other albums by that artist, in which case the artist-specific tracks appear under the respective artists).