Tagging practice: medleys and other multi-song tracks

2021-06-27 12:48:17

I am curious what you folks think. I am using foobar2000 and quite often use "quicksearch for same" and the like - "do I have a live version of this?!" etc.

For tag fields like composer, I consider them unordered lists. "Butler; Iommi; Osbourne; Ward" is the same as "Iommi; Osbourne; Butler; Ward". I have not bothered to consider "primary" composer ordering, nor to split between music / lyrics.

Tracks/songs in a medley and the like - they appear in order. Often an intro or outro or whatever has a name. Pink Floyd had "Speak to Me" and "Breathe" as a single track on most (all?) CDs up to the DSotM 20th anniversary edition, but subsequently split them. For example. And then you have some albums - live, most often - where a song is meddled into the middle of another. (I have a lot of metal and have cleaned a few "Songtitle - Guitar Solo - Songtitle cont'd" to "Songtitle", those are IMHO easy and can be disregarded.)

What do you think is The Right Thing or The Reasonable Desirable/Doable Trade-Off?

Re: Tagging practice: medleys and other multi-song tracks

Reply #1 – 2021-06-27 14:39:34

I have done it in two ways, although prefer he latter now:

A1. ARTIST: artist 1 vs. artist 2
A2. TITLE: track title 1 vs. track title 2

B1. ARTIST: artist 1 / artist 2
B2. TITLE: track title 1 / track title 2

As I say, it's almost always the latter now. Same with cue sheets that I create for DJ mixes that mashup 2 or more songs together for example. Sometimes the versus is still used if the release has been named that way.

I will order/list them as they appear in the song

Re: Tagging practice: medleys and other multi-song tracks

Reply #2 – 2021-06-27 15:07:00

I list artists and writers in the order that they appear. The order might have an importance although often I see them switched on a different release. I make sure to always use the same spelling for a songwriter, and avoid very short pseudonyms that are likely to clash. For consistency, I usually use the main spelling from Discogs with full first name.

For tracks with multiple titled segments I include them in order separated by a forward slash, and a dash in filenames. If there are more than 3 titles, I write the name of the medley, and include separate titles in the comments field. The main title shouldn't get too long that it doesn't fit the display. For a medley I usually don't include songwriters because there are too many and it is unclear who wrote what.