# When you rip classical music CDs what is the order in your title?



## cdlas (Sep 21, 2020)

Right now it's set to Album artist, Album title, then name of Track. 

But when I have already ripped over 100 CDs, I'm starting to think that having the name of album artist and album title in the track is completely unnecessary and clogs up the title so that I can't see what the names of the tracks are at a glance unless I actually tap on the song, because before the name of the tracks the name of the artist and album clogs the whole thing. 

By the way I've been ripping through bBpoweramp.


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

The way I do it?

Album Artist (which does the main sort): lists the conductor of the work--or in cases where the featured singer (say Maria Callas) or solist (think Jacqueline Pu Pré) is the primary draw--the prime performer of the work.

Artist (non-sort): Lists as many of the artists as possible in the meta data. Conductor; orchestra, choir, soloist, singer (role in Operas), etc

Album: Composer's last name: the work (and I've come to using No. 2 Symphony rather than Symphony No. 2 so it shows up visually), the date and venue when possible, the version when applicable, and [the label]

Track: Name of work, Movement number or Act number, Type of movement or title. In compilations of a historic nature (date of recording)

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

cdlas said:


> Right now it's set to Album artist, Album title, then name of Track.
> 
> But when I have already ripped over 100 CDs, I'm starting to think that having the name of album artist and album title in the track is completely unnecessary and clogs up the title so that I can't see what the names of the tracks are at a glance unless I actually tap on the song, because before the name of the tracks the name of the artist and album clogs the whole thing.
> 
> By the way I've been ripping through bBpoweramp.


At the risk of upsetting some posters here, can I refer you to my article on how to tag classical music rips?

Short version is that the "title" tag should be the symphony's tempo marking, or perhaps the first line of the aria in an opera, or whatever is most appropriate, but that under no circumstances should the "artist", "album" or "album artist" make an appearance in the "title" tag.

For example:

Album: Symphony No. 5 (Karajan)
Track: 1
Title: Allegro con brio
Artist: Ludwig van Beethoven
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Album: Symphony No. 5 (Karajan)
Track: 2
Title: Andante con moto
Artist: Ludwig van Beethoven
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven

And so on.

The point being that any decent music player software will correctly identify and display composer (usually by reading the Artist tag, which is why we end up duplicating the data in those two tags), album and track number and title data without you having to shove repetitive data in all the available tags just in case!

For any decently-sized CD collection (over about 20 CDs, I'd say), you want clean data with minimal repetition between tags. (Because repeating things is a pain for various data-integrity reasons. It makes bulk updating tags later on much harder, for example. And you risk typing 'Allegro con brio' in one place and "Allgro con brio" in another, meaning your metadata is now inconsistent). You want to tag intelligently (thus, you don't want to say things like 'Ah! Belinda, I am presst with torment [Dido, talking to Belinda, Act 1, Scene 2]'), because you are an intelligent person that already knows when Dido is singing (and if you don't, you're smart enough to read the score or libretto!), and the clue she's singing to Belinda is in the track title -and as music listeners, we're not especially interested in the minutiae of dramatic staging of operatic works!

You don't want to tag "Allegro Con Brio", because Italians don't talk in InitCaps.
You don't want to tag "Beethoven, Ludwig van", because you're dealing with digital music and electronic databases and we don't need to use ye olde card index nomenclature these days.
You don't want to tag "1. Allegro con Brio", because your ears should tell you that you're playing the first movement.
You don't want to tag "Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)" because you're marking up a music database, not a Groves Musicians encyclopedia.
You don't want to use 'Album Artist' tags, because it will only duplicate what you've already entered into 'Artist' and 'Composer' tags -and most music playing software tends to use the Artist tag in preference to the Album Artist tag anyway.

And so on. Get it right and you should have very accessible music from most music player software, such as you see here:









Though dbPowerAmp is an excellent ripper, I found its tagging to be suspect (meaning only that it didn't behave intelligently in all scenarios). Stick with it by all means, but I'd recommend you look at what my own (free of charge, but Linux-based) Classical CD Tagger (CCDT) software does. Not that you have to use it, but if you see what sort of fairly minimal information it prompts for in the screenshots, it may give you a clue as to how to use dbPowerAmp's interface to your best advantage.

One of my pet peeves with dbPowerAmp, for example, is that it insists on filling in the Disc tag. Since you now have a digital music collection and not a physical CD one, the concept of a disk, however spelled, is irrelevant... and I consider filling it in to be redundant. The way the interface handles free-form comments (which is where I think you should be placing the details of the performers of the work) is also pretty awful, with no decent re-sizing or line-wrap functionality. But I digress: and on the whole, it's very good software.

But anyway, I hope some of that gives you pointers to how to achieve a digital music taxonomy that works for you.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

I'm really glad you guys posted this. So maybe I can ask you some questions. I used to rip CDs to make copies for use in the car, but then I discovered the joy of ripping to flash drives - I can put dozens of CDs on one of them and in the car an mp3 sounds just fine. But....

1. If there is a movement or two that are played continuously, if they have separate tracks on the CD when I rip them there's a jarring pause between the mp3 tracks - the cd plays one after the other, why not the mp3? Is there a way to get continuous, uninterrupted playback?

2. The PC I prefer to rip with underwent a Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade about a year ago and all of the sudden the CD drive is no longer recognized. Microsoft said to reinstall the driver. HP blames Microsoft. I know others have had this same issue. Ever hear of this? So now I use an old Win7 machine that works fine and it also is the sole remaining device I can burn LightScribe disks with.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

mbhaub said:


> I'm really glad you guys posted this. So maybe I can ask you some questions. I used to rip CDs to make copies for use in the car, but then I discovered the joy of ripping to flash drives - I can put dozens of CDs on one of them and in the car an mp3 sounds just fine. But....
> 
> 1. If there is a movement or two that are played continuously, if they have separate tracks on the CD when I rip them there's a jarring pause between the mp3 tracks - the cd plays one after the other, why not the mp3? Is there a way to get continuous, uninterrupted playback?


Gapless playback as it's termed is an issue with the playing software, I'm afraid. So if your car CD player isn't naturally doing it, nothing is going to be able to fix that. Unfortunately, when it's playing MP3s, it sees them as separate data files, which usually end with special metadata sections which are rendered as silence, rather than as a continuous stream of digital audio as it does when playing a physical CD. As I say, if your player is afflicted by this (it's unfortunately quite common), there's nothing you can do to rectify it from the player's point of view, other than to avoid the use of MP3 (if your car CD plays FLAC files natively, for example, then those should play back gaplessly -but since they are lossless files, you won't get more than about 2 physical CDs-worth of data onto a single data CD).

But what you _can_ do is to rip the CD (or parts of it) as a single 'track'. I didn't think that dbPoweramp could do that, but a look at their CD ripping documentation tells me that potentially there's a 'Rip as One' option you might be able to use.

Doing this will immediately throw out any notion of "proper" tagging, of course: since now you only have 1 track to tag with all four movement names of the symphony! But it should fix the playback problem, since your CD player now will only see a few large single-files, each one representing the entirety of a piece. Since there's only one data file per symphony (say), there won't be any gap heard in the middle of playing any one of them.

Depending on how technical you want to get, though, there are better workarounds. First, put your digital music collection highest amongst your priorities and worry about how to play it later. This means, simply: rip in high quality, lossless FLAC in a composer/genre/album/track-by-track physical and logical hierarchy. Your FLAC collection becomes 'the source of truth' and everything else is constructed as a copy from it.

Next, your car is a noisy environment and you don't really need all that lossless FLAC goodness when you're in it to appreciate the music. So, make a copy of your FLAC collection (whole and entire, or just the bits you find suitable for a car journey) and convert it all in bulk (dbPoweramp is brilliant for this, but then so is my own entirely free, but based on Linux, AbsolutelyBaching Universal Audio Converter!) into an MP3 copy of your collection or part-collection. The quality doesn't have to be extreme: 192kbps should be fine. So for a 100GB collection of FLACs, your MP3 copy will be around an extra 30GB... which in today's multi-terabyte world is peanuts as far as extra disc storage capacity is concerned.

Now none of that fixes the gapless problem, but what you can _now_ do (if you're technically minded) is learn how to "concatenate MP3s". That is, get the operating system to construct a new, single track out of three or four or whatever MP3 tracks you point it at. I personally think this is the kind of thing Linux is exceptionally good at, but the fact you're using dbPoweramp tells me you're a Windows user, so this article (especially option 2) is probably most relevant.

So now you have your immutable track-by-track FLAC collection, the source of truth; you have a track-by-track MP3 copy of it; and finally you have single-track constructions from those track-by-track MP3s. You can then burn the single track MP3 to your CD (or USB stick) (and potentially delete the all-in-one-track version of the music afterwards, since you now no longer need it once it's safe on physical CD, and you can always re-construct it again later on if you ever need to). Once your car CD sees a single 'track' containing all four movements of a work, it should play it back gaplessly.

I also copy the track-by-track MP3s onto my mobile phone, where space is at a premium and sound-quality again doesn't matter quite so much (and my Android phone never has a problem with gapless playback, so the track-by-track nature of the MP3 collection isn't a problem either).



mbhaub said:


> 2. The PC I prefer to rip with underwent a Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade about a year ago and all of the sudden the CD drive is no longer recognized. Microsoft said to reinstall the driver. HP blames Microsoft. I know others have had this same issue. Ever hear of this? So now I use an old Win7 machine that works fine and it also is the sole remaining device I can burn LightScribe disks with.


Afraid I can't help you there. I long ago ditched Windows for the relative stability of Linux (at least if I break something, it's because I chose to do so, not because some update borked something without my permission!)

I am a bit surprised, however, because I have a variety of HP PCs, servers and what have you going back to about 2012 and I don't recall any of them ever losing access to their CD drives, no matter what operating system I was using at the time -it's such a standard driver interface these days that no proprietary shenanigans should be going on. If it were me, I'd probably try doing a clean install of Windows 10, but (a) there's no guarantee that would work and (b) I don't mean to guess or assume, but it's sounds potentially as if that might be a bit much for you to pull off with confidence?

Incidentally, I don't think they actually make Lightscribe disks any more! In any event, they were getting pretty hard to find back in 2016 when this article was written. Because the write-speed on the label side was _so_ slow, I think that technology has mostly died a death. Don't hitch your cart to that particular technology, is all I'm saying!


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

I like having all the crucial info in the title / name of the track. Other than file type, bitrate, and length, this is the only column in my player.

Examples:

Felix Mendelssohn - Violin Concerto in E minor - 01 - Constantin Silvestri & Paris Conservatoire O ft. Leonid Kogan 1959
Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 9 - 01 Andante comodo - Walter & Columbia SO 1962
John Williams - Devil's Dance - JW & VPO ft. Anne-Sophie Mutter 2020

The more familiar the names of the performers or ensembles, the shorter their form of adress. Names of movements are rarely kept; numbers usually suffice.

If I only have one recording of a particular piece, and expect that to remain the case, only the first track of the work contains the performer data (for example in operas)


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

I dont bother with tags. I organize files into directory structures on the hard-disk and all searching can be performed through the Total Commander (file manager). I want the names for the FLAC files short. Long names are only trouble.

something like this
https://www.ghisler.com/screenshots/en/03.html
ie all the information is kept in the directories and file names, no need for tags.

I did use a tagging software in the past, the mp3tag, but the tags are really pain in the a$
https://www.mp3tag.de/en/


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Fabulin said:


> I like having all the crucial info in the title / name of the track. Other than file type, bitrate, and length, this is the only column in my player.
> 
> Examples:
> 
> ...


Odd player you have there -or do you mean that you _choose_ only to have display the title?


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Odd player you have there -or do you mean that you _choose_ only to have display the title?


Yes, that's what I meant. I select the columns to be displayed. I use the Clementine player.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Jacck said:


> I dont bother with tags. I organize files into directory structures on the hard-disk and all searching can be performed through the Total Commander (file manager). I want the names for the FLAC files short. Long names are only trouble.


Most filesystems (NTFS on Windows, ext4 on Linux, for example) will indeed barf at a filename longer than about 255 characters. On Windows, it's a bit worse, since the entire path+filename needs to be less than 260 characters (on single-byte character sets). But I've yet to encounter the limit, on either file system, despite having 66,000 or so music tracks. It's really not a _practical_ issue.

There's also no reason to not avail yourself of tags: they can mostly be defined from the physical file structure (and vice versa). dbPowerAmp, for one, can create a folder structure from tags and move all tagged up music into the appropriate physical location as a result. So if you imagine that as you tag Artist, Genre, Album, Title _tags_, you're actually defining an Artist\Genre\Artist\Title folder structure. They're two halves of the same coin, basically.

Meanwhile, if you only go the tag route, you have a physical mess of files that can be difficult to manage, copy, move and so on. And if you only go the physical route: well, discoverabilty of music can be an issue, for one. How do you find songs sung by Galina Vishnevskaya in your physical-only set up, for example?

Now, maybe you never need to -and that's fine. But I like a filing system that's flexible enough to cope with my music-hunting needs of today _and tomorrow_!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Fabulin said:


> Yes, that's what I meant. I select the columns to be displayed. I use the Clementine player.


So I'm just intrigued why you do that.









I use Clementine too. That panel on the left is basically using and is sorted by the Artist tag. (Edited to add: technically, it's _grouped_ by Artist/Genre/Album, using a user-defined grouping order). You leave your Artist tag blank?

So how do you pick to listen Mendelssohn's music from Beethoven's, for example? In your scheme, I'm going to have to scroll through the *right* pane, containing 66,000 track names, reading only the first piece of information in each row to determine the composer. (I think: if you do it differently, I'd be interested to know).

Without an artist tag to control the left pane, I'm going to scroll through tens of thousands of rows to find the right composer's work in the right pane, surely? It would be a lot of tedious effort for me!


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Most filesystems (NTFS on Windows, ext4 on Linux, for example) will indeed barf at a filename longer than about 255 characters. On Windows, it's a bit worse, since the entire path+filename needs to be less than 260 characters (on single-byte character sets). But I've yet to encounter the limit, on either file system, despite having 66,000 or so music tracks. It's really not a _practical_ issue.
> 
> There's also no reason to not avail yourself of tags: they can mostly be defined from the physical file structure (and vice versa). dbPowerAmp, for one, can create a folder structure from tags and move all tagged up music into the appropriate physical location as a result. So if you imagine that as you tag Artist, Genre, Album, Title _tags_, you're actually defining an Artist\Genre\Artist\Title folder structure. They're two halves of the same coin, basically.
> 
> ...


Before I switched to classical music, it was easier, because most music outside of classical has only one performer, ie there is one album by Led Zeppeling and one soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. Classical music is more complicated because of different performances. So I organize it into music/Beethoven/symphonies/symphony 5/Karajan/track01 ....

The Total Commander is really effective in its search capabilities which are equal to linux. So I can search the music directory for Beethoven, Karajan, symphony 5 or any combination of those using various logical operators

and as you say, I can easily use a tagging software to automatically tag the files from the directory structure, but so far, I have not really had the need to use the tags


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Jacck said:


> Before I switched to classical music, it was easier, because most music outside of classical has only one performer, ie there is one album by Led Zeppeling and one soundtrack by Jerry Goldsmith. Classical music is more complicated because of different performances. So I organize it into music/Beethoven/symphonies/symphony 5/Karajan/track01 ....
> 
> The Total Commander is really effective in its search capabilities which are equal to linux. So I can search the music directory for Beethoven, Karajan, symphony 5 or any combination of those using various logical operators
> 
> and as you say, I can easily use a tagging software to automatically tag the files from the directory structure, but so far, I have not really had the need to use the tags


Well, it always comes down to what you need to get _out_ of a catalogue as to how you organise it. But here's that example I mentioned earlier:









Now, Galina Vishnevskaya's name is nowhere in my physical folder structure. For example:









That strictly, music/composer/genre/album+distinguishing-artist, physically. And yet my music player finds all the pieces Vishnevskaya is singing in because her name is in the COMMENTS tag, somewhere:









Note I don't even need to type the whole thing in before it finds it (which would be true of Total Commander and the file structure you _do_ use, I guess). But without a 'who is performing this' tag, with lots of free-form text, which would be quite unsuitable for a physical folder structure, I'd be lost.

I don't hunt down things like that very often, it's true -but it's nice to know that I can do so, no matter what the constraints of _physical_ storage structures might be.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> So I'm just intrigued why you do that.
> 
> View attachment 144321
> 
> ...


I don't search for files via Clementine; I do that through Windows search, which enables me to find my files using any word combination. If I type "Mendelssohn Silvestri", or "Concerto Kogan", I can find what I want quite quickly (Windows seems to remember files I select after typing various words, so my favourites are always at hand), and with a single click add it to my running Clementine playlist.

This is how my Clementine looks like. 







I like an efficient, Apollo-11-simple look.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

^^^ (AbsolutelyBaching) I understand the advantages you are writing about. But I would simply use google to find a discography for Galina Vishnevskaya online and then searched my files for the recording I want.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Jacck said:


> ^^^ (AbsolutelyBaching) I understand the advantages you are writing about. But I would simply use google to find a discography for Galina Vishnevskaya online and then searched my files for the recording I want.


And that's fine.

Sort of.

If you can deal with a list 90% of which _won't_ be in your collection, is presented in both Roman and Cyrillic alphabets and is at the mercy of the discographer's choice of 'tag', good luck to you. Whatever you find easiest, I guess.

It's just that I can do it in the one program, with consistent results, displaying only recordings which I know I own, and whose metadata content is entirely under my control... which seems a little more efficient to me.

But anyway. I guess I'm just saying to the OP: what tagging practice you decide on today will affect the way you do these sorts of things for years/decades to come. So choose wisely!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Fabulin said:


> I don't search for files via Clementine; I do that through Windows search, which enables me to find my files using any word combination. If I type "Mendelssohn Silvestri", or "Concerto Kogan", I can find what I want quite quickly, and with a single click add it to my running Clementine playlist.
> 
> This is how my Clementine looks like.
> View attachment 144326
> ...


Well, it's certainly in the bare-bones department! (I am intrigued, though, why you go to the trouble of displaying the bitrate, but not separating out things like composer and composition name!). Is bitrate something you care about/use to find or filter much? Fair enough, if so: I've just never met someone for whom it really mattered before!

Personally, I would hate to have to rely on Windows' own search functionality! It's been through too many iterations in recent years for my tastes. But whatever floats your boat.


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> And that's fine. I can just do it in the one program, which seems a little more efficient to me. But each to his own!


when the internet collapse comes, you will have a clear advantage  I understand the advantages you write about, and I also would like to have my files so well organized. But it comes down to laziness to fill in all the information in those tags.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Jacck said:


> when the internet collapse comes, you will have a clear advantage  I understand the advantages you write about, and I also would like to have my files so well organized. But it comes down to laziness to fill in all the information in those tags.


Ah, I'm with you there. I only have good tags, because I started in 1999 (getting it entirely wrong in the process: ripped everything to MP3 to start with! Second attempt was not much better, as I ripped everything to lossless WMA, just before deciding to dump Windows and switch to Linux!) and only had about 400 CDs to rip+tag. I couldn't possibly tag up my collection _ab initio_ these days. But as I add to it, one CD at a time, with the bulk gotten right over nearly two decades, it is now not really a drama.

It's why if I'm ever asked by someone just starting out ripping + tagging, I'm keen to see them use an approach which is reasonably future-proof and flexible, because it's based on sound data management principles (for example, working out what the primary key of a classical music collection should be), rather than relying on features of operating systems, file systems or file managers that might not be universally appropriate, or which might be appropriate today, but maybe not so appropriate in five years' time, say. (Google Play Music users, I'm thinking of you!!)

But yes, ultimately, we each have to live with whatever vessel we've crafted for ourselves.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Well, it's certainly in the bare-bones department! (I am intrigued, though, why you go to the trouble of displaying the bitrate, but not separating out things like composer and composition name!). Is bitrate something you care about/use to find or filter much? Fair enough, if so: I've just never met someone for whom it really mattered before!
> 
> Personally, I would hate to have to rely on Windows' own search functionality! It's been through too many iterations in recent years for my tastes. But whatever floats your boat.


The way I do it now, all the information necessary for me to find a file in a Windows browser (thanks to the number of key words included in my long file names!) is contained in said file name, which also makes all work & performance data easily legible no matter the device, folder, or player I view my files in. It's very robust, and supremely easy to edit for whatever reason. There is no other metadata on my files. Had I included other columns in my player, they would have been empty.

I can't imagine the measure of tedium the entering of all the metadata separately into respective text boxes for each of my thousands of files would entail...

As for the composer and title of the composition, they are easily legible, visibly separated by a short dash.

Visible bitrates make sense when one considers that a significant genre in my collection is film music, full of files dating from "several computers ago" when I was very ignorant about sound quality, releases of questionable quality in the first place, MP3s, AACs, bootlegs, rips, edits, and so on. A quick glance at the bit rate not only gives me an immediate information whether the file "should be ok", or whether there is something fishy about it even before I play it; it has also historically helped me a lot as a form of feedback and support towards my ability to tell sound quality. You know, I sometimes forget what quality I have specific recordings in, and would not notice for years that maybe they are not quite as good as they could be, had I tried _again _to find the highest available quality source of them.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I sort by Artist on my DAP.

So for the Karajan example above:









Artist: Herbert von Karajan
Title: Sym. No. 5 in C minor, op. 67: 1. Allegro con brio
Album: Beethoven Symphonien 5 & 6
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven
Album artist: blank

I realize that listing the Conductor as "sole" Artist is reductive, but it's a necessary sacrifice for me. I have many box sets, some with different orchestras within them, and it would be really aggravating to break them up as HVK/BPO, HVK/VPO HVK/Philharmonia, etc. (or Bernstein/NYP, Bernstein/VPO, Bernstein/BPO).


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> At the risk of upsetting some posters here, can I refer you to my article on how to tag classical music rips?


I got a chuckle that we both happened to chose Jacqueline Du Pré as an example of "Album sort" options/conundrums.

We are not like-minded when it comes to sorting "Album Artists" by the composters name. I prefer the Conductor (or in special cases the Significant Artist) in that slot as the "Album Artist" since I can always do another sort "by composer" in a database and accomplish the same thing).

Bill


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I sort by Artist on my DAP.
> 
> So for the Karajan example above:
> 
> ...


Arguing against leaving "Album Artist" blank and making Artist "reductive" is to make the Album Artist "reductive" while making the Artist inclusive.

For example

Beethoven: No. 9 Symphony 1978 [EMI]

Album Artist: Eugen Jochum

Artist: Eugen Jochum; London Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Chorus, Kiri Te Kanawa (soprano), Julia Hamari (contralto), Stuart Burrows (tenor) & Robert Holl (bass).

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Sorting by Album Artist gives one a clean access to all of Eugen Jochum's works, but the metadata is intact if one wanted to hear Kiri Te Kanawa (or Lauritz Melchior, or Janet Baker, or other in different works).

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I'm afraid I don't get your point. I advise always to leave "Album Artist" tag blank. I give various screenshotted examples in assorted music players why having both "Artist" and "Album Artist" tags in the same music file produces bad results. Most music players will completely ignore Album Artist by default; when they don't, they will usually not then display the Artist tag. Either way, it is best to understand the variety of media players and their behaviour before picking a tagging strategy, since if you pick Player A today, you will likely end up using Players B and C in the coming years.

I also don't get your point about du Pre being a conundrum. She's clearly the "distinguishing artist" for various cello concerto, so I'm not sure to what you're referring.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

You really can't argue about this or that tag in a vacuum. You need to understand how different players interact with different tags. The article I linked to before shows how Foobar and Windows Media Player handle the same files tagged with both Artist and Album Artist tags quite differently, for example.

The short version remains that in a purely classical music context, the Album Artist has no relevance and little utility. Windows Media Player, for example, will in the absence of an Album Artist tag quite happily display and sort by Artist tag, like every other player software I know of. That makes the Artist tag the common denominator.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I'm afraid I don't get your point. I advise always to leave "Album Artist" tag blank. I give various screenshotted examples in assorted music players why having both "Artist" and "Album Artist" tags in the same music file produces bad results. Most music players will completely ignore Album Artist by default; when they don't, they will usually not then display the Artist tag. Either way, it is best to understand the variety of media players and their behaviour before picking a tagging strategy, since if you pick Player A today, you will likely end up using Players B and C in the coming years.
> 
> I also don't get your point about du Pre being a conundrum. She's clearly the "distinguishing artist" for various cello concerto, so I'm not sure to what you're referring.


Yeah, that's exactly why I leave Album Artist blank. It just messes with my player's sorting, especially if I'm porting to multiple players.

If I were listening on a PC, I might choose differently, but I want to always have the option to move from device to device, so reductive is better.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

It really isn't terribly legible! I mean, obviously it is to you, because you're used to it. But I wouldn't know who was performing your Beethoven at a glance ...and I'm fortunate to know "VPO" means Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra! (Though some might prefer WPO, and citizens of Vilnius might get confused too!) . I also can't pick an allegro from an adagio, since your data seems to miss those sorts of things out (or maybe it was just that specific screenshot).

I also wouldn't want to sign up to a particular operating system's search tool. If Microsoft suddenly decided to make Windows a subscription-only product at £100 a year, I'd want to at least consider switching to Apple or Linux or Chromebook etc... So having all my eggs in one OS basket would be a red flag for me. Better, in my view, to rely on a cross-platform app to do search consistently across OSes (as Clementine does, of course). But that's just me, and I realise not everyone is as prone to changing OSes as me! 

It seriously takes me maybe 7 minutes to tag up an average CD. Maybe less. I've over 60,000 files, so I guess that probably is a substantial investment of my time in the aggregate. But it's trivial on a per CD basis, and spread over two decades, it has not really been an issue of tedium for me 

Meanwhile, looking at your data, you've probably typed about as much as me, just squished altogether rather than in separate fields! I'm not sure you win on the time and tedium stakes 

Anyway, the OP can look at our respective screenshots and decide for himself which approach more closely matches his needs, I guess.

Appreciate you sharing the reasoning behind your approach, anyway.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I am curious. Your scheme presumably means that when you think to yourself, 'I fancy listening to some Beethoven!', you have to remember to search under 'H'!

I get a lot of stick for making people search under 'L', but at least that is part of Beethoven's name!

How do you cope with Herbert's 5&6 being filed under H but Zubin Mehta's being found under Z?

Identical compositions being filed in different places would do my head in, I'm afraid!

But perhaps performer is more important to you than composer, so having all Herbert's recordings "co-located" is more useful to you than having all Beethoven together? Am intrigued!!


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> It really isn't terribly legible! I mean, obviously it is to you, because you're used to it. But I wouldn't know who was performing your Beethoven at a glance ...and I'm fortunate to know "VPO" means Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra! (Though some might prefer WPO, and citizens of Vilnius might get confused too!) . I also can't pick an allegro from an adagio, since your data seems to miss those sorts of things out (or maybe it was just that specific screenshot).
> 
> I also wouldn't want to sign up to a particular operating system's search tool. If Microsoft suddenly decided to make Windows a subscription-only product at £100 a year, I'd want to at least consider switching to Apple or Linux or Chromebook etc... So having all my eggs in one OS basket would be a red flag for me. Better, in my view, to rely on a cross-platform app to do search consistently across OSes (as Clementine does, of course). But that's just me, and I realise not everyone is as prone to changing OSes as me!


As I mentioned in my first post, the performer / ensemble abbreviations are reserved for their most famous bearers, or at least the ones I consider to be such. Orchestras that rarely grace my ears usually are marked with full names, just like an unknown conductor or soloist would.

I've never used OSes other than Windows, so that concern seems quite alien to me. Anyway, I have a back up in the form of foobar2000, a player which I use for several specialized purposes, such as preparing a list of files to be copied into a new folder / into the cloud without taking them out of their folders on my device. Tracks opened in foobar, when dragboxed there, are as good as files dragboxed in their respective folders of origin, and can be simply copied into another music player, such as Clementine, or into a google drive. Foobar can also search and play files directly from .zip / .rar folders. I used to simply have it as my main player, until I noticed that Clementine seems to have a better sound quality, just like I once noticed that foobar2000 seems to have a better quality than Windows Media Player...

Edit: as for the point you made in your last post, about performers, I have a couple of rare cases where the performer is more important than the composer. The biggest of them is my "Korngold & Walter" folder, where I have files such as:

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (cond.) - Felix Mendelssohn - Midsummer Night's Dream Overture (arr. Korngold) - Korngold & WB Studio O 1934 (potato)

I am sure they would be confusing to many onlookers :lol:


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

I like to have all my fields in perfect order, but when I actually sort through things, I usually ignore everything but the album titles, and when I actually listen to music, I usually ignore everything but the track titles.

There's no elegant way to cover every case, but to take some examples...

Sample Album Titles: 
Bach: Das Wohltemperierte Klavier [Gould 1960s-1971]
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas [Brendel 1970s]
Mozart: Don Giovanni [Giulini 1959]
Piano [Chung 2013]

Sample Track Titles: 
Bach: Das Wohltemperierte Klavier [Gould 1960s-1971]: Book 1: 1. Prelude & Fugue in C, BWV 846: Prelude #1 in C
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #1 in F minor, op. 2/1 [Brendel 1970s]: 1. Allegro
Mozart: Don Giovanni [Giulini 1959]: 1. Overture
Debussy: Suite bergamasque [Chung 2013]: 3. Clair de lune: Andante très expressif

Sample Album Artist fields:
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Giuseppe Taddei, etc.; Carlo Maria Giulini: Philharmonia Orchestra & Chorus
Myung-Whun Chung

That looks a little busy, but in an actual playlist, the text kind of sorts itself out so it's easy to see:

Beethoven: Piano Sonata #1 in F minor, op. 2/1 [Brendel 1970s]: 1. Allegro
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #1 in F minor, op. 2/1 [Brendel 1970s]: 2. Adagio
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #1 in F minor, op. 2/1 [Brendel 1970s]: 3. Menuetto (Allegretto)
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #1 in F minor, op. 2/1 [Brendel 1970s]: 4. Prestissimo
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #2 in A, op. 2/2 [Brendel 1970s]: 1. Allegro vivace
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #2 in A, op. 2/2 [Brendel 1970s]: 2. Largo appassionato
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #2 in A, op. 2/2 [Brendel 1970s]: 3. Scherzo (Allegretto)
Beethoven: Piano Sonata #2 in A, op. 2/2 [Brendel 1970s]: 4. Rondo: Grazioso


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I think they all three play via Windows' DirectSound API by default, so there shouldn't be sound *quality* differences, but maybe my ears aren't as good as yours.

I would have thought Foobar's minimalist interface would have appealed to your Apollo 11 tendencies more than Clementine's, though! 

Personally, I would hate to rely on a major IT's offering. Think Google Play Music. Think of all those who liked XP's search capabilities. I get the 'I'll never use anything but Windows' point, but when Windows itself changes, you're potentially a hostage to fortune anyway. My professional life was spent never trusting a major IT vendor's product offerings of today being there tomorrow. Hence I like my data to be essentially self-describing where possible. It's more portable that way.

Just today, I built a brand new server on a Raspberry Pi. My world is forever messing about with new OSes! 

But such are different life trajectories! It has been interesting seeing your vastly different approach.


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I would have thought Foobar's minimalist interface would have appealed to your Apollo 11 tendencies more than Clementine's, though!


My Clementine settings are an approximation of those I had in foobar2000 :angel:; I just couldn't bear my music player sabotaging audio quality to the point where I prefered to listen in Audacity(!).


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I can't tell much from your post as to what an Album title is versus what a track title would be... Except that it looks to me that you're repeating the one in the other. Is that correct?

What player do you use?


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I'm afraid I don't get your point. I advise always to leave "Album Artist" tag blank. I give various screenshotted examples in assorted music players why having both "Artist" and "Album Artist" tags in the same music file produces bad results. Most music players will completely ignore Album Artist by default; when they don't, they will usually not then display the Artist tag. Either way, it is best to understand the variety of media players and their behaviour before picking a tagging strategy, since if you pick Player A today, you will likely end up using Players B and C in the coming years.
> 
> I also don't get your point about du Pre being a conundrum. She's clearly the "distinguishing artist" for various cello concerto, so I'm not sure to what you're referring.


Speaking of "tagging, " it helps when one quotes to whom they are responding 

In your linked article you wrote: "The Artist tag is a little problematic for classical music. What is an artist in the classical music environment? Is it Jacqueline du Pré, whilst playing a cello concerto? Is it Karajan when conducting a symphony?"

I found it interesting we used the same example (and arrived at similar conclusions). I find the sort slightly "problematic" in that I generally sort by conductor, but there are exceptions.

I disagree rather strongly with the advice to leave Album Artist blank. By simplifying that tag to the principle artist/conductor and not the composer, one can then use the Artist tag (as opposed to the Album Artist tag) to fill in as many of the other major principles including the orchestra, soloists, singers, etc as possible).

I use a music player that defaults to Album Artist, so this works best for me. And in the Artist tag I generally put the conductor first, which is my default sort preference. When it's not I put the distinguished artist first.

Bill


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I am curious. Your scheme presumably means that when you think to yourself, 'I fancy listening to some Beethoven!', you have to remember to search under 'H'!
> 
> I get a lot of stick for making people search under 'L', but at least that is part of Beethoven's name!
> 
> ...


So, what I do with my player in addition to having recordings grouped by performer is to create playlists grouped by composer. (I _could _just search by composer, too, but then everything would be grouped in a mish mash of conductors, orchestras, chamber/orchestra/vocal). My Sony WM-1A allows for 10 Bookmark Lists to be created, of pretty much any size. So I have a Beethoven list, a Brahms, a R. Strauss list, etc., and those lists have multiple performers within them.

As far as usefulness, sometimes I do like to just plumb through all of my Herbie (as I'm doing for my Karajan Thread project, those are all organized by putting the disc number in the album name), which provides a great deal of variety. But other times I want to plumb one composer.


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## Holden4th (Jul 14, 2017)

I recently ripped my entire classical CD collection - 2000+ disks - into FLAC Level 5 files. I used dBPoweramp for the process and I chose to rip it all onto an external HDD. I used the default setting which was Album Artist, Artist, Album, Genre, Composer, Track.

The trick from here was how to organise the files (deciding where to rip it to). I used a basic folder and subfolder structure so that I could easily find things for my self. One of my main folders was COMPOSER. From here a set of subfolders stored my music. For example: Beethoven/Piano Sonatas/Pianist. For CDs with various composers/works I had other main folders such as Piano, Violin, Chamber Strings, Chamber Strings plus, etc. Most of these folders had the same artist.

dBPoweramp works very well with one major caveat - choice of cddbs. Without a doubt the most comprehensive music database for track listings is Gracenote which dBPa doesn't use.


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## Eclectic Al (Apr 23, 2020)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> For example:
> 
> Album: Symphony No. 5 (Karajan)
> Track: 1
> ...


I do it much like you, except that I would have the Album here as something like:
Beethoven: Symphony 005 (Karajan, 1963).

The point is that in my software at least (I mainly play using MusicBee) the default is that albums are displayed in alphabetical order, and the thing that gets played as an entity is the album. Hence, without using any search entry I can simply scroll to Beethoven's bit alphabetically and then double click on this particular version of his Symphony 5 recordings, which will then be played.

If I just had Symphony 5 (Karajan) as the album then I would have to use other means to separate the tracks from other Beethoven Symphony 5 versions of Karajan's, as well as (for example) his Prokofiev Symphony 5, etc. My intent is that "Album" uniquely defines the thing I want to play as a unit.

Does your software work differently, or are you using a search of some sort to limit what gets played?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Spy Car said:


> Speaking of "tagging, " it helps when one quotes to whom they are responding


I normally do Bill, but if you check the timestamps on those last few posts of mine, you'll see they were made from an insomniac's bed at around 11.30pm-1.00am. Which is a clue that I was using my mobile phone in a vain attempt to make me finally pass out. The mobile version of this site doesn't (apparently -I didn't know!) do quoting. My apologies.



Spy Car said:


> In your linked article you wrote: "The Artist tag is a little problematic for classical music. What is an artist in the classical music environment? Is it Jacqueline du Pré, whilst playing a cello concerto? Is it Karajan when conducting a symphony?"
> 
> I found it interesting we used the same example (and arrived at similar conclusions).


Ah, I see, but it's not exactly a conundrum [i.e., an insoluble puzzle or riddle], because it's very easily resolved as that article goes on to explain: Artist is always and only ever the composer's name, not the _performer_. So yes, it's a question we've both asked ourselves, but we come to diametrically opposite answers, I think.

I thought you were referring to the 'distinguishing artist' component of the ALBUM tag, which is there to make one Symphony No. 5 look different from another: usually that's the conductor's surname, but as the article I linked to explains, there are good reasons for it to sometimes be 'Sutherland' rather than 'Callas', or 'du Pré' rather than 'Barbirolli'.



Spy Car said:


> I find the sort slightly "problematic" in that I generally sort by conductor, but there are exceptions.
> 
> I disagree rather strongly with the advice to leave Album Artist blank. By simplifying that tag to the principle artist/conductor and not the composer, one can then use the Artist tag (as opposed to the Album Artist tag) to fill in as many of the other major principles including the orchestra, soloists, singers, etc as possible).


For which the COMMENT tag is sufficient, unless you are the kind of listener who actually chooses their listening on the basis of who's conducting, who's the violinist, who's the orchestra and so on. Fair do, if you are, of course. But if you're not, then elevating those details into one of the standard tags which almost every player out there uses as its primary means of sorting by default would not be a good idea.



Spy Car said:


> *I use a music player that defaults to Album Artist*, so this works best for me. And in the Artist tag I generally put the conductor first, which is my default sort preference. When it's not I put the distinguished artist first.
> 
> Bill


Which player would that be, then?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Eclectic Al said:


> I do it much like you, except that I would have the Album here as something like:
> Beethoven: Symphony 005 (Karajan, 1963).
> 
> The point is that in my software at least (I mainly play using MusicBee) the default is that albums are displayed in alphabetical order, and the thing that gets played as an entity is the album. Hence, without using any search entry I can simply scroll to Beethoven's bit alphabetically and then double click on this particular version of his Symphony 5 recordings, which will then be played.


Ah. I see you haven't read all my article! I make the point in Section 2.4: where the same conductor records the same work multiple times (Boult's multiple RVW symphonies and Karajan's different Beethoven cycles being the two examples cited, funnily enough), the "distinguishing artist's" name is not sufficiently distinguishing, and a year of recording needs to go in.

So I would do 'Symphony No. 5 (Karajan - 1963), too. The hyphen is purely decorative, I hasten to add!

I'm not sure why you'd use three digits for the symphony number, though, in that specific case, since Beethoven didn't get to double digits. I use three when I want to force Haydn to sort properly; 2 when I want Miaskovsky to do so; and so on.



Eclectic Al said:


> If I just had Symphony 5 (Karajan) as the album then I would have to use other means to separate the tracks from other Beethoven Symphony 5 versions of Karajan's, as well as (for example) his Prokofiev Symphony 5, etc. My intent is that "Album" uniquely defines the thing I want to play as a unit.


The very definition of a primary key -and the key (pardon the pun) to getting tagging done well, in my view. The only thing I would say is that the Album can never be sufficient in itself to be the primary key of classical music. Too many people wrote Symphony No. 5: without the composer's name in the key somewhere, you'd not be unique enough. Hence composer->album is my primary key (though I actually make it composer->genre->album because otherwise people like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach come in huge lumps that are difficult to navigate. Also I play the cantatas sufficiently often that I like to have an obvious way to find them distinct from anything else Bach wrote!)



Eclectic Al said:


> Does your software work differently, or are you using a search of some sort to limit what gets played?


No, it works as most music players do. The search function is there for when I really need it, but I need it rarely ("What else did Dennis Brain record that I might own" kind of searches). It's main function is to simply display composer names in the left-hand pane, to provide few-click access to a composer's entire ouvre, and then a simple right-click and 'Add to current playlist' to make the music actually play.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Holden4th said:


> I recently ripped my entire classical CD collection - 2000+ disks - into FLAC Level 5 files. I used dBPoweramp for the process and I chose to rip it all onto an external HDD. I used the default setting which was Album Artist, Artist, Album, Genre, Composer, Track.
> 
> The trick from here was how to organise the files (deciding where to rip it to). I used a basic folder and subfolder structure so that I could easily find things for my self. One of my main folders was COMPOSER. From here a set of subfolders stored my music. For example: Beethoven/Piano Sonatas/Pianist. For CDs with various composers/works I had other main folders such as Piano, Violin, Chamber Strings, Chamber Strings plus, etc. Most of these folders had the same artist.
> 
> dBPoweramp works very well with one major caveat - choice of cddbs. Without a doubt the most comprehensive music database for track listings is Gracenote which dBPa doesn't use.


Ah, Axiom 0 of classical music tagging: all online CD databases are, without exception, really nasty, long-since having been polluted by people whose understanding of classical music was sketchy at best -and who anyway didn't tag as you probably want to do. I never use any of them! Much better just to tag it up correctly yourself in my view! But I share your particular pain about CDDB, which is dreadful.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> So, what I do with my player in addition to having recordings grouped by performer is to create playlists grouped by composer. (I _could _just search by composer, too, but then everything would be grouped in a mish mash of conductors, orchestras, chamber/orchestra/vocal). My Sony WM-1A allows for 10 Bookmark Lists to be created, of pretty much any size. So I have a Beethoven list, a Brahms, a R. Strauss list, etc., and those lists have multiple performers within them.
> 
> As far as usefulness, sometimes I do like to just plumb through all of my Herbie (as I'm doing for my Karajan Thread project, those are all organized by putting the disc number in the album name), which provides a great deal of variety. But other times I want to plumb one composer.


That is actually quite an important point: the use of playlists in most music players definitely adds an extra layer of refinement/capability to the way one interacts with the music collection by default. They mean you can catalogue the collection in general one way and then add an extra sort-filter or search-order on top of it with playlists.

Personally, I don't use them, because I interact with my music collection directly, using however the player software orders it (though Clementine, for one, does allow me to specify a 'group by' Artist, Genre and Album with a bit of finagling, so I don't just use its default grouping/ordering).

I did once create a 'Ring' playlist, in which all the Solti recordings were added in correct sequence, so I could play Rheingold, Valkyrie, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung in the correct order and without interruption (call me a masochist if you must!), but I found little real utility for it on the whole. It's just another layer of complexity on top of the data which, in my case, I don't really need.

But I'm lucky. For the most part, I couldn't care less for the _performers_ of a work. My interaction with music is _entirely_ about the composer. If I have multiple performers of the same work (the eight different RVW symphony cycles I have, spring to mind), then the conductor's name in the album title gives me all the distinguishing power I need (or a glance at the embedded album art). Since I don't really care if it's a Boult or Previn, that sort of detail only gets a passing mention in my cataloguing scheme and is never used as a major organising principle of the music.


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## Eclectic Al (Apr 23, 2020)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I'm not sure why you'd use three digits for the symphony number, though, in that specific case, since Beethoven didn't get to double digits. I use three when I want to force Haydn to sort properly; 2 when I want Miaskovsky to do so; and so on.


Ah, that's just because I know that Haydn did get to 100. It just appeals to my sense of order that all the symphony numbers have the same number format across all composers. 



AbsolutelyBaching said:


> The very definition of a primary key -and the key (pardon the pun) to getting tagging done well, in my view. The only thing I would say is that the Album can never be sufficient in itself to be the primary key of classical music. Too many people wrote Symphony No. 5: without the composer's name in the key somewhere, you'd not be unique enough. Hence composer->album is my primary key (though I actually make it composer->genre->album because otherwise people like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach come in huge lumps that are difficult to navigate. Also I play the cantatas sufficiently often that I like to have an obvious way to find them distinct from anything else Bach wrote!)


Ah. I haven't bothered to understand MusicBee very well, and it is just convenient for me to put the composer into the album text, so I can use that on its own as my primary key.

It may well be that I could get it to order things based on "composer -> album", but I haven't found it easy to understand exactly how it chooses to list things or define a playlist, and can't be bothered to work it out. Hence, putting the composer name as the first part of the album text means that it defaults to listing things in that order and the default playlist is what I want.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Stumbled across this when researching Foobar2000 v. Clementine audio quality. Just thought it might cheer people up!

View attachment 144346


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Eclectic Al said:


> Ah, that's just because I know that Haydn did get to 100. It just appeals to my sense of order that all the symphony numbers have the same number format across all composers.


I think that makes you even more OCD than me! Congratulations  :lol:



Eclectic Al said:


> Ah. I haven't bothered to understand MusicBee very well, and it is just convenient for me to put the composer into the album text, so I can use that on its own as my primary key.
> 
> It may well be that I could get it to order things based on "composer -> album", but I haven't found it easy to understand exactly how it chooses to list things or define a playlist, and can't be bothered to work it out. Hence, putting the composer name as the first part of the album text means that it defaults to listing things in that order and the default playlist is what I want.


I like MusicBee a lot. I wrote a comparative review of Windows media players/organisers a while ago, fully expecting Foobar2000 to come out on top... and nearly fell off my chair when MusicBee beat it in the looks _and_ organising-capabilities departments. If I was still running Windows, I'd definitely be using MusicBee, though continuing to stick to my own tagging schema:

View attachment 144348


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I think that makes you even more OCD than me! Congratulations  :lol:
> I like MusicBee a lot. I wrote a comparative review of Windows media players/organisers a while ago, fully expecting Foobar2000 to come out on top... and nearly fell off my chair when MusicBee beat it in the looks _and_ organising-capabilities departments. If I was still running Windows, I'd definitely be using MusicBee, though continuing to stick to my own tagging schema:


I tried MusicBee and did not like it very much. Too complicated and not really intuitive. Probably caused by the fact that I do not use tags. So using AIMP instead


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Jacck said:


> I tried MusicBee and did not like it very much. Too complicated and not really intuitive. Probably caused by the fact that I do not use tags. So using AIMP instead


Yup. I wrote that up as part of my comparative review, too. My big problem with AIMP is that it doesn't do proper gapless playback, but merely _fades_ between tracks (at least, by default).

PS. I assume you know: since you've already carefully structured your physical folder/directory layout, a program like MP3tag can simply be run against (a backup copy of!) your music files and be directed to use that physical layout as the basis for populating the album, title, artist and so on tags, all entirely automatically?

I mean, obviously, it won't get the full cast of thousands correct for a recording of Mahler's 8th, but it will get all the key tags right without too much effort.


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## JAS (Mar 6, 2013)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Yup. I wrote that up as part of my comparative review, too. My big problem with AIMP is that it doesn't do proper gapless playback, but merely _fades_ between tracks (at least, by default). . . .


That sounds like the old 8-Track cassette format. (I never got into that because it was particularly unsuitable for longer forms of music. The changing of tracks was annoying.)


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

JAS said:


> That sounds like the old 8-Track cassette format. (I never got into that because it was particularly unsuitable for longer forms of music. The changing of tracks was annoying.)


I actually prefer it if a player 'sounds the gap', rather than trying to finagle it by blurring one track into another, as it does with my sample Gloriana tracks in that article I mentioned. I mean, the gap is annoying, but nowhere near as bad as hearing music being actively truncated and messed around with!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I sort by Artist on my DAP.
> 
> So for the Karajan example above:
> 
> ...


Question for MatthewW (and please take it as intended: genuinely curious).

*How do you search for only Beethoven's Symphony No 6?*

I mean, first you've called it 'Symphonien' (German plural), so it's not named as a Symphony at all. Second, you've named it '5 & 6', not 'Symphony No. 6', so it has no independent existence as a delimited symphony at all (neither does No. 5, come to that, I suppose )

Now, if it were me using your naming scheme, I suppose I'd be able to search by 'Symph AND Beethoven AND 6', but it's not quite as easy as just typing 'Symphony No. 6' and having it appear in my playlist area directly. I think I'd soon find that a bit of a tedious way of doing things.

Or, and I guess this is what I'm really curious about, do you never listen to _just_ Symphony No. 6, but because it came supplied on a 2-Symphony disk, you always listen to them together?

Or, do you use your playlists to separate out the 8 (or whatever number it is: probably 9, given 5 movements in Symphony 6?) tracks on this disk into two separate symphonies _after_ initial tagging as a combined 'album'?


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Question for MatthewW (and please take it as intended: genuinely curious).
> 
> *How do you search for only Beethoven's Symphony No 6?*
> 
> ...


Sony players are wonderful for audio quality and ease of use, but they do not have alphabetical search functions (like, say, iTunes or Foobar).

Beethoven's various works are on Bookmark List #1. If I want to listen to just Symphony No. 6, I simply scroll to one of the dozen or so renditions of the 6th on that list. The list has album art and artist names under the tracks, so I can easily see which conductor is responsible.

The "symphonien" vs. "symphony" thing is not an issue since I am not searching via typed text. I am just a stickler for album names matching what is on the cover precisely. All of the track names include words like "Sym. No. 6 - I. Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arrival in the Countryside. Allegro ma non troppo" so it is easy to see which symphony within a cycle I am looking for.

Albums are broken out by album in the manner they appeared on disc. Why would I break up two symphonies if I would not also separate the first 5 tracks on "The Doors" by The Doors? I would never do that. Symphonies 5 and 6 have the same artwork, and were released on the same album. (This is especially apt for individual releases like Kleiber's Beethoven 5 and 7 album).

When I ripped the tracks, I was a stickler for accurate and consistent metadata. Exact Audio Copy has a free database it checks and populates from, but it has many different naming schemes (and Artist schemes, such as making the "Artist" Ludwig van Beethoven). I edit the metadata so that it fits my needs and is accurate enough to the album notes. I also scan my own album artwork, because the majority of album art on the internet is low-res crap. It's all more work on the front end, but I kind of enjoy tedious data tasks, and I prefer it to having wackadoo naming schemes all over my collection, or bad looking art.

I also just tend to remember my options pretty well. If I want Riccardo Chailly's Beethoven cycle, I can also go to my Artist list and scroll to the Rs, which is my primary means of browsing my entire collection (all genres).

My primary Home screen with sorting options I find useful:








Artist view, my primary means of browsing my collection. Here I am in the H's:







(and yes, there are 255 HVK albums in my collection. That's what happens when you buy all three "decade" boxes and break them out by album  )

Album view within Herbie's folder - I found it useful to indicate them chronologically by box set:








My Beethoven Bookmark List. Since the Hi-Res 1977 HVK cycle is my first choice, it resides at the top. But the list is long and comprehensive of my Beethoven by different performers.








The Play view (in this case Haydn Sym. 82 & 87). Note the metadata reflected below the image.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> Sony players are wonderful for audio quality and ease of use, but they do not have alphabetical search functions (like, say, iTunes or Foobar).


I liked the photos! Makes things a lot clearer.



MatthewWeflen said:


> Beethoven's various works are on Bookmark List #1. If I want to listen to just Symphony No. 6, I simply scroll to one of the dozen or so renditions of the 6th on that list. The list has album art and artist names under the tracks, so I can easily see which conductor is responsible.


That I didn't understand, sorry. I assume you have ripped that CD as track 1 - Symphonien 5&6, 2 - Symphonien 5&6 ... 9 - Symphonien 5&6. I get how Symphonien 5&6 appear in your Bookmark List 1, but not how you would know to start playing from track 5 onward so that you were only listening to Symphony 6.



MatthewWeflen said:


> The "symphonien" vs. "symphony" thing is not an issue since I am not searching via typed text. I am just a stickler for album names matching what is on the cover precisely. All of the track names include words like "Sym. No. 6 - I. Awakening of Cheerful Feelings upon Arrival in the Countryside. Allegro ma non troppo" so it is easy to see which symphony within a cycle I am looking for.


Ah, OK. I think that might answer the doubt I had above: because the 'work name' is included in the track title. Got you.



MatthewWeflen said:


> Albums are broken out by album in the manner they appeared on disc. Why would I break up two symphonies if I would not also separate the first 5 tracks on "The Doors" by The Doors?


Excellent question! Hopefully the answer is short, sweet and meaningful: Because classical music isn't like other music! The Doors released their album _as_ an album (I believe that's what "modern folk" do, anyway!). Beethoven didn't. That's my only answer, I'm afraid. It's why my articles and software etc are very clearly about _classical music_ tagging, ripping and so on. I would never presume to apply any of my approaches to non-classical music. I simply don't have enough, or know enough about it.



MatthewWeflen said:


> I would never do that. Symphonies 5 and 6 have the same artwork, and were released on the same album. (This is especially apt for individual releases like Kleiber's Beethoven 5 and 7 album).


Yeah, I get that. I just don't buy into the record companies' way of shipping stuff out. Britten being a case in point: lovely artwork on the LP covers, crappy black and white and irrelevant photos on the original CD release, slightly crappier abstract artwork with background photo of Britten on the re-release, and then some dopey line-drawing on the box set of his complete works when re-re-released! I can't be doing with what record companies feed me. So I break it out into what the composer wrote, no matter how it's supplied to me, and pick the best artwork I can remember from when I first ever encountered it. Thus my artwork for the Albert Herring opera is this:









...because that was the cover of the LP boxed set I used to take out of the library when first getting to know the work in the age of the Dinosaurs when I was a teenager.

I expect your Karajan symphonies have been re-re-released on BluRay or something too, combined with 4 different symphonies and exciting new album art!

Anyway: I just don't get excited about what is, for me, essentially a packaging decision made by a marketing department somewhere.



MatthewWeflen said:


> When I ripped the tracks, I was a stickler for accurate and consistent metadata. Exact Audio Copy has a free database it checks and populates from, but it has many different naming schemes (and Artist schemes, such as making the "Artist" Ludwig van Beethoven). I edit the metadata so that it fits my needs and is accurate enough to the album notes. I also scan my own album artwork, because the majority of album art on the internet is low-res crap. It's all more work on the front end, but I kind of enjoy tedious data tasks, and I prefer it to having wackadoo naming schemes all over my collection, or bad looking art.


Yup. CDDB is _always_ rubbish! We are in complete agreement about the importance of good quality album art, too.

One last question, then (if you are game!): do you _only_ listen to music via that Sony player? You don't have a desktop PC plugged in to a decent hi-fi anywhere, then?


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I expect your Karajan symphonies have been re-re-released on BluRay or something too, combined with 4 different symphonies and exciting new album art!
> 
> Anyway: I just don't get excited about what is, for me, essentially a packaging decision made by a marketing department somewhere.
> 
> ...


I live in a big city condo surrounded by neighbors. So I don't play music over a big sound system (those are attached to my TV and projector) very frequently. I listen mostly in the late evening over my good headphones (Sony MDR-Z7) from my good player (Sony WM1A). I also have a smaller Sony player (same collection, different SD card) attached to my Bose Stereo speaker in the dining room that I listen to whilst cooking. I've never really been a PC music listening person, except for a brief time as a bachelor using iTunes (blech!).

FWIW, I do have some collections that were ripped from Blu-Ray (such as the Beethoven cycle shown above in my Bookmark list). I do sort that as a single "album" under the new art, because it is a different audio format than the CD releases that were in the 70s box.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Incidentally, because I think "mobile music" is fairly important to a lot of people these days, I thought I'd replicate MatthewW's excellent screenshot approach with my own phone, which is Android, using Plexamp as the music player:









Principal organisation remains by what Plexamp calls 'artist', but which is 'composer' in my tagging scheme. It's fairly easy to jump to the end of the alphabet for Mozart using the little letter markers on the right. Otherwise, it's only around 500 composer names to scroll through, so fairly quick to do.









Having picked a composer, Plexamp now lets me down a little bit, because it only displays 'albums' by album name (I would prefer it to display by genre first, and only within a genre by album name). But it's mostly workable for music 'on the go'. Lots of album art imagery to help me choose a work to play.









Click on a 'work' and it's ready to play, with track lists available if I want to jump into the middle or something.

The key point here is that Plexamp is actually connecting to my own music server in the loft, even if I'm on the bus. My ISP gives me a fixed IP address, so that's not difficult to connect to from anywhere on the planet. It means the same Plex Server I use at home for watching movies allows me to listen to my one and only music library anywhere in the world. In other words, the same tagging scheme that works for me on the desktop with Clementine works almost as well on a mobile phone in a Poland hotel room. There's no music stored locally on my phone, in other words. The Plex Server automatically 'transcodes' the original FLAC files into lower-quality MP3s on-demand, so my phone's data allowance doesn't get eaten up quickly, either (though with a 60GB monthly allowance, I wouldn't care if it didn't transcode at all!)

So, another note to the OP: when you are coming up with a tagging scheme that works for you in one context, think of all the other contexts in which you might want to listen to music, and make sure your tagging scheme adapts equally well to all such contexts.

I find myself wondering, for example, whether some of the schemes I've seen suggested here would work at all, let alone efficiently, in the context of "Alexa, play Salieri". I know my tagging approach will (though I'd have to say, "Alexa, play _Antonio_ Salieri"!) Of course, if you never intend to let listening devices into your home, that's not something you need worry about. But if you ever think you (or your kids) might, then you need to think of the _future_ consequences of a chosen tagging strategy.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I live in a big city condo surrounded by neighbors. So I don't play music over a big sound system (those are attached to my TV and projector) very frequently. I listen mostly in the late evening over my good headphones (Sony MDR-Z7) from my good player (Sony WM1A). I also have a smaller Sony player (same collection, different SD card) attached to my Bose Stereo speaker in the dining room that I listen to whilst cooking. I've never really been a PC music listening person, except for a brief time as a bachelor using iTunes (blech!).
> 
> FWIW, I do have some collections that were ripped from Blu-Ray (such as the Beethoven cycle shown above in my Bookmark list). I do sort that as a single "album" under the new art, because it is a different audio format than the CD releases that were in the 70s box.


Got you about the listening conditions. Thanks.

I've just looked at your profile photo... so I can tell your ears are fairly young! I do quite a line in converting SACD and BluRay audio to 44.1KHz 16-bit FLAC, because my ears can't tell the difference! Thus, I only have one format to deal with. I wish it weren't so


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Got you about the listening conditions. Thanks.
> 
> I've just looked at your profile photo... so I can tell your ears are fairly young! I do quite a line in converting SACD and BluRay audio to 44.1KHz 16-bit FLAC, because my ears can't tell the difference! Thus, I only have one format to deal with. I wish it weren't so


That photo is about 7 years old at this point. 

Recording quality and mastering are far more important than file resolution. There are CD-quality FLAC files that blow away Hi-Res (such as Michael Sanderling's amazing 2019 Shosty cycle for Sony). But for future proofing I prefer never to alter a file format. As of right now, I've still got a good 90gb left on my 512gb SD cards. Once I start running up against that limit I will have to make some choices.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> That photo is about 7 years old at this point.
> 
> Recording quality and mastering are far more important than file resolution.


Indeed. I have heard multiple different Solti Rings at this point, thanks to remastering! I was aiming more at the 'multiple audio formats' comment, but different masterings can certainly be worth a re-purchase!



MatthewWeflen said:


> There are CD-quality FLAC files that blow away Hi-Res (such as Michael Sanderling's amazing 2019 Shosty cycle for Sony). But for future proofing I prefer never to alter a file format. As of right now, I've still got a good 90gb left on my 512gb SD cards. Once I start running up against that limit I will have to make some choices.


Indeed. That will be, er... fun! Unfortunately, I'm at something like 1.4TB, so SD cards need to get a bit better before I'll use them for much!


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Indeed. I have heard multiple different Solti Rings at this point, thanks to remastering! I was aiming more at the 'multiple audio formats' comment, but different masterings can certainly be worth a re-purchase!
> 
> Indeed. That will be, er... fun! Unfortunately, I'm at something like 1.4TB, so SD cards need to get a bit better before I'll use them for much!


I have a detachable SSD backup as my music repository, as well. But the players themselves play off of micro-SD.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I have a detachable SSD backup as my music repository, as well. But the players themselves play off of micro-SD.


I gave up having multiple copies of files at some point. It was just getting unworkable. Hence, everything is on one RAID array, to which Clementine attaches directly, and the Plex server also has access for remote listening purposes.

Anyway: that's prompted me to remember that I had one other question to ask you. If you buy a new Beethoven CD, you obviously rip it and tag it. But do you then have to remember to manually add it to your 'bookmark' lists, or playlists? If you rip it as 'Zubin Mehta', you'd presumably have to remember to also manually add it to your Beethoven bookmark? If you ever forgot, you'd have some Beethoven that wouldn't be readily accessible as Beethoven, no?

My point: back in the day, I used to rip a CD to FLAC, copy it into another directory tree, convert it to MP3, and thus make it available to my mobile phone that way. If I forgot the extra conversion step, I had the CD accessible at home, but not on the move. (Hence why I now make everything work off a single music library). It occurred to me you have a similar 'extra step' to do to make your fresh rips discoverable in the 'correct' place, no?


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

I renamed the movements of *Keith Emerson's Piano Concerto No. 1*

I. Zeus
II. Aphrodite
III. Thor


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

pianozach said:


> I renamed the movements of *Keith Emerson's Piano Concerto No. 1*
> 
> I. Zeus
> II. Aphrodite
> III. Thor


If I was tagging it, I'd have the TITLE tracks as:

Zeus (Allegro giocoso)
Aphrodite (Andante molto cantabile)
Thor (Toccata con fuoco)

...on the grounds that names are good, but tempo indications are more helpful to me, personally. I wouldn't use numbers in the track titles, personally, because I can count 

It's a fun piece, either way.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I gave up having multiple copies of files at some point. It was just getting unworkable. Hence, everything is on one RAID array, to which Clementine attaches directly, and the Plex server also has access for remote listening purposes.
> 
> Anyway: that's prompted me to remember that I had one other question to ask you. If you buy a new Beethoven CD, you obviously rip it and tag it. But do you then have to remember to manually add it to your 'bookmark' lists, or playlists? If you rip it as 'Zubin Mehta', you'd presumably have to remember to also manually add it to your Beethoven bookmark? If you ever forgot, you'd have some Beethoven that wouldn't be readily accessible as Beethoven, no?
> 
> My point: back in the day, I used to rip a CD to FLAC, copy it into another directory tree, convert it to MP3, and thus make it available to my mobile phone that way. If I forgot the extra conversion step, I had the CD accessible at home, but not on the move. (Hence why I now make everything work off a single music library). It occurred to me you have a similar 'extra step' to do to make your fresh rips discoverable in the 'correct' place, no?


Yeah, I have to manually add it to a Bookmark List. It will remain on the "Recent Transfers" shortcut until I get some new piece of music, though.

By no means are the bookmark lists comprehensive. They just comprehend my most frequent composers and recordings. I wish there were 20 (or unlimited!). But, Sony's gonna Sony. Their more recent Android-based players may allow for this, at least within the Android layer. I'm just not a streaming guy, so I haven't been interested in the tradeoffs (more UI layers, more OS storage, diminished battery life).


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> If I was tagging it, I'd have the TITLE tracks as:
> 
> Zeus (Allegro giocoso)
> Aphrodite (Andante molto cantabile)
> ...


Oh you technophiles! I was trying to be somewhat funny.

Actually I simply added the name to the actual title

_Zeus - Piano Concerto No. 1, First Movement: 'Allegro Giojoso'
Aphrodite - Piano Concerto No. 1, Second Movement: 'Andante Molto Cantabile'
Thor - Piano Concerto No. 1, Third Movement: 'Toccata Con Fuoco'
_
This was because I made a playlist of the album where I'd "adjusted" the track order. I just thought for an ELP album that 18 min of piano concerto, followed by 22 minutes of Greg Lake ballads was a lousy choice.

_*Fanfare For The Common Man
Lend Your Love To Me Tonight
Aphrodite - Piano Concerto No. 1, Second Movement: 'Andante Molto Cantabile'
The Enemy God Dances With The Black Spirits
C'est La Vie

Zeus - Piano Concerto No. 1, First Movement: 'Allegro Giojoso'
Hallowed Be Thy Name
L.A. Nights
New Orleans

Thor - Piano Concerto No. 1, Third Movement: 'Toccata Con Fuoco'
Nobody Loves You Like I Do
Two Part Invention In D Minor
Food For Your Soul
Closer To Believing

Tank
Pirates*_


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I've certainly altered track orders. Occasionally, collections of, say, String Quartets will be ordered as they appeared on CD, as opposed to composition order. Very annoying, and definitely something I fix. MP3Tag is a very frequently used tool for me.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> Yeah, I have to manually add it to a Bookmark List. It will remain on the "Recent Transfers" shortcut until I get some new piece of music, though.


Got you. So not completely undiscoverable.



MatthewWeflen said:


> By no means are the bookmark lists comprehensive. They just comprehend my most frequent composers and recordings. I wish there were 20 (or unlimited!). But, Sony's gonna Sony.


Indeed! I saw Techmoan had one of these (obviously a different model from yours, but maybe similar functionality), and I liked the look of them. But I had a MiniDisc player back in the day, so Sony is a no-no in these parts now!

Apple products are banned here, too! 



MatthewWeflen said:


> Their more recent Android-based players may allow for this, at least within the Android layer.


Maybe that's what Techmoan was reviewing. Difficult to keep up at times!



MatthewWeflen said:


> I'm just not a streaming guy, so I haven't been interested in the tradeoffs (more UI layers, more OS storage, diminished battery life).


Interesting you say that. I certainly am not into streaming from the likes of Spotify. I like to own (and curate and tag properly!) my music, not rely on someone else to get it wrong! But I can't say I've noticed storage or battery life detriments from doing it from Plex Media Server. My new Xiaomi Red Note 9 Pro (or whatever it's actually called!) can last two days on a charge, despite heavy music streaming via Plex. I mostly did it because I was fed up being stuck in Italian or Polish hotel rooms without a decent movie service: I can stream a movie from home via the Hotel's wifi no problem. And one day I realised, if I can do it for movies, why faff around with microSD cards for music? Just stream that too.

Interesting the way we all reach our own solutions, isn't it?!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

pianozach said:


> Oh you technophiles! I was trying to be somewhat funny.
> 
> Actually I simply added the name to the actual title
> 
> ...


_

I think I knew you were being funny. Sadly, I was trying to be subtly amusing right back at you!

For me, you've still got the 'work name' repeated more times than is good for you. And you're still counting out loud, even if you're spelling it out in words, rather than Roman numerals. 

So no, your tagging strategy won't work for me!

Also, you're violating Axiom 6 in a really bad way. Italians don't write Allegro Giocoso like that. Especially not with "j" when there should be "c"!_


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I think I knew you were being funny. Sadly, I was trying to be subtly amusing right back at you!
> 
> For me, you've still got the 'work name' repeated more times than is good for you. And you're still counting out loud, even if you're spelling it out in words, rather than Roman numerals.
> 
> ...


For the most part I'm only obsessed with spelling errors for artists and composers (yesterday I noticed that for two of my Steppenwolf albums the composer credits for the John Kay songs were assigned to "John Kays"). I'll find typos and horrible mistakes frequently, especially with composer credits.

Mostly my entire CD collection is not played, as it's all been digitalized by upload to iTunes. iTunes generally identifies the CD and tags everything for me automatically, although sometimes it will give me a choice, but it only gives the CD titles when I have to choose.

I like iTunes because I can sort in a variety of ways, or only look for tracks that have "Harrison" attached somehow. Not a perfect search tool, but it will do.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Got you. So not completely undiscoverable.
> 
> Indeed! I saw Techmoan had one of these (obviously a different model from yours, but maybe similar functionality), and I liked the look of them. But I had a MiniDisc player back in the day, so Sony is a no-no in these parts now!
> 
> ...


I'm not a streaming guy because I like owning and curating my music. I haven't bought a Sony Android-based player in particular because pf the tradeoffs I listed, which are only justifiable if one desires streaming.

Using a phone as one's audio player is perhaps less of a tradeoff because the battery is larger. With that said, I like to have separate devices that are purpose built as opposed to one do-it-all device that does lots of things less expertly. I also don't want to run down my phone battery on streaming or music listening. If and when a purpose built DAP runs down the battery, I can always use it plugged in (my dining room DAP is always plugged in, my WM1A perhaps 60% of the time as I listen on the couch). A phone is pretty useless qua phone plugged in.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I'm not a streaming guy because I like owning and curating my music. I haven't bought a Sony Android-based player in particular because pf the tradeoffs I listed, which are only justifiable if one desires streaming.


Not sure if you regard my Plex Server thing as 'streaming' or not. Hence my desire to distinguish between Spotify and Plex. The Plex server is _my_ server, serving (streaming, I guess) _my_ music which I own and curate. I really don't see tradeoffs with listening via Plex in terms of storage capacity, battery life or anything else you mentioned. (Quite the opposite really: I don't _need_ an SD card in my phone, because no music is stored locally).



MatthewWeflen said:


> Using a phone as one's audio player is perhaps less of a tradeoff because the battery is larger. With that said, I like to have separate devices that are purpose built as opposed to one do-it-all device that does lots of things less expertly. I also don't want to run down my phone battery on streaming or music listening. If and when a purpose built DAP runs down the battery, I can always use it plugged in (my dining room DAP is always plugged in, my WM1A perhaps 60% of the time as I listen on the couch). A phone is pretty useless qua phone plugged in.


I have a spare battery pack thingy that I can plug the phone into via a very short USB cable. If I drive somewhere, the phone is plugged into the cigarette lighter thingy for the duration. "Range Anxiety" is definitely a thing, I acknowledge, but I find it's manageable. And of course, in a hotel room, if I am after music or a movie, it's plugged in, so no phone-functionality issues.


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> I normally do Bill, but if you check the timestamps on those last few posts of mine, you'll see they were made from an insomniac's bed at around 11.30pm-1.00am. Which is a clue that I was using my mobile phone in a vain attempt to make me finally pass out. The mobile version of this site doesn't (apparently -I didn't know!) do quoting. My apologies.
> 
> Ah, I see, but it's not exactly a conundrum [i.e., an insoluble puzzle or riddle], because it's very easily resolved as that article goes on to explain: Artist is always and only ever the composer's name, not the _performer_. So yes, it's a question we've both asked ourselves, but we come to diametrically opposite answers, I think.
> 
> ...


Let's not argue over the semantics of the word "conundrum" (which can be defined variously), I'll settle for "problematic" when it comes to deciding who the primary (or "distinguishing") artist is on a recording. I have a general rule to sort by conductor, but there are exceptions to the rule.

I use iTunes (with a bit perfect add on). iTunes has many sort (and sort by search) options, but sorting by Comments isn't one of them. So your scheme of using the Comments tag (in the way I use the Artist tag) as including as many principals as possible (conductors, orchestras, choirs, singers, soloists, etc.) would have no search value.

Since I can sort by Composer (via search) I use Album Artist as the primary/distinguished artist. And put the composer's name in the Composer tag.

That way if I want to see all my "Beethoven," I do a search sort. If I want a particular conductor, I search by conductors name. If I want to hear everything I have by Franz Völker I can see everything I have tagged by a sort.

In my main organization I prefer to look at my collection sorted in order by the primary/distinguished artist, with the ability to to searches.

In iTunes using the non-searchable Comments section to have detailed artist information would be valueless.

So we all need to make choices based on what database and player we are using.

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

pianozach said:


> For the most part I'm only obsessed with spelling errors for artists and composers (yesterday I noticed that for two of my Steppenwolf albums the composer credits for the John Kay songs were assigned to "John Kays"). I'll find typos and horrible mistakes frequently, especially with composer credits.
> 
> Mostly my entire CD collection is not played, as it's all been digitalized by upload to iTunes. iTunes generally identifies the CD and tags everything for me automatically, although sometimes it will give me a choice, but it only gives the CD titles when I have to choose.
> 
> I like iTunes because I can sort in a variety of ways, or only look for tracks that have "Harrison" attached somehow. Not a perfect search tool, but it will do.


Er. OK. </backs away slowly...>

_Apple!!! :devil: _


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Not sure if you regard my Plex Server thing as 'streaming' or not. Hence my desire to distinguish between Spotify and Plex. The Plex server is my server, serving (streaming, I guess) my music which I own and curate. I really don't see tradeoffs with listening via Plex.
> 
> I have a spare battery pack thingy that I can plug the phone into via a very short USB cable. If I drive somewhere, the phone is plugged into the cigarette lighter thingy for the duration. "Range Anxiety" is definitely a thing, I acknowledge, but I find it's manageable. And of course, in a hotel room, if I am after music or a movie, it's plugged in, so no phone-functionality issues.


By "streaming" I mean a paid service in which you do not own the music, you only access it while you are a subscriber. I've definitely considered NAS music/movie streaming solutions. I just ultimately never wanted to have a server running 24/7.

So the only tradeoffs would be power usage (running a server) and audio quality (potentially, if you can hear the difference).


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

Spy Car said:


> Let's not argue over the semantics of the word "conundrum" (which can be defined variously), I'll settle for "problematic" when it comes to deciding who the primary (or "distinguishing") artist is on a recording. I have a general rule to sort by conductor, but there are exceptions to the rule.
> 
> I use iTunes (with a bit perfect add on). iTunes has many sort (and sort by search) options, but sorting by Comments isn't one of them. So your scheme of using the Comments tag (in the way I use the Artist tag) as including as many principals as possible (conductors, orchestras, choirs, singers, soloists, etc.) would have no search value.
> 
> ...


Very much agreed. One's tagging scheme needs to fit one's device/delivery system. There is no one "right" answer.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Spy Car said:


> Let's not argue over the semantics of the word "conundrum" (which can be defined variously), I'll settle for "problematic" when it comes to deciding who the primary (or "distinguishing") artist is on a recording. I have a general rule to sort by conductor, but there are exceptions to the rule.


It wasn't semantics. My point is that it wasn't "problematic", at all. It's a problem only because people don't get the point of the ARTIST tag. If you think it should contain the conductor, the orchestra... and the cellist... then you will ponder whether the ARTIST should be Elgar, du Pré or Barbirolli. But once you accept that it only and always should be set to the composer's name, it isn't a problem, nor a conundrum. It's a very easily _solved_ problem, is my point.



Spy Car said:


> I use iTunes (with a bit perfect add on). iTunes has many sort (and sort by search) options, but sorting by Comments isn't one of them. So your scheme of using the Comments tag (in the way I use the Artist tag) as including as many principals as possible (conductors, orchestras, choirs, singers, soloists, etc.) would have no search value.


Er, I've posted screenshots of me searching for "Vishne" and the music player correctly identifying Britten's _War Requiem_ because the Comments field mentions 'Vishnevskaya' in it somewhere.

My use of the Comments tag therefore has excellent search value, and I've shown it as such. I get that iTunes might not be able to search by tags it doesn't display up-front, or what have you. I don't use iTunes, so wouldn't presume to comment. But most Windows music players are quite comfortable searching through non-displayed information, provided it's present in a tag _somewhere_. My ability to find Vishnevskaya tracks is true for, for example, Foobar2000, Clementine and MusicBee, on Windows -even though I use Clementine on Linux as my daily driver. Not being able to search comments would seem to be a limitation of iTunes more than a generic problem faced by all music players, I have to say.



Spy Car said:


> Since I can sort by Composer (via search) I use Album Artist as the primary/distinguished artist. And put the composer's name in the Composer tag.


I think we need to distinguish more clearly between sorting (which is the act of putting a list into any defined order) and filtering (which is limiting the contents of a list by some criteria or other) and searching (which is the act of creating a list of things in a large collection which match some criterion or other.

What I want in a music player is a highly useful default sort order, and a very handy search facility that can help me winnow down the complete music library by filtering.

If a player's default display lists (for example -and I'm specifically thinking of Google Music Player) all the 'albums' by an 'artist' in _recording date_ order (which GPM does/did), then it's a dreadful default display order. It means Albert Herring appears in the album list for Benjamin Britten _after_ Peter Grimes, because it was recorded in 1964 and Peter Grimes was recorded in 1958. The fact that I could _filter_ for Albert Herring by searching for it doesn't make a date-ordered default display any more palatable!

So if a music player doesn't display things in a meaningful way, having great search or filtering capabilities doesn't make it better. And having to make my tags conform to the way a _specific_ player works is a dreadful thing to have to do. Your tagging approach should work cross-platform, cross-player, be scalable, flexible and work in wildly different scenarios (desktop PC v. Android phone v. Alexa device, for example).



Spy Car said:


> That way if I want to see all my "Beethoven," I do a search sort.


Well, I'm glad it works for you. If I want to see all my Beethoven, I click 'L', find "Ludwig" and click on that. No searching required, just mere visual inspection of an alphabetically-sorted list of names. It seems less faff to do it that way than have to do a 'search sort'. But each to their own.



Spy Car said:


> If I want a particular conductor, I search by conductors name. If I want to hear everything I have by Franz Völker I can see everything I have tagged by a sort.


If I want a particular conductor, I can do that too, by search:

View attachment 144395


And if I want everything that I've got with Lucia Popp, I can do that too:

View attachment 144396


My point is not particularly to diss your approach: if it works for you, that's fine. But does it do anything mine doesn't? No. Does mine sort things _naturally_ without needing to type in search terms as an extra step to finding music? Yes. Does yours? Don't know. Some screenshots would help!



Spy Car said:


> In my main organization I prefer to look at my collection sorted in order by the primary/distinguished artist, with the ability to to searches.


And this is where, I think, we get to the real crux of the matter. What one puts into a catalogue very heavily depends on what one wants to get out of it. If you want to go into a bookshop and ask for "Do you have _The Hobbit_", you're hoping for an alphabetical ordering of book titles. If you go in asking for "books by Tolkien", you're rather relying on an Author-sorted book collection. But beware when the shop sorts in one way and you think in another, for then you are relying on the Shop Assitant being able to translate from one sort-order to another (i.e., I know he's asking for the Hobbit, but I shall look under 'T' because I shall silently translate his request into a search-by-author-name). If you end up relying on the skills of a particular shop assistant in that way, you're kind of screwed when he or she leaves.

For some reason that honestly passes me by, but is perfectly legitimate, quite a lot of people care that it's Karajan, or Popp, or Vishnevkaya performing -and thus, for them, sorting by performing artist is clearly going to be a significant requirement. Me, I have only a passing interest in who is performing (except in so far as it distinguishes one recording of Symphony No. 5 from another). So, for me, being able to _search_ by performer is useful, but it would be a crazy way to sort things *by default*.

The pedant in me also wants to point out that picking a _specific_ artist for _classical_ music is always a problem. Are those folksongs by Britten, or Pears? Or Britten and Pears. What happens when Britten is conducting Vishnevskaya? The problem doesn't arise in non-classical music, I think, so much: Queen release an album, the artist is Queen, the performer is Queen, no dramas. Decca release a new recording of La Traviata... who are you going to declare "artist"?! The tenor, the baritone, the soprano, the orchestra, the conductor or who?! It's why, for me, caring about the performer sufficiently to make it your default display order is just not sensible in classical music, since few 'compositions' are ever going to have a single, clearly-defined "performer" (barring a piano sonata, I guess).

Anyway, I digress. The serious point is that when a newbie says "any tips on tagging", the response should, I think, be, "How do you approach your music?". If they do it like Radio 3 does ("And now for some Beethoven"), then composer will be king. If they do it like you ("I know I've got the recording by Pavlovaritch somewhere...") then ordering by composer would, possibly, not be so good. But if you don't ask them to specify their approach, saying "I do it this way" is just potentially misdirecting people, in my view.



Spy Car said:


> In iTunes using the non-searchable Comments section to have detailed artist information would be valueless.


And I get that. So, if you are an Apple user, using iTunes, doing things with the COMMENTS tag would really be a stupid thing to commit to: I absolutely agree. So, ask the newbie, do you use Windows, Linux, Apple. _Then_ say, 'well, in that player, this will work, but that won't work' and so on. Unfortunately, we tend not to see that, but merely get "I do it this way" replies.

If you look at the various posts in this thread, we have someone saying "I do it this way", and later it turns out that it only works for them because they're committed to using Windows Search to actually find music they're interested in. So if we're dealing with an Apple user, that's not really a tagging approach that could seriously be recommended, no?

Then we find out "I only ever use Windows"... and I think to myself, 'does this person not use a mobile phone with Android? Does this person never need to find music on a bus or a train?'. Fine, for *them*, if so... but that makes that person's context quite unique, frankly, so again, their particular choice of tagging approach can't really be said to have general applicability. The utility in suggesting it to a newbie asking for tagging advice? Dunno, but I don't think it's high.

Another one that I myself fail at sometimes: do you _only_ listen to classical music? Because a good tagging approach to use for classical probably won't be ideal for non-classical. Again: without establishing the boundaries, you can't really offer good advice. In my articles I try to make clear that it's for exclusively classical on Windows or Linux (and hence Android). And that it's for people who think "I'd like to listen to Beethoven" not people who say, "I rather fancy some Furtwangler today" or "I need something in E flat minor".



Spy Car said:


> So we all need to make choices based on what database and player we are using.


I entirely agree, 100% (though I think it's 'approach to music, OS/platform, player', but the general point you're making is sound). But I don't see a lot of "what player and approach to music" questions being asked in these sorts of thread. I do, however, see a lot of "I do it this way" answers, which kind of negates the very important point you've just made. I wish it were otherwise.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> By "streaming" I mean a paid service in which you do not own the music, you only access it while you are a subscriber. I've definitely considered NAS music/movie streaming solutions. I just ultimately never wanted to have a server running 24/7.
> 
> So the only tradeoffs would be power usage (running a server) and audio quality (potentially, if you can hear the difference).


Do it with a Raspberry Pi. 5 Volts and 2 Amps. My high school physics says that's 10 Watts. Or 8.8KWh per year (i.e., 8,766 hours per year, so 87,660 Wh, or 88 KWh). At around 15p per KWh, that adds up to £13.20 per year, I think. It's not worth worrying about, basically.

Don't get me wrong: to make sure my music is _safe_, I use a proper Xeon server running a 4-disk raidZ2 array as the storage backbone. That's going to be maybe 20 times the cost for electricity (and a hell of a lot more in a regularly-refreshed set of reliable hard disks!). But the electricity cost is still going to be fairly trivial: say £300 a year (assuming a 200W-ish server like the HP Proliant Microservers). The Raspberry Pi running Plex Server that access that music collection: I wouldn't even notice its additional cost.

Of course, I recognise I'm lucky I have a loft to shove permanently-running PCs and servers in. No-one would want to live with a server fanning itself in the corner!

*Edited to correct my maths! Out by a factor of 10  Doh! * Don't think it changes the point, though.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> Very much agreed. One's tagging scheme needs to fit one's device/delivery system. There is no one "right" answer.


I agree.

But some tagging schemas are crafted (for hypothetical example) because a particular piece of player software can't search COMMENT tags, where 99% of other players can. So that to me would seem to be a 'less applicable' tagging scheme than the scheme that works for the 99%.

Another tagging scheme might be crafted (for another hypothetical example) to use the particular features of a search engine provided by a specific OS. Given the OS manufacturer regularly changes that search engine capability as new versions of its OS are released; given that not everyone uses that OS in the first place... it would seem to me that such a scheme would be 'less applicable' than one which tried to be OS agnostic, or OS-feature free.

Or again, some people are, hypothetically, unique in the way they think of and approach their music and, perhaps, have very specific music playing needs that revolve around, say, a specific hardware device. Their scheme will be highly tailored to them and will work wonderfully for them... but their tagging scheme is surely 'less applicable' than one that tries to be hardware agnostic or depends on taking an approach to music that is vastly more common?

So, I will definitely agree with "there is no right answer". But I think I will insist that there are better and worse answers; and also that there are answers which can be widely-applicable and answers which are very narrowly-applicable. YMMV, of course.


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> It wasn't semantics. My point is that it wasn't "problematic", at all. It's a problem only because people don't get the point of the ARTIST tag. If you think it should contain the conductor, the orchestra... and the cellist... then you will ponder whether the ARTIST should be Elgar, du Pré or Barbirolli. But once you accept that it only and always should be set to the composer's name, it isn't a problem, nor a conundrum. It's a very easily _solved_ problem, is my point.
> 
> Er, I've posted screenshots of me searching for "Vishne" and the music player correctly identifying Britten's _War Requiem_ because the Comments field mentions 'Vishnevskaya' in it somewhere.
> 
> ...


Your answer that the Artist tag isn't problematic (despite saying it is "a little problematic for classical music" on your blog) presupposes an an acceptance of your solution that one use the composter for the Artist and leave the Album Artist bank, but that "solution" would cause a huge mess for anyone using iTunes. It would (in conjunction with using the non-searchable Comments for artist info) make this music database virtually useless.

So not exactly a universal solution.

As to not getting "I do it this way relies," IMS I started my first post saying "I do it this way." 

Rather you are the one saying saying the Artist "always should be set to the composer's name" and I simply disagree. Doing so would make my archive less functional using iTunes, where there is a Composer tag for that purpose. So *I* don't accept your "solution," nor do I agree that it is a "solution." Sorry.

I'm glad your database will search Comments, but iTunes does not. So using Comments isn't a universally good idea in my estimation, and would be an absolute debacle for those in the Apple universe with the current feature set.

In Comments I put in "comments," such as the source of the files, the year of the mastering, special notes (XZY's last concert), etc.

For one who seems to be punctilious over word choices, using Comments to list artists seems odd. Just saying.

I prefer a music database to display albums by the date they were recorded. If I have 15 performances of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Parsifal (not counting duplicates on different labels or different releases) I want them in order of performance. How would you have it? I'm confused.

Ideally a tagging system is cross solution, but--respectfully--the solution you offer is a fail for the Apple universe. Our ideas of "wildly different scenarios" simply don't match 

When you type in "L," Ludwig van Beethoven is the only composer/artist that comes up? I tend to doubt it.

Yes, my system does something yours does not. It makes iTunes very efficient. Yours would be a catastrophically bad way of organizing a collection for those in the Apple universe (which is part of the diversity).

I've ever been in a book store in my life (as a bibliophile) and encountered a shop where the proprietor has organized the entire store in alphabetical order by title (without respect to genre or author). Never once. It does provoke nostalgia for all the great book stores that have been lost in the past and worries for the few who are trying to hang on in this pandemic.

Sorting by performer strikes this listener as a completely natural way to organize a collection, just as I organize my books by authors and genres.

When you point out the problem of being a "pendant" you illustrate the problem I brought up at the start. It can take a judgement call when deciding the primary artist on a tag. I have a strong preference for the conductor as the primary artist, but have exceptions (as with the aforementioned Maria Callas and Jacqueline Du Pré examples).

I solve the artist issues by using the Album Artist as the primary sort and making the Artist tag inclusive. If I want to see all my La Traviata discs, I filter for that term. Piece of cake.

As for advice to newbies, you now say the best approach is "How do you approach your music?" (advice I would not quibble with), but that's not how you started your conversation and you continue to argue that your approach is a universalist solution, when it clearly isn't a good one for anyone in the Apple universe.

Windows, Android, and Raspberry Pi are not the limit of of a diverse universe. Your "solution" would not work in an Apple universe.

Like most music lovers I know, my listening crosses all sorts of musical genres, so I'd agree with your statement that your system "probably won't be ideal for non-classical." And count me as one who does wake up feeling like "I rather fancy some Furtwangler today." 100%.

I'd suggest looking at your criticisms (evidently aimed outwards) that you: *Don't see a lot of "what player and approach to music" questions being asked in these sorts of thread. I do, however, see a lot of "I do it this way" answers, which kind of negates the very important point you've just made.* and ask if you aren't guilt of the same thing?

BTW, as a long time lurker I've enjoyed reading your posts and have no desire to be an antagonist, I just think your system is a poor (to the point of being unusable) solution for people using iTunes.

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Spy Car said:


> Your answer that the Artist tag isn't problematic (despite saying it is "a little problematic for classical music" on your blog)...


It says it's a little problematic in paragraph 1 of section 2.2 and then goes on to resolve the problem in paragraph 2! That was my point. It's a problem experienced by people new to tagging, but it's easily resolved.



Spy Car said:


> ...presupposes an an acceptance of your solution that one use the composter for the Artist and leave the Album Artist bank, but that "solution" would cause a huge mess for anyone using iTunes. It would (in conjunction with using the non-searchable Comments for artist info) make this music database virtually useless.


Well, there are a number of things to say at this point. First, _your_ statement presupposes a need to hunt for performers in the first place.

But second, this Apple support query suggests that you're factually incorrect and that iTunes _can_ search in COMMENT tags, provided only that the column is visible. This seems plausible to me, since otherwise, iTunes would be about the _only_ music player that couldn't search through them. I think it's a flaw in the software that the column needs to be made visible at all to be searchable, but if those are Apple's rules, fine. There's nothing to stop you making it visible but about 2 pixels wide!

Third, if your point is that the tagging article should contain a disclaimer that it doesn't apply to iTunes, I'd be open to that... except that support article suggests it does. I'd be happy to say, "I don't use iTunes and can't comment about the applicability of any of the following advice if you choose to use it".



Spy Car said:


> So not exactly a universal solution.


Well, it's _fairly_ universal! It works on Windows, Linux and Android; on AIMP, MusicBee, Clementine, Strawberry, MediaMonkey, WinAmp and Windows Media Player after all. Oh, and according to that support article, it even applies to iTunes. I have yet to see a _more_ universally-applicable approach, anyway.



Spy Car said:


> As to not getting "I do it this way relies," IMS I started my first post saying "I do it this way."


I know. I chose my words very carefully so as not to offend you or to suggest that I was directly targeting you. 



Spy Car said:


> Rather you are the one saying saying the Artist "always should be set to the composer's name" and I simply disagree.


I am indeed saying that, but my article (which I always point to so that people can read _why_ I say that) explains the reasoning behind me saying it. You simply say you disagree with it -and by way of justification claim that iTunes can't search the COMMENT tag, which it turns out, it can so long as the tag is displayed somewhere. (I have no knowledge of whether that's actually true or not, I hasten to add. I'm just saying what I've read on the Apple support forum).

So yes, I say it and I explain why I say it, and the reader is then free to say, 'Well that sounds fine' or 'Well, that's utter rubbish'. Whereas you "simply disagree" for an apparent technical reason that actually turns out not to have any validity.



Spy Car said:


> Doing so would make my archive less functional using iTunes, where there is a Composer tag for that purpose. So *I* don't accept your "solution," nor do I agree that it is a "solution." Sorry.


And that's fine, provided we understand that (a) you reject it on the basis of a (possible) misunderstanding of how iTunes search actually works; and (b) every other music player for every non-Apple platform I can think of _does_ work with it well.



Spy Car said:


> I'm glad your database will search Comments, but iTunes does not.


Well, at the risk of repetition, read the support forums. I think it will.



Spy Car said:


> So using Comments isn't a universally good idea in my estimation, and would be an absolute debacle for those in the Apple universe with the current feature set.


So, honest question. If it turns out that iTunes _does_ search in COMMENT, provided only that the column is displayed, presumably in suitably tiny column off the side of the screen display somewhere, would your opinion of the suggestion to use COMMENT to store performer details be any different from what it is now?



Spy Car said:


> In Comments I put in "comments," such as the source of the files, the year of the mastering, special notes (XZY's last concert), etc.


Fine. As I say, if that has ramifcations for what you put in ARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST and COMPOSER tags, I think that's misguided. But whatever.



Spy Car said:


> For one who seems to be punctilious over word choices, using Comments to list artists seems odd. Just saying.


Most software with which I am familiar provides a dirty great big, free-form text field for COMMENT. Whereas for any other tag, they usually provide quite small display boxes. Case in point:









Now, I suppose I could suggest putting a large amount of free-form text into the LYRICS tag, so it didn't _have_ to be comments. But most player software won't search LYRICS in my experience. So COMMENT is the only *standard* tag that is amenable to the simple insertion of a large amount of free-form text.

The fact that it's called 'COMMENT' is really irrelevant: I also stick composer in ARTIST and DATE contains a year, not a full date. They're just tag names. You get to decide what use to put each one, having in mind the search and display characteristics of your player software and your tag editing software.



Spy Car said:


> I prefer a music database to display albums by the date they were recorded.


Again, that's your preference, and I respect it, but it produces seriously stupid results on occasion. Why should my list of Britten operas go "P, A"? When I want to play cantata BWV 35, why should I have to hunt for it _after_ BWV 190 simply because Suzuki chose to record BWV 190 two years before he recorded BWV 35?!

My contention (which you are free to disagree with, of course!) is that _most_ people are unlikely to care much about when their music was recorded and they would prefer alphabetically sorted lists of 'album names' that make instant sense, because we do so much else in life alphabetically. So I play to the _most_ crowd.

Don't forget that I do store the year of recording. If I want to find a recording by year, I can search for it. But it's not a _default sort order_ I'd choose to use.



Spy Car said:


> If I have 15 performances of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting Parsifal (not counting duplicates on different labels or different releases) I want them in order of performance. How would you have it? I'm confused.


Don't be confused! Read the article. (see the end of Section 2.4, specifically). I have multiple recordings of Boult doing RVW. Primary key theory mandates that the year of recording must go into the 'distinguishing artist' component of the ALBUM tag. Hence Symphony No. 9 (Boult - 1959) and Symphony No. 9 (Boult - 1969). If you have a specialist interest that means you've got multiple recordings of the same work under the same conductor in the same year... well, I will concede that you're going to need to do something like "(Boult - 1969 #1)" and "(Boult - 1969 #2)". In all cases, because the primary key is well-defined as composer/genre/album, it's the ALBUM tag that's going to have to bear the burden of truly distinguishing multiple recordings in that way.



Spy Car said:


> Ideally a tagging system is cross solution, but--respectfully--the solution you offer is a fail for the Apple universe.


Erm, again, and with due respect, and acknowledging that as a non-iTunes user I cannot say definitively one way or another, but Apple support would suggest you're incorrect in that assertion of 'fail'. I would genuinely be grateful if you'd take the trouble to tag one CD up the way I suggest and tell me, with COMMMENT switched on in the display, whether or not it is actually searchable after all. If it isn't, then I'll accept the non-applicability of my scheme to Apple users.



Spy Car said:


> Our ideas of "wildly different scenarios" simply don't match
> 
> When you type in "L" Ludwig van Beethoven is the only composer/artist that comes up? I tend to doubt it.


Of course not. On the desktop, I would scroll to the 'Ls' and click on "Ludwig van Beethoven". On the phone, I'd click the little 'L' on the right-hand side of the display (see earlier screenshot). That causes the main display to jump to displaying the "Ls", and visual inspection gets me to tap on the Ludwig van Beethoven entry.



Spy Car said:


> Yes, my system does something yours does not. It makes iTunes very efficient. Yours would be a catastrophically bad way of organizing a collection for those in the Apple universe (which is part of the diversity).


Again, I think you're basing that assertion on a technically incorrect fact.



Spy Car said:


> I've ever been in a book store in my life (as a bibliophile) and encountered a shop where the proprietor has organized the entire store in alphabetical order by title (without respect to genre or author). Never once. It does provoke nostalgia for all the great book stores that have been lost in the past and worries for the few who are trying to hang on in this pandemic.


Think of it as a parable. I've never sowed seeds in wild and thorny places either, but the truth of the parable remains pertinent anyway!



Spy Car said:


> Sorting by performer strikes this listener as a completely natural way to organize a collection, just as I organize my books by authors and genres.


And that's fine. But your choice of performer for a recording of Mahler's 8th, for example? For Verdi's La Traviata? I guess you're going to say "conductor", but I don't know why he or she should get such special treatment! My point being that what you declare to be 'performer' might not be the same as someone else's. (For the record, my Traviatas are catalogued as La Traviata (los Angeles) and La Traviata (Sutherland), and neither Mr Serafin nor Mr. Boynynge get a look-in!)



Spy Car said:


> When you point out the problem of being a "pendant" you illustrate the problem I brought up at the start. It can take a judgement call when deciding the primary artist on a tag. I have a strong preference for the conductor as the primary artist, but have exceptions (as with the aforementioned Maria Callas and Jacqueline Du Pré examples).
> 
> I solve the artist issues by using the Album Artist as the primary sort and making the Artist tag inclusive. If I want to see all my La Traviata discs, I filter for that term. Piece of cake.


Let's hope you've never mis-typed it as La Trviata, of course. (The serious point being that the eye can easily ignore small typos in a list that's displaying in, say, Alphabetical order, but if you're filtering things, you either get a precise match or nothing at all. [Ask me how I know!]. Filtering is good to have, and adds orders of flexibility to things, but I wouldn't want it to be the primary way of accessing music because of this precision that filters have).

The point you don't seem to take on board is that most players get VERY confused about tracks that are tracked with both ALBUM and ALBUMARTIST tags. I document this in section 2.3, with screenshots. Now, clearly, iTunes is special in its ability to not get confused (just as Foobar2000 doesn't), but if Windows Media Player does, and decided only to display/sort by one or other of them without giving you the option which, I'd suggest that it's a problematic approach.



Spy Car said:


> As for advice to newbies, you now say the best approach is "How do you approach your music?" (advice I would not quibble with), but that's not how you started your conversation...


That's _exactly_ how I started my conversation. "At the risk... can I point you to this article...". And the article precisely and deliberately gets people to think about how they should or might approach a music catalogue and ask questions of it.



Spy Car said:


> ...and you continue to argue that your approach is a universalist solution, when it clearly isn't god good one for anyone in the Apple universe.


I definitely do not, and never have, argued that it has universal applicability. As the article itself makes clear, if you care about the physical CD or LP more than the music that's delivered on it, my approach will be wrong for you (so MatthewW's attachment to tagging things exactly as the CD cover displays them, so he would be filtered out of considering my approach in paragraph 5 of section 1 of my article).

As the end of Section 1 makes clear, if you cannot agree that "Composer is King", then the rest of the article isn't for you. So anyone who says "I want to default sort by date", or "I want to default sort by performer (however ill-defined that might be)" also will know not to bother reading further.

It also definitely doesn't apply to people who want to catalogue both classical and non-classical music. The fact that the article is entitled 'Axioms of *Classical* Music Tagging makes that pretty clear.

I think I'm fairly up-front that it is a tagging strategy that will work for a lot of people with a diverse range of classical music and a diverse operating system and device infrastructure, that's true. But I don't make the sort of claims you attribute to me.



Spy Car said:


> Windows, Android, and Raspberry Pi are not the limit of of a diverse universe. Your "solution" would not work in an Apple universe.


I am again going to ask you, genuinely, if you would go to the trouble and effort of tagging up a CD rip using my tagging suggestions, switching on COMMENT in the iTunes display, and finding out whether or not it really won't work in an Apple universe. I think it will, but I would be happy to be proved wrong -and I've no doubt, too, that even if I'm proved right on the specific issue of being able to search COMMENT tags, there might be other issues that arrive that would make it an impractical approach for you. But just to say 'it's not universal because it doesn't work on Apple': I won't accept that. Apple accounts for about 13% of desktops, so my approach works on 87% of desktops. It works on 60%+ of mobile phones. And I think it _will_ work on Apple, provided only that COMMENT is made searchable by making it visible.



Spy Car said:


> Like most music lovers I know, my listening crosses all sorts of musical genres, so I'd agree with your statement that your system "probably won't be ideal for non-classical." And count me as one who does wake up feeling like "I rather fancy some Furtwangler today." 100%.
> 
> I'd suggest looking at your criticisms (evidently aimed outwards) that you: *Don't see a lot of "what player and approach to music" questions being asked in these sorts of thread. I do, however, see a lot of "I do it this way" answers, which kind of negates the very important point you've just made.* and ask if you aren't guilt of the same thing?


And I would say no, because the very first thing I did in this thread was to refer people to a 12,500 word article in which all these assumptions are questioned and discussed.



Spy Car said:


> BTW, as a long time lurker I've enjoyed reading your posts and have no desire to be an antagonist, I just think your system is a poor (to the point of being unusable) solution for people using iTunes.


It's not my intention to be antagonistic either, Bill; and I appreciate your kind words about other posts. And I actually appreciate your restricting your criticism of my 'solution' to "people using iTunes". I'm half-prepared to admit the fact ...but I'd really like you to see if COMMENT can be made searchable first!

And if you find out it is, I'd be interested in finding out what other issues my approach would bring. I'd hope I was open-minded enough to tweak and finagle the thing to accommodate needs I haven't anticipated, for example...provided only they had mass-applicability.


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> It says it's a little problematic in paragraph 1 of section 2.2 and then goes on to resolve the problem in paragraph 2! That was my point. It's a problem experienced by people new to tagging, but it's easily resolved.
> 
> Well, there are a number of things to say at this point. First, _your_ statement presupposes a need to hunt for performers in the first place.
> 
> ...


I think your "cure" to the problem of who might be chosen as the primary/distinguished artist is worse than the disease. Sorry. Definitely would not work well in the Apple universe. So I don't see using the conductor as the Artist and ignoring Album Artist balnk as a solution I'd consider. And I'm not "new" to tagging.

And yes, I do seack for performers. Guilty as charged. My listening habits are strongly formed by seeking music by performers and performances. That said if I generically wish to see all my Beethoven or Bruckner or whatever, doing so is a piece of cake.

As to iTunes, I tried searching for items in my Comments on my Mac multiple times prior to posting. Unless there is a hidden search option I don't know about, Comments are not searchable by default. Not sure what you mean by the Comment column being visible. On the desktop Comments are to visible unless one goes into the Album Info (metadata) section. This is unlike the other tag fields.

We disagree about what "universality" means.

I think you are confused about how iTunes works. Using Comments for art/performer information doesn't work that way, and that's why there tag options for Composer, Artist, and Album Artist. I use these are they were designed to be used.

I've gone into all the desktop setting for iTunes on my Mac and littery have no idea what you are talking about when you talk about a column "being displayed."

There are two different tags available to iTunes users for artists. One [Album Artist] is great for use with primary/distinguished artists and another [Artist] that allows one to fill in as many performers as possible]. That's how the platform is designed to work. So I'll continue to put the name of the composer in the Composer metadata field and "comments" in the Comment field.

I don't think it is 'misguided" to use the metadata as it was designed to be used. In what universe does a list of artistic talents on a recording qualify as a "Comment?" We will need to disagree on who is misguided.

I've never run out of room in the Artist tag even when making a long list of singers, conductor, and orchestra in an Opera.

I use the Comments to make comments. "The first performance of Bird Song," or LP transfer by PDQ, or other information about my source, or comment on the work.

No download service offers music with performers in the Comments field. You are going against the established norms (and to your disadvantage, from my perspective).

None of the eventualities you present is a real issue. If you want to hear a particular work it's supremely easy to do a search. Type "La Traviata" and that's what one sees.

I very much care about when performances were recorded. It is an "essential" part of the way I use my archive. I have many classical works where a conductor has recorded a piece multiple times. I'm interested in progressions. Is that unusual? I don't think so. I want them in order of performance (but could change that sort option in iTunes).

Parable? Have you been to a bookstore that shelved books by the title of the book (while ignoring the author and the genre of the book)? That would be a "wild and thorny place."

For Mahler 8, if would tag Gustav Mahler as the "composter in the Composer field, the conductor of the performance in the Album Artist field, and would include the conductor, the orchestra, the choirs, and principle soloists in the Artists field.

If I mistyped La Traviata, nothing would come up (assuming I'd never made the same spelling error when entering my metadata) and in truth, by the time I've typed La Tra...I don't need to persist if I'm feeling lazy.

I understand some players are poorly designed and don't work well with standard tags. We should encourage manufacturers to improve their acts.

I can not agree that Composer is "king" when organizing a music library. Too limiting for me. And I think I'm in the vast majority of people who organize their music by performers.

And what downloadable music provider uses your system? I'd dare say, zero. One would need to manually re-tag every new digital download by hand (to end up with a scheme that virtually no one uses). Strikes me as unwise. Hopefully manufactures of players improve their software moving forwards. That does seem to be the weak link with non-Apple portable devices.

I said it before, but I see no way to "switch on the Comments in an iTunes display" on the desktop. That's not how iTunes works on a Mac. Comments are only visible if one goes into the show "Info" (metadata) mode. In ordinary use the comment field information is hidden from the user, Unlike Album, Album Artist, and Artist. Composer is a user selectable option by work. I tried to make Comments "searchable" on the desktop, but see no way to do so. I'd like to be able to search comments, but still would not use it as the field to tag performers.

I am sincere when I say I've enjoyed reading your posts. Despite my ongoing disagreement with your metadata scheme.

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

OK, I felt bad about asking you to test stuff out. I swallowed my principles, fired up a Windows 10 virtual machine, installed iTunes for Windows from the Windows Store, and then (this bit really brought tears to my eyes!) parted with credit card details so that I could obtain an Apple ID and actually use the software! (Honestly: especially since Apple have said that development of iTunes is to end soon, I'd be looking for a different media player on Apple, if it was me! But I digress...)

I brought over three CDs-worth of FLACs from my regular media library. I had to convert them to MP4 files, of course, since iTunes won't natively play FLAC (doh!), but eventually I started in this state:









It's not dreadful, it's not ideal. But it's usable. Quite similar to how MusicBee displays things, I think. Note that I am in Songs mode. Note that I haven't had to alter my tagging scheme at all, yet it looks usable. Note, finally, that over on the right-hand side, I have enabled the Comments column, though I've made it very small and pushed it away so that I don't really have to look at it.

Next test:









Note I've typed 'Vish' in the search window at top-left. Note that the Aaron Copland and Beethoven CDs have disappeared: the display has correctly filtered for only that CD in which Vishnevskaya is singing. Yet her name appears nowhere in the 'standard' tags: it's being found in that COMMENT tag. So iTunes really _can_ search the COMMENT tag.

And finally I change the search term from 'Vish' to 'Berl'... and suddenly the Karajan CD is the only one displayed:









Again, the correct CD is displayed, because Karajan is conducting the Berlin Philharmonic.

Short version: my tagging strategy _will_ work effectively on Apple and/or iTunes, just as it does on Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris and Raspberry Pi. 

Slightly longer version: Apple has announced the death of iTunes and I don't like the way it can't do FLAC natively nor the way it defaults to reporting statistics back to Apple HQ (albeit that can be turned off). I wouldn't hitch my media horse to that particular post, anyway. So I'll still edit my article and add a disclaimer: it works on iTunes, but you shouldn't really be using it.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

I just wanted to finish up with these two screenshots too:









Notice that I am now no longer in 'Songs' mode, but have selected the 'Artists' mode in the left-most panel. According to the Apple support articles I read, searching on the COMMENT tag should *not* work in this non-Songs mode, but it clearly does. "Berl" being the search term, only the Karajan CD is displayed.









And change the search term to 'Vish' (or 'Pear', come to that), the correct War Requiem CD is displayed alone.

So comment search works fine in non-Songs mode too, which is much better than I thought and makes iTunes a nearly-equivalent player to MusicBee (given that 'Artists' is how I'd usually sort/group my library in most other media players).


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## Spy Car (Nov 15, 2017)

Apple hasn't announced "the death" of iTunes, they've just changed the name to Music in the most recent OS version. It's a rebranding move.

I searched for known "comment" terms after switching over to the Song Tab mode and get no results. I don't see the option for turning Comment filtering on. I get Name (song name), Time, Artist, Album, Genre, and Plays. If there are ways to turn on other fields, they are pretty well hidden.

And I would never (NEVER EVER) want to us iTunes in Song mode in any case. That would be far beyond unwieldy. Looks like an Android/Widows-type nightmare of disorganization 

Are you able to filter and sort by Comments (artists) in the critical (for me anyway) Album view? Doesn't work for me. I tried.

Bill


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Spy Car said:


> I think your "cure" to the problem of who might be chosen as the primary/distinguished artist is worse than the disease. Sorry. Definitely would not work well in the Apple universe.


And I'm sorry, but since you typed this, I just demonstrated with screenshots that it works perfectly well in an iTunes universe. You _can_ sort by COMMENT tag. It's not impossible at all, and you don't even need to be in Songs mode to do it (which, if that had been a requirement, would have made it a bit of a non-starter).



Spy Car said:


> So I don't see using the conductor as the Artist and ignoring Album Artist balnk as a solution I'd consider. And I'm not "new" to tagging.


If you were (new, I mean), I don't think you'd be quite so immune to change, I'm afraid. I see it quite often: I've got things the way that work for me, so I'm not considering anything else that might work just as well... or possibly better.



Spy Car said:


> And yes, I do seack for performers. Guilty as charged. My listening habits are strongly formed by seeking music by performers and performances. That said if I generically wish to see all my Beethoven or Bruckner or whatever, doing so is a piece of cake.


See my iTunes screenshots above. I can search by singer, orchestra, conductor, horn player... whatever, basically. Once you can search COMMENT, all becomes terribly easy, in fact.



Spy Car said:


> As to iTunes, I tried searching for items in my Comments on my Mac multiple times prior to posting. Unless there is a hidden search option I don't know about, Comments are not searchable by default.


Well, there is the option to do what Apple support said to do: display the COMMENT tag. Shrink it down to tiny size and maybe even resize things so it disappears off to the right if seeing it annoys you, and it's searchable in Songs mode and Artists mode.



Spy Car said:


> Not sure what you mean by the Comment column being visible. On the desktop Comments are to visible unless one goes into the Album Info (metadata) section. This is unlike the other tag fields.


Unfortnuately, Apple support gives conflicting advice on this. Some say, go into Songs mode, click View -> Show View Options and in the Personal section, place a check mark against the 'Comments' item:









Others say, right-click the column headers that are already displayed in Songs mode









By ticking the 'Comments' item in that list, it makes it be displayed as one of the columns in the background music list.

Either way, once the Comments column is visible, it's searchable.



Spy Car said:


> We disagree about what "universality" means.
> 
> I think you are confused about how iTunes works.


I'm really not. I just tested it. It works fine. I can do a search for any piece of free-form text that stored in the COMMENT tag. If that happens to be the name of the principle violinist or the tea lady that was on duty during the recording sessions, I can filter the list of albums or songs to be played by it.



Spy Car said:


> Using Comments for art/performer information doesn't work that way, and that's why there tag options for Composer, Artist, and Album Artist. I use these are they were designed to be used.


I'm afraid I've just demonstrated that COMMENTS _do_ work that way, even in iTunes. And that's why it's perfectly ok to use the tag which has been provided for the purpose. I use it as it was designed to be used, too!



Spy Car said:


> I've gone into all the desktop setting for iTunes on my Mac and littery have no idea what you are talking about when you talk about a column "being displayed."


Well, I've described it in more detail above, so maybe you'll have better luck with a second try?



Spy Car said:


> There are two different tags available to iTunes users for artists. One [Album Artist] is great for use with primary/distinguished artists and another [Artist] that allows one to fill in as many performers as possible]. That's how the platform is designed to work. So I'll continue to put the name of the composer in the Composer metadata field and "comments" in the Comment field.
> 
> I don't think it is 'misguided" to use the metadata as it was designed to be used. In what universe does a list of artistic talents on a recording qualify as a "Comment?" We will need to disagree on who is misguided.


But in which universe is it OK to declare Karajan the only artist that's involved in a recording of Beethoven's 5th? You make judgment calls about what to put where in your tags. So do I. Our judgment calls are different, I agree, but mine are not misguided so much as yours are based on a misunderstanding of what iTunes is capable of doing, I'm afraid.



Spy Car said:


> I've never run out of room in the Artist tag even when making a long list of singers, conductor, and orchestra in an Opera.


I didn't say you would run out of room! I know my tags and their technical capabilities, and there's about 4 million possible tag=value pairs possible in a FLAC file and there's functionally no limit to what the value can be set to... But *use your eyes*! Look at what space MP3Tag or EasyTag or dbPowerAmp makes available for Artist versus Comments. Which is _easier_ to use for typing a long bit of text?

Here's a clue:









That's me having copied my COMMENT tag contents into the PERFORMER tag field (chosen at random: I could have picked Album Artist or any other displayed field if you'd prefer). The PERFORMER is quite happy to be 28 words and 235 characters long... but the display is truncated. I have to enter the field and scroll right if I want to read it all. It's not what's _possible_, it's what's easier to read!

Now, not every tag editor I've used provides a large space for COMMENT like that one does. But many do.

I've proposed using COMMENT because it works for most software situations. That's all. It's not that it's the only way to do it, but it is one of the more _flexible_ ways of doing it, because if you ever change from Apple to Windows, or Windows to Linux, or Linux back to Apple, you'll find most tag editors will allow you to work in the same way. It's a bit of gentle future-proofing, basically. So, yes, I could stick it in any one of the other fields... but it just works more comfortably to use COMMENT.



Spy Car said:


> I use the Comments to make comments. "The first performance of Bird Song," or LP transfer by PDQ, or other information about my source, or comment on the work.


And that's fine too. I don't find "I was sitting in the third row when this was performed" any less or more of a comment than "Peter Pears is singing this", personally. You have decided on a data hierarchy where "Peter Pears (tenor)" counts as somehow more 'significant' than "This concert cost me a fortune!", but as data, there's really nothing intrinsic to distinguish them from each other. They are both unstructured, free-form text.



Spy Car said:


> No download service offers music with performers in the Comments field. You are going against the established norms (and to your disadvantage, from my perspective).


Oh, don't get me started on "established norms"! I get my downloads from Prestoclassical, an online store I have adored and spent up big with for years. The poor loves wouldn't know how to tag their music from their elbows, unfortunately. I have to re-tag _everything_ I get from them. To me, this merely means I'm in charge of my data. I don't have to put up with anything the music industry foists on me, and given their strongly non-classical financial interests, I don't expect them to get it right, either.



Spy Car said:


> None of the eventualities you present is a real issue. If you want to hear a particular work it's supremely easy to do a search. Type "La Traviata" and that's what one sees.


You've missed my point, I think. If you are having to type for something in a search box, you have to match _exactly_. If, by chance, one of your tracks is listed as 'La Trviata', the search will not retrieve it. But if you are merely _sorting_ by album name, then a mistyped 'Trviata' will probably not even register with your brain. You'll see the album and play it just fine, despite the typo.

I'm saying that the default sort order is immune from the need to match precisely. A search result isn't.



Spy Car said:


> I very much care about when performances were recorded. It is an "essential" part of the way I use my archive. I have many classical works where a conductor has recorded a piece multiple times. I'm interested in progressions. Is that unusual? I don't think so. I want them in order of performance (but could change that sort option in iTunes).


Did you miss the part where I said that I also add dates into my Album names where I think they're necessary? You're really not doing anything I don't do.



Spy Car said:


> For Mahler 8, if would tag Gustav Mahler as the "composter in the Composer field, the conductor of the performance in the Album Artist field, and would include the conductor, the orchestra, the choirs, and principle soloists in the Artists field.


And those are all decisions you're making that have no more intrinsic validity than me saying Gustav Mahler would be COMPOSER and ARTIST, ALBUM ARTIST would be blank and Zubin Mehta, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir would go in COMMENT. There's nothing particular intrinsically valid about my choices either.. except that they happen to work in multiple players on multiple platforms flexibly, extensibly and efficiently.



Spy Car said:


> I understand some players are poorly designed and don't work well with standard tags. We should encourage manufacturers to improve their acts.


I'm afraid that ship has sailed. There are remarkably few good music players available these days: developers for them just have moved on to the presumably more exciting world of streaming media, I suppose. I have politely told Prestoclassical everytime they've tagged things incorrectly, for example, but there's no money in fixing it, I think.



Spy Car said:


> I can not agree that Composer is "king" when organizing a music library. Too limiting for me. And I think I'm in the vast majority of people who organize their music by performers.


Well, we must agree to differ. When I tune in to Radio 3 (sorry, I don't know where you're located, so I don't know if that reference means anything to you or not), they're playing 'Composer of the Week'. When they list their program schedules, they list it by composer. When I go into a record shop, they sort alphabetically by composer surname. When I go to prestoclassical, what's their _first_ sort criterion?









And so on. Now, I know there are audiophiles that do things differently. I've had requests from some of them to add a tag for 'key' and for 'recording engineer' into my own tagging software, for example (requests denied, incidentally!). So if you're one of them, that's fine and nothing I've said really applies to you.



Spy Car said:


> And what downloadable music provider uses your system? I'd dare say, zero.


[

I don't think it's much of a dare to say zero! I think it's very clearly zero. And I would contend that's because almost no-body in the music industry marketing departments understands classical music properly. It doesn't surprise me: fortunately we have tag editors to rectify their deficiencies.



Spy Car said:


> One would need to manually re-tag every new digital download by hand (to end up with a scheme that virtually no one uses).


That's precisely what I do. It's what MatthewW does, too. It's what Fabulin does as well. I'd be astonished if people who think of themselves as music _lovers_ would ever do anything else, frankly. If you care about it, don't you curate it carefully?

I sure as hell wouldn't trust my organisation of 5000 ripped CDs to third parties of whom I knew nothing and cared less!



Spy Car said:


> Strikes me as unwise. Hopefully manufactures of players improve their software moving forwards. That does seem to be the weak link with non-Apple portable devices.


That's really not the issue! I think they call it the 'Apple Reality Distortion Field' (or Effect, I can't remember now). It's why Apple users end up paying way more than non-Apple users for software with more restrictions and, sometimes, less capabilities and think it's the non-Apple people that are doing it wrong. It is something of a running joke in IT circles, I fear.

Anyway: I'm more flexible than that, and if there are people who use Apple products, I think they should be catered for. But that means providing players and tag editing software, not re-organising the entire music industry to adopt a classical-centric tagging model!



Spy Car said:


> I said it before, but I see no way to "switch on the Comments in an iTunes display" on the desktop. That's not how iTunes works on a Mac. Comments are only visible if one goes into the show "Info" (metadata) mode. In ordinary use the comment field information is hidden from the user, Unlike Album, Album Artist, and Artist. Composer is a user selectable option by work. I tried to make Comments "searchable" on the desktop, but see no way to do so. I'd like to be able to search comments, but still would not use it as the field to tag performers.


I've explained what's involved above, and I don't think repeating myself is going to help.



Spy Car said:


> I am sincere when I say I've enjoyed reading your posts. Despite my ongoing disagreement with your metadata scheme.
> 
> Bill


Again, I thank you sincerely in return. I enjoy metadata discussions. Not that it's particularly relevant, but I spent 30 years as a professional database administrator. So (and I realise you have to take this on trust somewhat!) I know a good data model when I see one.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Spy Car said:


> Apple hasn't announced "the death" of iTunes, they've just changed the name to Music in the most recent OS version. It's a rebranding move.
> 
> I searched for known "comment" terms after switching over to the Song Tab mode and get no results. I don't see the option for turning Comment filtering on. I get Name (song name), Time, Artist, Album, Genre, and Plays. If there are ways to turn on other fields, they are pretty well hidden.
> 
> ...


I won't reply to this in detail, as I think our posts are crossing to confusing effect.

I will just say that since you posted, I posted #80, which shows you that you _don't_ need to be in Song mode. Yes, it works in Artist view.

And I've just checked: it works in Album view too:









You need to go to Songs view, right-click the column title area of the left-display panel (where all the songs are listed), then select 'Comments' from the list of available columns. That makes sure comments are displayed. Once you do that, click the spyglass icon in the search field and de-select 'Search entire library' and select instead 'Filter by All'. Why you should need to do that second step, I have no idea. But I saw it mentioned on an Apple support page, so I did it and it just works after that. Good luck, basically!

And as I say, once you get it working in Songs view, it will work in Artists and Albums views too.

As for the demise of iTunes, I can only quote you from the article I linked to:

_Technology giant Apple announced Monday that it is phasing out its iconic media application iTunes.
Apple made the announcement at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, which kicked off Monday.
iTunes will be reconfigured into three new apps: Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Podcasts. The news was first reported by Bloomberg last week._

Now, I expect you'll say, "but 'Apple Music' is the same thing as 'iTunes', just a different branding". And it may well be (without being able to look at the source code, we cannot know!) But my suspicion is that it will be about the same as iTunes as Windows 10 Search is to Windows XP Search. IE, completely and wildly different in capabilities. Which might mean it's better, in fact... but it also might mean it's not!

Anyway, I'll leave it there. Since it's still downloadable from Apple, it's still a viable option. But Windows Media Player is also still supplied by Microsoft... and it's _definnitely_ on life-support, so wouldn't be a player I'd sign up to for the long-term these days!

PS. It's half past midnight again and another insomniac session beckons! So though it won't do me much good, I will leave my desktop and go lie down somewhere dark. Given the lack of quoting on the mobile version of the site, I promise not to reply until at least 6 hours time!


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## Holden4th (Jul 14, 2017)

AbsolutelyBaching said:


> Ah, Axiom 0 of classical music tagging: all online CD databases are, without exception, really nasty, long-since having been polluted by people whose understanding of classical music was sketchy at best -and who anyway didn't tag as you probably want to do. I never use any of them! Much better just to tag it up correctly yourself in my view! But I share your particular pain about CDDB, which is dreadful.


I had to do this quite a few times. Even the 40CD Cziffra box didn't follow a consistent pattern.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

It's a shame I haven't heard back from Bill.

To recap: my tagging suggestions are rubbish... because they don't work in iTunes.... except that they _do_ work in iTunes, but maybe not in Apple Music, which has replaced iTunes on Apple hardware platforms, but not on Windows. So maybe, they're not so much rubbish, because they actually work on all media players on all platforms... except, perhaps, Apple Music on Apple.

Anyway. I wanted to mention that as a result of this thread, I went back to information theory to re-think what might be the "primary key" for recorded classical music, and wrote the results up here.

The significance of that is that 'recording date' is, I now realise, an absolutely essential component of the 'primary key' to recorded music, which I had acknowledged in my more general tagging article, but only as an exception to the general rule, which wouldn't affect most people most of the time. I had previously suggested the need for a date in the ALBUM tag to distinguish between particularly prolific conductors' recordings of the same piece, but optional otherwise.

Except I then went and bought a recording of Aaron Copland recording his 3rd Symphony... which clashed with a prior recording of Aaron Copland recording his 3rd symphony I had, which I had not been aware of. Thus, without the recording date in the ALBUM tag, there's no way to distinguish them. So, I've come to the conclusion, documented in that more recent article I've linked to, that recording date is a _non-discretionary_ component of the ALBUM tag.

So, short version: this was a very interesting discussion and it made me re-think things, and I've accordingly changed my views, and recording date should now definitely be a mandated component of the ALBUM tag.

For everything else Bill was complaining about, I have no qualms about still insisting that the COMMENT tag is the place for details about the soprano, the tea lady and the recording engineer, because *all* search engines can deal with it, even iTunes (though I still don't know about Apple Music, because Bill never got back in touch).


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## Ganz Allein (Mar 26, 2021)

Interesting discussion! My approach is a mix of taking as much as I can from GraceNote (mostly the individual track names - just because I don't have the energy to go through and update each individual track!), and then standardizing album names so that I include the Composer, work, conductor, and (if applicable) year of recording. Admittedly, this isn't a perfect solution, as the track names can be pretty unwieldy, and I generally don't include information about soloists.

Here's an example that I think demonstrates both the pros and cons of my approach:

Album: Beethoven: Missa Solemnis (Bernstein)
Artist: Leonard Bernstein: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Track: Beethoven: Missa Solemnis in D, Op. 123 - Credo: Et Vitam Venturi Saeculi

Obviously the track title is not particularly useful, but I like that I can choose to sort by Album, which effectively sorts by composer, or I can sort by Artist, which effectively sorts by Conductor.

One suggestion made by AbsolutelyBaching that I'm considering adopting is to add soloists into the comment field, although the idea of going through my library and adding those tags is quite daunting!

One thing that I particularly disagree with AbsolutelyBaching on is that I enjoy equating digital music with the physical media it was originally printed on! Particularly in cases where a single CD contains multiple works, I find it interesting to see what commonalities or juxtapositions are highlighted by the pairings, even if the supplemental work is just filler to pad running time, as is often the case.

Anyway, I get a surprising amount of (perverse?) pleasure in ripping CDs and editing the tags, so thanks all for the ideas and discussion!


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