# Software for organising classical music



## piccardy (Sep 14, 2010)

Can anyone recommend some good software for organising, catalogging (and playing) my digital collection of classical music? This has got huge now, and iTunes just won't cut it - I have lots of duplicated works and this doesn't have enough tags to allow me to distinguish them from one another (title, conductor, orchestra, composer, soloists, etc). Some way of tagging albums with user-defined tags would also be useful.


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## Fsharpmajor (Dec 14, 2008)

I googled it and found this:

*http://www.wizetech.com/amc/index.shtml*

I can't vouch for it, since I've never used it myself. It says it can cope with thousands of mp3s.


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

I've only found one decent solution to this problem, a little-known gem called muso. As well as everything you mentioned, it's also able to separate work titles from movement descriptions so the symphony, opera or whatever is shown as a header with detailed movements underneath.


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## Conor71 (Feb 19, 2009)

piccardy said:


> Can anyone recommend some good software for organising, catalogging (and playing) my digital collection of classical music? This has got huge now, and iTunes just won't cut it - I have lots of duplicated works and this doesn't have enough tags to allow me to distinguish them from one another (title, conductor, orchestra, composer, soloists, etc). Some way of tagging albums with user-defined tags would also be useful.


FWIW in iTunes I tag duplicated works in the Album field as (e.g):

Beethoven: Symphonies [Gardiner] [Disc 1] etc.
Beethoven: Symphonies [Karajan] [Disc 1] etc.

You could also try adding the name of the conductor/ensemble in the Album Artist field which might do the trick too?

You get the idea - its a shame iTunes doesnt have more cataloging features than it does but I think it is quite workable even with a large collection (+ you can copy to iPod as well!) .


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## Nicola (Nov 25, 2007)

piccardy said:


> Can anyone recommend some good software for organising, catalogging (and playing) my digital collection of classical music? This has got huge now, and iTunes just won't cut it - I have lots of duplicated works and this doesn't have enough tags to allow me to distinguish them from one another (title, conductor, orchestra, composer, soloists, etc). Some way of tagging albums with user-defined tags would also be useful.


Although it may sound a bit complex, I have a 5-element system for managing all my music that I have worked out as the best for me after experimenting with dozens of alternatives:

Media Player: Creative MediaSource 5 (this normally comes shipped when you buy a Creative Labs product like a sound card). I like the way it lets you play and record music so very easily, and its facilities for applying sound volume management and audio clean-up, etc.

Audio Editing: Audacity 1.13.12. In the case of editing, for example, a radio concert I use it to trim both ends, to remove rubbish noise in between movements, and occasionally to normalise the volume. I don't generally bother with any of the filters, except occasionally fade in/out.

Tagging: I find Windows Media Player is by far the best for this purpose, especially for classical music. That's what I use for all tagging, whatever the source material. I seldom use it as a media player. There are several fields to complete which should be more than adequate to cater for any collection, however large or varied.

Burning/Ripping: Windows Media Player. There are several on the market but I like the way this programme does it.

Storing Files on PC: I have a bespoke system. All downloads and radio recordings, and all my CDs which are ripped to MP3 320kbps, are stored in "My Music". The top layer is by Composer. Within each composer, the sub-classification varies according to the type of music they wrote. In the case of Beethoven, for example, there is Symphony, Chamber, Concerto, Other Orchestral, Piano Solo, Choral, Sacred, Opera. Within each of these there may be other sub-categories, e.g for Chamber I have duet, trio, quartet, etc. For other composers (all 334 of them) I have similar structures which vary according to the type of genres they worked in. All the information incorporated from the tagging process described above gets picked up automatically,

I find this system works very well and it's one of my pride and joys keeping it all in good shape. It's partly a labour of love which I wouldn't bother with if I didn't have such a large collection, but with over 300 composers and several thousand music files it's pretty necessary to have some kind of system.


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

The beauty of muso is that you don't really have to organise your files properly on your PC, it pulls them in from anywhere. If you've already set up composer (etc) tags in the song files it pulls them in, but if not (and I don't bother) you can edit muso's database pretty easily - I just make sure I edit the attributes for the new tracks I import which isn't too arduous - and it helps to keep compose names consistent. You can also tidy up your extra tags like orchestra, performer, etc. Then you can browse albums by composer or orchestra or whatever you want really, then drill down (if you want) to the album view which for classical albums looks a bit like the track/movement listing and liner notes you see in a CD booklet.


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## Ravellian (Aug 17, 2009)

I have about 50GB of music on my iTunes player and I think it organizes it pretty well. I custom-entered all the information for my tracks, and I have it display like this:

Name of piece - Time - Artist (I put the composer here) - Album Artist (I put the performer here) - Year (composition date) - Album.

It works pretty well. And of course you can have the player organize it according to any of the above headings. How big a collection are we talking with you?


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## djmomo17 (Aug 12, 2010)

I also use iTunes exclusively (also for 50 gigs) and do almost the exact same thing as Ravellian. If I'm feeling ambitious I'll group movements/variations of a single work using the GROUP tag.


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

40,171 tracks for me - wow


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## piccardy (Sep 14, 2010)

Thanks to all - some useful advice. I have about 500Gb of digital music, mostly lossless. I don't like trying to do this in iTunes, I've tried as suggested but still there's no place for conductor - and I want the album to be primarily keyed by title, conductor and orchestra. Muso is good, I tried that, only it will take me quite some time to edit the database since my tags are incomplete - I did it with a dozen or so albums and I think it will be worth the effort.


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## johnnyx (Jan 3, 2007)

Awhile ago I switched from iTunes to Foobar2000 and like it much better. It is pretty easy to customize the interface.


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

@Nicola: I tried to send you a private message but was unable to. Here is what it said. If others would like to chime in and give their backup strategies, I'm all ears. Thanks.

------

I was just reading your post of 9/15 concerning how you store your music. I think it's probably the best idea for me, as I haven't found any software that really does the job as far as classical music goes.

My question is what you use for backup? Do you use an external hard drive? More than one? I'm using Vista Ultimate and it has a pretty good backup utility. 

I have been wanting to go to downloads to save money (buy MORE cd's  ) but haven't come up with an adequate storage mechanism. I have plenty of hard drive space so with your strategy I think I might begin. 

-------


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## Rasa (Apr 23, 2009)

I think the problem really begins with the deficiencies of mp3 tags. What use is a organising piece of software if that will only work on that computer and the data isn't stored inside the mp3s?


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

Rasa said:


> I think the problem really begins with the deficiencies of mp3 tags. What use is a organising piece of software if that will only work on that computer and the data isn't stored inside the mp3s?


If you back up your mp3s/flacs/apes then it would also make sense to backup your database from whatever tool you use to organise your music. Your tool of choice should have sufficient export/import features if it holds data that isn't in the song file tags, I agree.


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

I know I'm not thinking this completely through, but let's say I don't use tags. Let's say I just organize by directory. Am I really any worse off than I am now storing CD's in a cabinet? At least I have quick search so that if I search on 'Mozart' they will all pop up quickly if I have it all indexed.


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

Never mind, looking back I see what your saying. I think I might just start with all the new music I buy and then work on all the older stuff as I go along. Muso sounds like it would be a good deal.

EDIT: Sorry I keep waffling on this. It's been a long time since I've thought about it. 

@Johnnyx: I was just looking at the Foobar2000. I see they have an SDK. Was wondering if you used that to modify the interface. Did you also have to capture any additional information that they weren't capturing, like "Composer"? It sure would be nice to finally have a program that is tailored for classical music even if it took a bit of effort. I have Visual Studio and have been itching for something to get my hands dirty with. Maybe this is a worthwhile thing to do.


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## Comistra (Feb 27, 2010)

I've come up with a system that works pretty well for me, given the constraint I'm working with: I need my music to be easily accessible on my portable player. Unfortunately, this means shoehorning things into the artist/album paradigm. I've experimented with a composer tag, but the results were poor (I can't remember what exactly was wrong; this was a while ago).

Anyway, the basis of my system is that each work is treated individually. This isn't exactly a revelation, of course; but it took me a while to get away from managing my classical like I did other CDs. That is, I would have, for example, the artist be "Mendelssohn, Felix" and the album "Symphonies Nos. 3 & 5". It doesn't take long for this to get unwieldy, especially when you have multiple composers on one disc.

So the artist is still the composer (due to the previously-mentioned issues with the composer tag); but the album is each individual work. Thus my earlier example would be split into two "albums": Symphony No. 3 and Symphony No. 5.

But of course there are multiple recordings of many pieces, so they must be distinguished. This is done by appending the orchestra and conductor (or the quartet, or the soloist, etc) to the album (i.e. work) name. The Mendelssohn from above, plus other types of works as examples:

Symphony No. 3 ("Scottish") [LPO: Haitink]
Symphony No. 3 ("Scottish") [UO: Sitkovetsky]
Symphony No. 5 ("Reformation") [LPO: Haitink]
Cello Concerto No. 2 [Sádlo; CF: Neumann]
Piano Sonata No. 30 [Kovacevich]
String Quartet No. 42 [Lindsays]

etc etc. I fear that this too will become unwieldy, but with close to a thousand different works, it's still going strong. It also conveys a lot of information pretty concisely, which I like. I just have to remember what the abbreviations mean! (London Philharmonic, Ulster Orchestra, and Czech Philharmonic, if you were wondering.)

I keep telling myself that I'm going to write a program solely to organize my classical music, which would allow me to have better control over tags; but since there's no pressing need for it, I just can't get up the motivation. Once I hit a certain threshold and my current system breaks down.... well, we'll see.


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

Sounds like you've got a good thing going Comistra. As far as record layout goes, that may just be the way to do it. The problem is, entering all that information. For instance, I have a small collection compared to some people on here and I couldn't imagine entering all that information by hand, even as small as mine is. 

To give you an example, I've got the Haydn boxed set that has 150 CD's in it. Haydn wrote a little over 100 symphonies so you figure 2 symphonies per CD, the first 50 disks are symphonies. Then I would have 100 more CD's to enter of works and that's just one box!!

I would probably be willing to go in and enter Composer, Conductor, and a title for each CD that I have, but each separate piece would be too much. 

I've gotta think on this some more.


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

But most tools worth their salt allow you to edit the tags for arbitrary collections of tracks all at once - so you can select all the tracks in your 150 CD collection and set the composer for all of them in one operation.


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## Comistra (Feb 27, 2010)

haydnguy said:


> To give you an example, I've got the Haydn boxed set that has 150 CD's in it. Haydn wrote a little over 100 symphonies so you figure 2 symphonies per CD, the first 50 disks are symphonies. Then I would have 100 more CD's to enter of works and that's just one box!!
> 
> I would probably be willing to go in and enter Composer, Conductor, and a title for each CD that I have, but each separate piece would be too much.





bassClef said:


> But most tools worth their salt allow you to edit the tags for arbitrary collections of tracks all at once - so you can select all the tracks in your 150 CD collection and set the composer for all of them in one operation.


It does take some work, it's true; and I suppose the way I do it might not be feasible for most people.

When I rip, I import tags from freedb. These are by no means perfect and often need fixing up, but they tend to help reduce the amount of work needed. I've also written a program that can do mass search-and-replace on tags with regular expressions, which basically means that if I import tags that are "incorrect" (by my standards), but in a consistent fashion, I can change them all in one fell swoop.

As bassClef notes, editing multiple tags at once is easy. So if I'm ripping my Mendelssohn Symph. 3&5 disc, for example, I can just tag everything with Mendelssohn quickly; and then I can also set the "Comment" field to:
London Philharmonic Orchestra, Bernard Haitink, conductor

Each track has to be done, to some degree (based on the imported tags) by hand, but there is some automation: each work's track looks something like this: "Symphony No. 3 ("Scottish"): I. Andante con moto". You can copy/paste the "Symphony No. 3" bit; or if there are a lot of tracks, I can easily use my search-and-replace program to prepend the work name to each track (this was extremely helpful with Swan Lake's 49 tracks).

Then I have a script I wrote that can scan all the FLACs and extract relevant information. It looks at titles, and figures that everything before a colon is a work name, and everything after is a movement name (which tends to be tempo indication). It scans the comment and extracts the orchestra (which it converts to an abbreviation) and conductor; and can also extract the soloist for a piece; or a quartet, etc. Armed with all this information, it can tag files with updated and properly formatted album and track information.

It sounds like a lot of work, but it's actually quite efficient. With the proper tools I can quickly prepare a rip for conversion to the "correct" format. Fairly recently I bought a 40-disc box that I had to rip and tag. Tagging of each disc took significantly less time than the rip of the next disc; and I was ripping at burst speed (+ AccurateRip).


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

I actually enjoy editing the data for my classical albums in my tool of choice, getting the album view looking nice and complete, with artwork, work headings, movement detail, composer, conductor, orchestra, performers etc. Once this detail is complete muso does a good job in pulling in reviews, composer biography, similar albums, etc. 

In short I don't think there's any quick win with little effort. What you put in you get out.


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

Yesterday after Nicola had mentioned Creative Media Player I noticed that there was a Creative Organizer in the same program group. I just looked at it and it looks interesting. (It came with my Dell.) I noticed that there was a "Get Info" button up at the top and I pressed it. It said it was using GraceNote to get the information and after I ok'd the license stuff, by golly if it didn't pull the exact thing I had in my CD player.

I took a screen shot to show.

View attachment 1201


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## Rasa (Apr 23, 2009)

All good catalogue programs aside, without the meta tags the collection is still bummed on my ipod


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## graaf (Dec 12, 2009)

johnnyx said:


> Awhile ago I switched from iTunes to Foobar2000 and like it much better. It is pretty easy to customize the interface.


foobar2000 is incredible piece of software. Audio player which can, when provided the converter itself, also do CD ripping and can work with MP3, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, WavPack, AAC, and virtually any other converter can be added. I use MP3 format, but whatever the format is, it is the same to organize since I do not use tags - I customize names of files and folders in such a way that it's all self explanatory and easy to quick-search (real time searching). Since foobar2000 is very customizable, I can choose whether I want names of folders displayed in my playlist or not.

I also use MP3Gain, to adjust the volume of mp3's (using album gain, to save the difference between the files themselves).


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## Michael- (Oct 20, 2010)

Just found and joined this very interesting website.
I had the some problems of finding software to organise and play my music collection which although small by some of the standards here (108 composers, 406 works on 25gb so for) was becoming a total mess.
The best player/organiser I have found is WinAmp which recognises the composer tag and has a very clean and comprehensive look and interface. It also directly links to the Gracenote database which seems to be pretty accurate.
I tag by Composer, Album, Artist, Album Artist, Track No, (composition) Year etc and it is really working very well. I use Mp3Tag which seems to work for all audio formats.


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## johnnyx (Jan 3, 2007)

Along with using foobar2000 I use a file tagging/folder naming system similar to ones mentioned above.
For tagging artist = composer, album title = individual Work plus performer.
I also organize my music folders hierarchically by classical era, then composer, then individual work plus performer. The only exception to this is that for some of my very favorite performers I keep their stuff together in a folder. I am really enjoying hearing how others organize their digital music collections.


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## bassClef (Oct 29, 2006)

Interesting:
http://forums.slimdevices.com/showt...Support-Thread&p=731741&viewfull=1#post731741


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