# Liner Notes



## beat1234 (Nov 24, 2020)

I'm new to collecting classical. Many digital downloads from amazon do not include liner notes. what is the best source of liner note information on the web? I want the who what when and where (with the what being what kind of recording, originally digital or analog?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Well, you generally won't find very good liner notes on the Internet (their existence would make, for example, ripping and sharing digital files a little too easy for the record labels' comfort!)

You can instead buy your digital downloads from somewhere like Presto Classical, who usually (but not always) include a digital booklet download when you opt to download an 'album' from them. For example:









Note how the first Mahler recording _doesn't_ have a booklet included; the second one does.

Another option is to visit Discogs. You won't get information in a nice digital booklet, but its database can be helpful in finding out recording venues and dates, performer names and so on. Unfortunately, you may have to hunt around a bit, because there are usually multiple database entries for the same work -when it was released on LP, then cassette, then CD and so on. Each 'release' gets its own entry -often, the recording date and location are only found on one of them (usually, but not invariably, the earliest).

Discogs Also Has An Annoying Tendency To Treat The English, German And Italian Language Like This Sentence: everything in initcaps. It means you'll see symphony movements listed as Allegro Con Brio, for example.

An alternative to Discogs is Allmusic. Their information is sometimes a bit barebones, but At Least Its Not Usually In Initcap!!

Hope that helps a little.


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## beat1234 (Nov 24, 2020)

thanx for the nfo. what does initcaps stand for? Initial letter in caps? yeah, when editing metadata for mp3s i've noticed the lower case usage in the movement's name. since i don't understand the language or what the words mean I leave them as they are. i also type in all lowercase, no caps, bc it's easier on a phone and it's also easier when the laptop is resting on my belly while i'm in bed haha. what is the reason for the movement's name being in all lowercase?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

beat1234 said:


> I'm new to collecting classical. Many digital downloads from amazon do not include liner notes. what is the best source of liner note information on the web? I want the who what when and where (with the what being what kind of recording, originally digital or analog?


Not all liner notes are available online but some are, and things are getting better. One good free source is Naxos Music Library. You have no need to join it to use it for 15 minutes at a time. They allow you access to most of the classical liner notes which are available, and you can download them onto your hard drive.

Also the Hyperion website.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

An awesome source is the New York Philharmonic archives. Enter a composer/work and they all the concerts, have program booklets with exceptional notes.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

beat1234 said:


> thanx for the nfo. what does initcaps stand for? Initial letter in caps? yeah, when editing metadata for mp3s i've noticed the lower case usage in the movement's name. since i don't understand the language or what the words mean I leave them as they are. i also type in all lowercase, no caps, bc it's easier on a phone and it's also easier when the laptop is resting on my belly while i'm in bed haha. what is the reason for the movement's name being in all lowercase?


It _shouldn't_ be in all lowercase. Beethoven's 5th symphony's first movement has a tempo indication of *Allegro con brio*, for example. Capital A, because it's the start of the tempo indication, lower case on the other words because they are not proper nouns. *Allegro Con Brio* is just musically ignorant, I think. If in doubt, read the score:









Where starting every word with a capital letter gets really problematic is in German. Because German uses capital letters to indicate the presence of a noun. Start capitalizing every German word and you make a right hash of German grammar rules.

Lack of grammatical and lexical care in tagging is a particular bugbear of mine. If you care about the music, I think, you should care about how it's presented and displayed in your music player. I am probably in a minority of sticklers on the subject, however, so you (like everyone else) is free to do whatever suits your own needs (and posture, apparently!). I will admit, it's a bit of a first world problem.

But my view is: start as you mean to go on. If you're starting out collecting classical music for the first time, you are in a perfect position to do things the _right_ way, instead of doing it a bad way which you regret 10 years down the line when the size of your music collection makes fixing things up a bit of a problem! But anyway: do what you feel appropriate.


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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> It _shouldn't_ be in all lowercase. Beethoven's 5th symphony's first movement has a tempo indication of *Allegro con brio*, for example. Capital A, because it's the start of the tempo indication, lower case on the other words because they are not proper nouns. *Allegro Con Brio* is just musically ignorant, I think. If in doubt, read the score:
> 
> View attachment 146514
> 
> ...


I see I'm not the only one picky about this sort of thing. That is a pet peeve of mine too. Whenever I rip a CD, I have to go through and lowercase a bunch of stuff. It just looks sloppy to me when I see a track that goes something like "O, Du, Mein Holder Abendstern".


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## caracalla (Feb 19, 2020)

As well as Naxos, Chandos and (especially) Hyperion are pretty good for open-access booklets. If you're looking for information about obscure repertory, rather than just recording details, it's usually worth checking out Hyperion to see if they have their own version(s). This online 'liner-note library' of theirs is extensive, and I've come to see it as a major boon. 

Wrt basic recording details, the most problematic things are usually when and where the recording was made, and which soloists are employed on specific tracks. As AB notes, your first port of call for this info should be Discogs. You will find they often list several versions of the same album, covering both reissues and releases to different international markets. The amount of recording detail supplied can vary greatly between entries, so if you don't find what you need on the first version you look at, be sure to check out the others. Discogs is also invaluable if you have tracks from reissues or compilations, and want to find out when, in what context and on what label the music was first released.

If Discogs fails, your album may be in the AllMusic or ArkivMusic databases, which sometimes include recording info culled from the liner notes. If still no joy, you can do a general Google search coupled with 'review'. If you're lucky, this will throw up several review sites & blogs - some very obscure - which occasionally supply the info you want on a plate. And always check out the main text, as reviewers sometimes refer in passing to the recording venue and/or the contributions of individual soloists. 

If none of this works, my last throw is usually to do a search at WorldCat, which supplies basic discographical info for librarians and researchers. It's far from infallible, but can sometimes save the day when all else has failed. Anyway, my own experience is that a good 95% of what you need is out there somewhere, even if it needs quite a bit of perseverence to hunt it down. Good luck.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I have emailed Brilliant Classics several times in order to obtain booklets (as PDF files) for album downloads that did not have them. They were very friendly and obliging each time.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

beat1234 said:


> I'm new to collecting classical. Many digital downloads from amazon do not include liner notes. what is the best source of liner note information on the web? I want the who what when and where (with the what being what kind of recording, originally digital or analog?


Apart from those already mentioned, I'll add HIGHRESAUDIO.com, who supply a free digital booklet for a lot of downloads that they're selling.

Specifically about the when and where -

Even the booklet does not always state the when and where, especially for older CDs.

One way to find out is to find the back cover of such a CD on the internet. Newer CDs are more likely to state the when and where on the back cover.

Better still, try to find the Japanese edition of back cover. It almost certainly states the when and where, and the Japanese have been doing that for decades.

Even better still, search for the CD at hmv.co.jp or tower.jp. Not only do they state the when and where for the CDs that they're selling, they even correct misprints of such.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I have emailed Brilliant Classics several times in order to obtain booklets (as PDF files) for album downloads that did not have them. They were very friendly and obliging each time.


That is a good piece of information to know. I've always thought of record companies as ogres, not friends! Nice to have a different perspective.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Kiki said:


> Specifically about the when and where -
> 
> Even the booklet does not always state the when and where, especially for older CDs.
> 
> One way to find out is to find the back cover of such a CD on the internet. Newer CDs are more likely to state the when and where on the back cover.


Never a truer word spoken.

One trick I have used -though it is not always terribly accurate. If the CD itself, or the CD case or the CD booklet has a '℗' followed by a year on it somewhere, it means that's the date of the sound recording copyright. (It's a P, not a ©, because it stands for 'phonogram').

Anyway: the actual date of recording is usually (but by no means always) one year(ish) before the P-date. So, if I couldn't find better information about the recording date from Discogs and so on, but I saw '℗1983', I would probably tag that up with a 1982 recording year. It would be close, though it might not be perfect (I've one CD in my collection where the P-date is more than 2 years after the recording date. I assume in such cases, a recording took place that the marketing department wasn't sure what to do with, so that it languishes in the vaults until some suitable moment is found to release it -and bingo! a P-date is assigned. But I'm making most of that up!

Anyway: P-dates minus 1 if all else fails.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Also wanted to add that for anyone just starting out in classical music, the IMSLP website is a goldmine -though obviously it helps if you can read music for it to be of personal value. But even if you can't, if you want to know how to spell tempo indications correctly, rather than just go off the CD case, it's a wonderful resouce. IMSLP doesn't even cost anything -though you can pay, I think it is, $28 per year to access everything with no download delays and the satisfaction of knowing you're helping fund the thing's continuing existence. But if that's too much: every score on there is available for free anyway.


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## caracalla (Feb 19, 2020)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Anyway: P-dates minus 1 if all else fails.


I'm sure many people use the P-1 formula if needs must; I just use the P date with a 'c' (circa) suffix.

But that might be miles out. A few weeks ago, I downloaded a couple of Baroque things I wanted from a La Serenissima album released earlier this year called 'Extra Time'. It's called that because they're in the habit of using any decent chunks of time remaining at the end of recording sessions to bash out an extra concerto or short suite on the side. Accumulating enough of these occasional odds-and-ends to fill this compilation disc took them several years, with the result that nearly every piece on it has a different recording date and venue. The oldest seems to have been languishing in their bottom drawer since 2011!

Happily, the recording details are all spelled out in the liner notes. And as the disc is published by Signum, one of the small independent labels handled by Hyperion, access wasn't a problem. But this episode was an unwelcome reminder that 'reasonable approximations' can sometimes be hopelessly wrong. Being a year or two adrift doesn't matter too much, but a decade is serious time.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

caracalla said:


> I'm sure many people use the P-1 formula if needs must; I just use the P date with a 'c' (circa) suffix.
> 
> But that might be miles out. A few weeks ago, I downloaded a couple of Baroque things I wanted from a La Serenissima album released earlier this year called 'Extra Time'. It's called that because they're in the habit of using any decent chunks of time remaining at the end of recording sessions to bash out an extra concerto or short suite on the side. Accumulating enough of these occasional odds-and-ends to fill this compilation disc took them several years, with the result that nearly every piece on it has a different recording date and venue. The oldest seems to have been languishing in their bottom drawer since 2011!
> 
> Happily, the recording details are all spelled out in the liner notes. And as the disc is published by Signum, one of the small independent labels handled by Hyperion, access wasn't a problem. But this episode was an unwelcome reminder that 'reasonable approximations' can sometimes be hopelessly wrong. Being a year or two adrift doesn't matter too much, but a decade is serious time.


As I say, I use the P-date _in extremis_ only and understand its inevitable inaccuracies. When it's all you've got (and we're mostly talking, I think, about 1970-1980 recordings), it's better than nothing. I had hoped I had made its limitations perfectly clear.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

^

I also put a "c" (for circa) at the back of the (P) year, e.g. "1998c". However, I'd imagine if one wants to perform conditional filtering on the year field (e.g. >=1998) then one better puts the circa indicator somewhere else. I don't do that so it's not a problem I need to solve. I suppose people who don't care about the year don't care either.

I've got another disc that has got only a (C) year. I know that record company licensed the recording from another company, and this CD is definitely a re-issue, while the sound quality sounds much older than the (C) year, therefore I'm pretty sure the actual recording year is probably way earlier than the (C) year.

Another even more extreme case is where not only the recording date is missing, but also both (P) and (C) years! (And it's a BBC CD!) "XXXX" was all I could do. :lol:

But these are extreme cases.

BTW, just for a good laugh, DG released Abbado's Schubert 5 & 8 with the VPO in 2018. It came from a live 1971 Austrian Radio recording. But in DG's booklet, both (P) and (C) are "2018 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH". I thought I understood what (P) and (C) meant, but I really can't say I do. (Unless DG did a buyout to the rights of that recording, instead of licensing it from Austrian Radio?)


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I have emailed Brilliant Classics several times in order to obtain booklets (as PDF files) for album downloads that did not have them. They were very friendly and obliging each time.


I had a different experience with Naxos. Since the digital booklet of Ádám Fischer's Beethoven cycle does not state any recording dates, I emailed Naxos. Their replay was "the date of recording is 29 February - 1 March 2016." I was speechless when I read that. Which symphony? There are nine, to say the obvious. So that wasn't very helpful. Fortunately, another TC member has got the CD set, and the recording dates were found printed at the back of the CD sleeves! Lucky me. (Incidentally, only 4 of the 9 symphonies were recorded in 2016.)


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Kiki said:


> ^
> 
> I also put a "c" (for circa) at the back of the (P) year, e.g. "1998c". However, I'd imagine if one wants to perform conditional filtering on the year field (e.g. >=1998) then one better puts the circa indicator somewhere else. I don't do that so it's not a problem I need to solve. I suppose people who don't care about the year don't care either.
> 
> ...


I don't put anything but a year. The reason? The 'date' field should accept a date, not a mixture of dates and text. it makes subsequent re-processing of data extremely difficult if you can't be certain what data is in there.

As an example, I have recently (and somewhat reluctantly) concluded that the recording DATE tag should actually make an appearance in the ALBUM tag. I always allowed for that to happen as an exception, but I now realise that data theory says it needs to happen routinely. See this article for an explanation, if you are interested.

As a result, I needed to script something that would take one tag and put it in another, and bracket it correctly and so on. The fact that I knew only 4-digit years were in my DATE tag made that quite easy to do. Had I been having to parse a mixed-data tag of variable length, it would have been a much more difficult task.

Anyway: I agree. There have been occasions when I simply guessed at the date, in the absence of everything else!

And yes, I have recordings with Benjamin Britten conducting dated 1984, which is a bit of an achievement since he died 8 years earlier!!


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## caracalla (Feb 19, 2020)

Kiki said:


> I had a different experience with Naxos.


Looks like you were getting the casual brush-off right enough.

I was interested in your comments on the Japanese market, where it seems to have been established for a very long time that people who buy recorded music are entitled to know its provenance. Obviously, matters on this front are steadily improving in the West, but there are plenty of laggards (yes, DHM, I'm looking at you) and it may yet be some time before best practice becomes standard. It would give the process a big push, I think, if review and retail sites took to including this info as a matter of course among the listed credits, and made it their business to strong-arm it out of labels which are not freely forthcoming. They would certainly have a lot more clout than individual punters.

I see your Naxos problem was eventually solved with reference to the CDs' back covers. That's where this info should be (and often is), of course, as well as in the liner notes, but it can sometimes be difficult to find a readable image online. No one could reasonably dispute that this is small-print stuff. I find this is one area where Amazon often comes up trumps.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

^

Totally agreed! If reviewers, retailers and record companies alike would always provide recording dates, life would be easier not only for the pedantic collector, but also for accurately identifying a recording in a review/discussion/marketing promotion etc. Otherwise how would someone be able to tell which of the twelve (at least twelve) recordings of Karajan's Beethoven 9th that people are talking about?

Review sites like Musicweb International, retailers like HMV Japan and Tower Records Japan, and record companies like Chandos and Naxos are leading the way. Kudos to them. (It's ironic that I had that problem with Naxos' digital download of A. Fischer's Beethoven, but digital is a whole new sector that many record companies/online retailers are definitely going backward compared to the physical media sector in terms of recording data/liner notes.)

I wish more people would care about this. 

Just to touch on one other thing - the accuracy of recording dates is also important. I collect Mravinsky's recordings. The dates provided by Praga, Russian Disc, Erato, Melodiya etc. are full of errors, even fabrication as some people suspect. It's a minefield for collectors. :lol:

--

Fortunately for me, cover art has seldom been a problem for me. I used to scan all my CD covers. Nowadays I can download a decent size original graphics cover, or extract it from a free digital booklet.

For digital downloads, I've yet to see one that does not include a decent size cover, but that's my experience only. Most retailers do need to improve by including the digital booklet though!

Kudos to those record companies and online retailers who do provide a decent size cover, especially Chandos and Naxos again, and they also provide the covers (and sometimes the booklets) of other labels that they distribute. 

Talking about Amazon, the errors and omission of essential info like composer, work, performer etc. on their product pages is amazing, but I noticed they have started to include a reasonably high-resolution cover image in recent years. Progress! And progress is good.


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