I picked up Andrea Bocelli’s “Complete Opera Edition” (10 operas presented on 18 discs) and I am in the process of ripping the tracks to my computer. Tagging these files is going to be a daunting task, I think. With other genres, tagging is a proverbial piece of cake. Classical and opera isn’t so straightforward. The most challenging part, I think, is going to be the Title tags. Looking through the CD booklet, there are some insanely long track titles with a lot of ellipses, like: “Au bonheur dont mon âme est pleine, ami ... Mais celle qui devint ma femme ... Vous l'avez d” (that’s as much as SonataDB got, the rest was truncated). Having these excessively long titles bugs me for some reason. I would like to simplify these titles somehow, but I am not knowledgeable enough about opera to know the best way of doing it. Is there anyone with experience tagging classical/opera that might offer some suggestions?
Perhaps you can group the separate tracks into acts or movements, and prepend something like "Act 2: Au bonheur dont mon âme est pleine, ami..." and so on, keeping the long titles, but with one or more overall identifiers in front.
Which program are you using to tag? If you're using Foobar or Quodlibet/ExFalso or a similar high-powered tagger, I would add tags to identify every little detail, such as composer, orchestra, performers, recording date, performance date and venue, everything.
It hardly matters for popular music, but for classical/opera, this information is quite important due to the many different performances and recordings of a particular piece.
I see that this subject has been discussed before, there was some quite good pointers in this thread: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,105591.0.html
With regard to tagging, I like to keep things as basic as possible. Tagging these opera recordings is proving to be a major headache. Artist is no problem; I'm lumping them together with the rest of the Bocelli albums. I'm using the name of the opera for the album. It's these insanely long titles that's giving me such a headache.
Right now, I am in the process of tagging Massenet's "Werther." Disc 1, Track 16, the title listed in the CD booklet is as follows. Try to ignore the all caps. With my eyesight, it is easier for me to manage tags in Foobar when working with all capital letters.
AI-JE DIT VRAI? L'AMOUR QUE J'AI POUR ELLE N'EST-IL PAS LE PLUS PUR... PARTIR! NON!...AH! QU'IL EST LOIN CE JOUR PLEIN D'INTIME DOUCEUR... WERTHER! N'EST-IL DONC PAS D'AUTRE FEMME ICI-BAS
This is how it appears in the CD liner notes. Most had to be entered in manually; I may have missed an accented character or two. This insane string of characters is such a jumbled mess, I don't know what to do with it.