# How big is yours?



## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

For no particular reason, I find myself wondering whether my digital music collection is large, small or merely in-between when compared to the collection of others. Measuring the size of a classical music collection is problematic, of course: you could count CDs, but that's not much use if most of your collection is stored digitally on a hard disk. Some CDs in any case only store 40 or 50 minutes of music; others contain over 70 minutes: it seems unfair to count them equally! Counting tracks is also pointless in the classical music domain: one track of Wagner might last half an hour, whereas one of Boyce might last mere seconds.

So, knowing that comparisons are invidious at the best of times; and knowing that determining the size of a digital music collection is specifically problematic, I nevertheless had a go at assessing mine.

I loaded my entire collection into the playlist of a media player that will tell you how minutes of music is queued up to play. I used 'DeadBeef' to do that, but I seem to recall that Foobar2000 will do the same thing if asked nicely. Anyway, however you do it, I know that to play my entire classical music collection I will need to listen for 174 days, 21 hours, 4 minutes and 39 seconds:









In all, that adds up to (174x24x60)+(21x60)+4+(39/60)=251,824.65 minutes of music. Given a CD can maximally store around 74 minutes of audio, that's around 3,403 full-CDs-worth of music.

I'm just idly wondering if that's a decent size or merely pales into insignificance with the size of collections, similarly computed, belonging to other denizens of this group!

The question is asked in a spirit of fun curiosity, not competitive ruthlessness!! :tiphat:


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

I tend to copy all music I have on CDs to the computer so that I can listen while navigating in the net. At the moment, I have 411 GB of classical and 210 GB of non-classical music on my PC, to a total of 621 Gb. Taking a rough estimate of 200 MB per CD, then my current collection has about 3000 CDs.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

As a true Boomer (and partial Luddite), my complete collection is on CD (even downloads, I'll burn to CD or DVD). I lost count of the number of albums. Should be in the 10000 range for classical music only (and something like that for pop/rock/jazz/new age).


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Thanks for that Allerius.

Unfortunately, that's not really a good way of measuring it, though. Do you rip your CDs to FLAC or MP3? If FLAC, do you rip at compression level 8, 5 or what? If to MP3, do you rip to 320kbps variable bit-rate or 192kbps constant bit rate? All of those decisions affect whether "a rough estimate of 200MB per CD" is valid or not.

In my case, for example, I have 1.2TB of classical music files in FLAC files, level-8-highly-compressed... so about double your disk space consumption, but I'm only claiming that as 3,400 CDs. And, by the way, I was really only interested in classical music collections and didn't count all my non-classical music in the above computation.

You see the problem, I hope. So would you be able to do what I proposed and find out how long it would take to play your entire classical music collection in, say, Foobar2000 or some other media player of your choice and compute from there? Then we will at least have *consistent* measurements.


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## mikeh375 (Sep 7, 2017)

fascinating dizwell. I shan't be able to contribute but I can tell you that going in and out of charity shops has swelled my CD collection enormously - probably expanding my digital listening into another lifetime. I wont stop though, who can resist the best in the world for a £1 or even less?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Art Rock said:


> As a true Boomer (and partial Luddite), my complete collection is on CD (even downloads, I'll burn to CD or DVD). I lost count of the number of albums. Should be in the 10000 range for classical music only (and something like that for pop/rock/jazz/new age).


Impressive stuff -but, as a Boomer myself, it saddens me that you cannot quantify your collection(s) more precisely than that 

I cannot conceive of the shelf-space required for that many CDs either!

Have you never felt the urge to rip?!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

mikeh375 said:


> fascinating dizwell. I shan't be able to contribute but I can tell you that going in and out of charity shops has swelled my CD collection enormously - probably expanding my digital listening into another lifetime. I wont stop though, who can resist the best in the world for a £1 or even less?


Oh I agree. I have a lovely second-hand bookshop not too far from me, staffed by knowledgeable volunteers, who do a nice sideline in second-hand classical music CDs for a pittance a piece. My collection boomed once I'd discovered them. But having once bought a CD, it gets ripped and catalogued the same day it gets home... and then the physical disk is filed in the loft, never to be played again.


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

According to my iTunes, in my classical collection I currently have 1,715 "albums" (which ranges between everything from single discs to 16 disc operas to box sets) coming in at 171.5 days of music.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

dizwell said:


> I cannot conceive of the shelf-space required for that many CDs either!
> 
> Have you never felt the urge to rip?!


It's big. But I like looking at it. 

No, I don't rip the CD's. I prefer the sound of my stereo system over that of the laptop.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

WildThing said:


> According to my iTunes, I currently have 1,715 "albums" (which ranges between everything from single discs to 16 disc operas to box sets) coming in at 171.5 days of music.


Yup: counting "albums" or "tracks" just doesn't work in the world of classical music, does it?! But the duration is a fair measure -and it would seem we are about equivalent in that regard. Thanks for sharing


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

Art Rock said:


> I prefer the sound of my stereo system over that of the laptop.


I do as well. That's why I play my mp3s through my stereo.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Art Rock said:


> It's big. But I like looking at it.
> 
> No, I don't rip the CD's. I prefer the sound of my stereo system over that of the laptop.


Blimey, I don't disagree with that in the slightest...  ...but I take my PC's high-end sound card and plug its output into the AUX socket of a fairly high-end amplifier, so I get the sound of a stereo system _without_ all the shelving!


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

dizwell said:


> Thanks for that Allerius.
> 
> Unfortunately, that's not really a good way of measuring it, though. Do you rip your CDs to FLAC or MP3? If FLAC, do you rip at compression level 8, 5 or what? If to MP3, do you rip to 320kbps variable bit-rate or 192kbps constant bit rate? All of those decisions affect whether "a rough estimate of 200MB per CD" is valid or not.
> 
> ...


You're right, it's not a consistent way of measuring it. I tend to rip my CDs to MP3, usually to 320kbps, but sometimes to 256kbps and even 192kbps, what makes it even harder to make a good estimate out of it. Selecting all the files I have and playing them in a media player should do the trick, but I'm too lazy to do that now heh.


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## Bulldog (Nov 21, 2013)

I have around 15,000 cd's. They are all over the house in a random order. When I go to any room in the house, I'm always surprised at what's there. I love good surprises!

Of course, how I handle the collection makes for one big problem - information retrieval.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Allerius said:


> You're right, it's not a consistent way of measuring it. I tend to rip my CDs to MP3, usually to 320kbps, but sometimes to 256kbps and even 192kbps, what makes it even harder to make a good estimate out of it. Selecting all the files I have and playing them in a media player should do the trick, but I'm too lazy to do that now heh.


Can you hear the difference between a 320kbps and a 192kpbs track of the same piece? Just interested to know why someone who likes music that much wouldn't have ripped to FLAC, for example?

In my case, I rip to FLAC because I know I then have what essentially amounts to an archive copy of my CD, and is something from which I can later generate MP3 files (for listening on airplanes or trains, where pristine audio quality is not really a requirement, but squeezing a lot of music on to a fairly small phone is) without further loss of signal.

But at 56+, my ears long since lost the ability to spot a 320kbps from a FLAC. So I do it because of archival reasons, not for audibility ones. Which is not necessarily the sanest approach -which is why I'm interested in what others do.


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## larold (Jul 20, 2017)

I don't keep a very large active collection anymore -- about 400 CDs and a few hundred hours of downloads.

I estimate I have owned around 12,000 LPs, cassettes, reel to reel tapes and CDs since about 1972.

I still prefer CDs to other media though I occasionally buy an LP of something never digitized. I burn my downloads and LPs to CD.


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

My humble collection consists of 70268 minutes
I have around 20 more on their way, so that adds up to about 1000 CDs
foobar also told me that 88% of them are wav files, while 12% are my older rips in level 0 flac
They occupy ~700GB on my NAS
As mass storage becomes more and more affordable, I stopped using compressed formats.

Having physical copies is nice. I don't trust digital storage as they can fail quite easily, nor would I trust the online platform would last forever!


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## Tero (Jun 2, 2012)

The mass of music I have is hard copy. I have bought the occasional download and do have a working Amazon music account, I have stuff from Finnish LPs to obscure punk groups on LP. I got rid of most of the LPs but there are nearly half left. About 500 cassettes got throw our in my 2015 move.

The only digital thing I have ever managed to keep in order from computer to computer are Powerpoints I made for 3 session noncredit classes. There are bits of film in those folders as well. They sit in a My Passport drive, about a year old. In my car I have up to 32MB of music on a stick.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Nearly everything I have has been copied to digital files although I usually listen to CDs. Apparently I have 283.2 days worth of music. Nearly all of it I know quite well. It should be enough ...


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

rice said:


> My humble collection consists of 70268 minutes
> I have around 20 more on their way, so that adds up to about 1000 CDs
> foobar also told me that 88% of them are wav files, while 12% are my older rips in level 0 flac
> They occupy ~700GB on my NAS
> ...


Definitely with you on the bit about online platforms. My music is _*my*_ music, not someone else's at their pleasure!

As far as digital storage goes, I believe in the rule of three. That is, my music collection is stored on my PC first and foremost, but is nightly copied to NAS Server 1. NAS Server 1 then performs a weekly copy to NAS Server 2 and a fortnightly copy to NAS Server 3. Every month, NAS Server 1 is synchronised to my PC (i.e., if I've deleted something off my PC, it's only at this point that it is also deleted off NAS Server 1). Every 2 months, NAS Server 1 and NAS Server 2 are synchronised. And every 3 months, NAS Server 1 and NAS Server 3 are syncrhonised. So, if I ever make a terrible mistake (or suffer a hardware failure) on my PC, I should be able to recover any required files from one or other of the servers, going back potentially up to 3 months ago.

I also make sure that the NAS servers run different operating systems (well, sort of: 2 distinct flavours of linux and a freeBSD one) and that all my files are stored on ZFS (thus eliminating bit-rot as an issue), in at least zraid 2 configuration (so two disks from each server can fail simultaneously without the data being lost). I also make sure my servers run ECC memory (also contributing to less bit-rot).

Anyway, boring details aside, I stopped caring about physical media in 1999 and haven't lost anything at all since, so I've come to trust my digital storage more or less completely... but yes, it's something you have to invest some time and effort into getting right before you can really do that.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Enthusiast said:


> Nearly everything I have has been copied to digital files although I usually listen to CDs. Apparently I have 283.2 days worth of music. Nearly all of it I know quite well. It should be enough ...


I knew someone would make me feel inadequate eventually! :lol:


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## Xisten267 (Sep 2, 2018)

dizwell said:


> Can you hear the difference between a 320kbps and a 192kpbs track of the same piece? Just interested to know why someone who likes music that much wouldn't have ripped to FLAC, for example?


Too much space consuming. Sometimes, particularly when I was a beginner in classical music some twelve years ago, I wouldn't have much choice but to copy the music in relatively low quality (192 kbps) to have them on my PC. In my early days as a listener, when my collection was small, I would just listen to my CDs on a CD player also.

Today, I'm happy with 320 kbps. I don't hear the difference between MP3 at 320 kbps and FLAC, perhaps because my ears are not that sensible or because my sound system is not so great (most of the time I listen to music in a Sony MDR-ZX110 stereo headphone), so I don't really see the need for lossless audio files, although I have a few.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Allerius said:


> Too much space consuming. Sometimes, particularly when I was a beginner in classical music some twelve years ago, I wouldn't have much choice but to copy the music in relatively low quality (192 kbps) to have them on my PC. In my early days as a listener, when my collection was small, I would just listen to my CDs on a CD player also.
> 
> Today, I'm happy with 320 kbps. I don't hear the difference between MP3 at 320 kbps and FLAC, perhaps because my ears are not that sensible or because my sound system is not so great (most of the time I listen to music in a Sony MDR-ZX110 stereo headphone), so I don't really see the need for lossless audio files, although I have a few.


With you there. It all depends on your ears and your listening habits, I agree. When I listen at home, I usually do it on reasonable kit, so my OCD would be triggered if I thought I was listening to good quality MP3s rather than FLAC there, even though I couldn't tell the difference! It would be the fact that I know I'm not listening to the entire audio signal that would bother me, not whether I could actually tell the difference or not. Kind of irrational, I guess! On the other hand, when I take music on holiday (usually copied to my phone's internal storage), space is at a premium and, despite the Sennheiser earphones, audio quality isn't, so at that point I copy/convert to MP3 and my OCD isn't triggered, because I don't expect FLAC on that device or listening equipment!

But I would get seriously triggered by converting (say) 320kbps MP3 to (say) 192kbps MP3, because you can't convert a lossy signal to another lossy format without "bad things happening"! Hence my need for a lossless 'source' file to work from.


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

dizwell said:


> Definitely with you on the bit about online platforms. My music is _*my*_ music, not someone else's at their pleasure!
> 
> As far as digital storage goes, I believe in the rule of three. That is, my music collection is stored on my PC first and foremost, but is nightly copied to NAS Server 1. NAS Server 1 then performs a weekly copy to NAS Server 2 and a fortnightly copy to NAS Server 3. Every month, NAS Server 1 is synchronised to my PC (i.e., if I've deleted something off my PC, it's only at this point that it is also deleted off NAS Server 1). Every 2 months, NAS Server 1 and NAS Server 2 are synchronised. And every 3 months, NAS Server 1 and NAS Server 3 are syncrhonised. So, if I ever make a terrible mistake (or suffer a hardware failure) on my PC, I should be able to recover any required files from one or other of the servers, going back potentially up to 3 months ago.
> 
> ...


Redundancy and backups are quite expensive. I guess you have more important data stored on your servers right? 
For me, I cannot justify paying for those. I don't even use RAID on my NAS because my files on it are not really precious. I'd rather save the money for more CDs:lol:


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## Tallisman (May 7, 2017)

Approx 6 inches. Oh wait.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

Interesting question, dizwell! That prompted me to check my storage...

Classical music files - 1.37TB. These are all lossless and hi-res files that are either CD/SACD/DVD/blu-ray rips or digital downloads. Most are level-8 FLACs. Also scanned my covers into JPEGs, but honestly they are not big in size. Think my collection is pretty modest in size, as far as music lovers are concerned.

And then I have 3 copies of backup lying around in the house, so multiply 1.37TB by 4.... but harddisks are reasonably cheap, so why not? What I need to think seriously about is an off-site backup! :lol:

A lot of folks nowadays prefer to stream from the internet. Obviously, they don't need to keep a big collection at home. For me, I only use internet streaming for sampling purpose. I always get a copy, physical or digital, of something that I like. And it has to be lossless. Ahem. 

Never digitized my LPs and LDs. They're still sitting in the listening room looking absolutely gorgeous. There are not too many of them, maybe around three hundred. Thrown away all my cassettes and VHS tapes years ago - one of the most regretful things that I've done, I'm afraid, so they don't count either.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

rice said:


> Redundancy and backups are quite expensive. I guess you have more important data stored on your servers right?
> For me, I cannot justify paying for those. I don't even use RAID on my NAS because my files on it are not really precious. I'd rather save the money for more CDs:lol:


Music is the most important thing on those servers. There are some movie rips from DVD too, but they are always lossy rips, so they're only for convenience and don't replace the source physical DVDs. The only thing I really care about is the music!

I guess it can be expensive -but no more than old-style, high-end hifi kit, and my servers *are* my hifi! A simple HP Microserver costs around £380. Populate with 4x1TB hard disks in raid z2 for 2TB usable, and you have spent a further 4x£39 or about £535 all-up. I don't think that's particularly expensive, though I would hate to have to buy three of them at once. I'm lucky: I worked in IT for years, so I have acquired the relevant hardware over time. But I don't think it's beyond the realms of what your average classical music lover would spend on good quality audio kit, really.

One interesting point you made me think of: in one way, my CD collection is, of course, the ultimate backup to what I have on hard disk. If I had three servers all fail catastrophically at the same time, I could, in theory, re-create my music collection by re-ripping the source CDs (though it would take me years to do it!). But you made me realise that this is increasingly not true -as a lot of my music these days is purchased as FLAC downloads direct from the likes of Prestoclassical. I assume I could always re-download anything I'd purchased from them -though I wouldn't want to bet my life on it! Either way, looking after my existing, carefully-curated digital music files is something I take quite seriously and have been prepared to spend up on (though not, I think, excessively).


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Tallisman said:


> Approx 6 inches. Oh wait.


Ha! I knew there would be one...


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Kiki said:


> Interesting question, dizwell! That prompted me to check my storage...
> Classical music files - 1.37TB. These are all lossless and hi-res files that are either CD/SACD/DVD/blu-ray rips or digital downloads. Most are level-8 FLACs. Also scanned my covers into JPEGs, but honestly they are not big in size. Think my collection is pretty modest in size, as far as music lovers are concerned.


Yup: as mentioned previously, you can't really answer this question by size. Those SACDs will be enormous, for example, but their average duration won't be significantly longer or shorter than a normal CD's average duration. This question can only meaningfully be answered by play duration, I fear.



Kiki said:


> A lot of folks nowadays prefer to stream from the internet. Obviously, they don't need to keep a big collection at home.


You hit a nail on the head here. I cannot fathom people who only stream. Not classical music listeners, anyway. The number of times I'm told I've listened to 'Solti's Ring' or 'Karajan's Symphony No. 9' drives me insane! I think it's maybe got better in recent years, but tagging of music by others is almost always rubbish and one's listening statistics get 'poisoned' by bad data in consequence. Like you, I have to own it and tag it "properly"!


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

In about 2 years, I’ve “collected” more than 700 albums on Spotify, having payed so far a grand total of $30.00 after having the premium subscription for a couple months My physical “collecting” interest goes to books, so I have no problem with missing out on whatever benefits CDs may bring.


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## Barbebleu (May 17, 2015)

rice said:


> My humble collection consists of 70268 minutes
> I have around 20 more on their way, so that adds up to about 1000 CDs
> foobar also told me that 88% of them are wav files, while 12% are my older rips in level 0 flac
> They occupy ~700GB on my NAS
> ...


I concur. I have two backups of all my digital music files in different locations. An IT friend once told me that in the digital world nothing exists unless it exists in three places - original, copy and backup of the copy! You can never be too careful. Having said that I need to live to be about 140 to hear all that I have again. I'm half way there!:lol:


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Allegro Con Brio said:


> In about 2 years, I've "collected" more than 700 albums on Spotify, having payed so far a grand total of $30.00 after having the premium subscription for a couple months My physical "collecting" interest goes to books, so I have no problem with missing out on whatever benefits CDs may bring.


Well, I'm cheating now, I realise, by changing the question -but are you able to say how much (for example) Tchaikovsky you've listened to compared to (also for example) how much Mozart?

I get you may not be interested in the answer to that sort of question. But if you were, wouldn't you hate it if your Tchaikovsky was sometimes filed under 'Peter Illich' and sometimes under 'Pyotr Ilyich', whilst your Mozart was sometimes catalogued as 'Wolfgang Amadeus' and at other times 'Wolfgang Amadé'? When you let others tag your music, that's the sort of thing you have to put up with (or, as I say, worse: finding that the Nutcracker was apparently written by Zubin Mehta, for example!)

Personally, I do like to know what and how much I listen to (see https://www.last.fm/user/dizwell for example), largely because I find I am a creature of habit and if not otherwise directed, I will tend to listen to Bach, Britten and RVW and not a lot else. So seeing that I'd listened to so little Mozart (to take a recent example), I was encouraged to listen to a lot more of him, to try to right the balance a little. Which I guess is a long way of saying, I find there's a real need to catalogue my music properly, so my statistics don't get poisoned by rogue inputs.

_Chacun á son gout_, of course. I'm just surprised a little at quite how many people here don't do digital at all, or don't do _organised_ digital very much


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## Fabulin (Jun 10, 2019)

Total size : 273 GB (293 261 278 011 bytes)
Duration : 3wk 1d 2:24:22.980
Encoding : lossless (80.8%); lossy (19.2%)

80% of the collection comes from the last 3 years (rapid growth, I know)

And recently I've done both a large transfer of files into another hard drive, and deleted quite a lot of music that I never intended to revisit, but still kept at one point or another. About a month ago it would be more, but by how much---I can't tell anymore.


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

dizwell said:


> Music is the most important thing on those servers. There are some movie rips from DVD too, but they are always lossy rips, so they're only for convenience and don't replace the source physical DVDs. The only thing I really care about is the music!
> 
> I guess it can be expensive -but no more than old-style, high-end hifi kit, and my servers *are* my hifi! A simple HP Microserver costs around £380. Populate with 4x1TB hard disks in raid z2 for 2TB usable, and you have spent a further 4x£39 or about £535 all-up. I don't think that's particularly expensive, though I would hate to have to buy three of them at once. I'm lucky: I worked in IT for years, so I have acquired the relevant hardware over time. But I don't think it's beyond the realms of what your average classical music lover would spend on good quality audio kit, really.
> 
> One interesting point you made me think of: in one way, my CD collection is, of course, the ultimate backup to what I have on hard disk. If I had three servers all fail catastrophically at the same time, I could, in theory, re-create my music collection by re-ripping the source CDs (though it would take me years to do it!). But you made me realise that this is increasingly not true -as a lot of my music these days is purchased as FLAC downloads direct from the likes of Prestoclassical. I assume I could always re-download anything I'd purchased from them -though I wouldn't want to bet my life on it! Either way, looking after my existing, carefully-curated digital music files is something I take quite seriously and have been prepared to spend up on (though not, I think, excessively).


My NAS is part of my audio system too. I use a network player which reads files off the NAS and output to the DAC. Yes a simple backup can be done quite cheap, I could've made several cold backups by simply buying some dirt cheap 1 TB external harddrives!
I would've done so if I've purchased more digital music. But I think I only bought 2 albums ever. For the rest I have the CDs: the best backup.


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## D Smith (Sep 13, 2014)

I have in excess of 2000 Classical Cd's and box sets. I don't know how many hours that translates to. I also kept some LP's from the 70's and 80's. Nowadays I largely just get a lossless download as I've run out of space!


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

Kiki said:


> Interesting question, dizwell! That prompted me to check my storage...
> 
> Classical music files - 1.37TB. These are all lossless and hi-res files that are either CD/SACD/DVD/blu-ray rips or digital downloads. Most are level-8 FLACs. Also scanned my covers into JPEGs, but honestly they are not big in size. Think my collection is pretty modest in size, as far as music lovers are concerned.
> 
> ...


Yes, lossless or nothing. As an audiophile (seeing your naim icon I guess you're one too:lol I cannot comprehend how some "music lovers" ever listen to their music from streaming services, and probably through their phones!


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## Allegro Con Brio (Jan 3, 2020)

dizwell said:


> Well, I'm cheating now, I realise, by changing the question -but are you able to say how much (for example) Tchaikovsky you've listened to compared to (also for example) how much Mozart?
> 
> I get you may not be interested in the answer to that sort of question. But if you were, wouldn't you hate it if your Tchaikovsky was sometimes filed under 'Peter Illich' and sometimes under 'Pyotr Ilyich', whilst your Mozart was sometimes catalogued as 'Wolfgang Amadeus' and at other times 'Wolfgang Amadé'? When you let others tag your music, that's the sort of thing you have to put up with (or, as I say, worse: finding that the Nutcracker was apparently written by Zubin Mehta, for example!)
> 
> ...


Yes, that is by far my biggest qualm with Spotify (and there are many issues). It drives me nuts that I can't organize my albums the way I want, not to mention the frequent lazy errors in the album titles (Franz Joseph _Hadyn_, an album of Beethoven's 6th that's just called _Symphony No. 6_, etc. etc.) That being said it's by far the best streaming service I've tried (and I've tried a handful) for two simple, non-negotiable reasons: gapless playback and the size of the library. Classical-oriented services like Idagio and Primephonic don't have these perks. Sometimes I've wondered if it'd be worth it to get into the download thing (I don't even own a CD player!) but for now, it is what it is unless I find a better service.

As far as seeing how often I've listened to certain composers, I don't care too much about that. The closest Spotify comes is "your top played songs of the year," which is pretty useless for classical.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

dizwell said:


> Yup: as mentioned previously, you can't really answer this question by size. Those SACDs will be enormous, for example, but their average duration won't be significantly longer or shorter than a normal CD's average duration. This question can only meaningfully be answered by play duration, I fear.


That's a good point, so I dragged everything onto foobar, surprisingly it didn't take long, only a few minutes.... and the total duration of the tracks is around 228 days.

I definitely don't give these 228 days of music equal play time though. Some are repeated quite frequently in fact. But then I suppose most people do that.



rice said:


> Yes, lossless or nothing. As an audiophile (seeing your naim icon I guess you're one too:lol I cannot comprehend how some "music lovers" ever listen to their music from streaming services, and probably through their phones!





dizwell said:


> You hit a nail on the head here. I cannot fathom people who only stream. Not classical music listeners, anyway. The number of times I'm told I've listened to 'Solti's Ring' or 'Karajan's Symphony No. 9' drives me insane! I think it's maybe got better in recent years, but tagging of music by others is almost always rubbish and one's listening statistics get 'poisoned' by bad data in consequence. Like you, I have to own it and tag it "properly"!


I can't comprehend either, but if people are happy with internet streaming, I feel happy for them. For me whether a streaming service will stay in business is a risk for losing all my music, and I definitely won't entertain the idea of paying a premium for their "lossless" offering for the rest of my life, not to mention the non-transparent attitude of such companies regarding the bandwidth management (and therefore tempering of the contents) used in their streams in real-time. Well, for folks who care little about sound quality, it's a non-problem for them. Although as a music lover I can't comprehend that either.

Meta-data is in fact one of my pet peeves! Like you, dizwell, I also tag all my files, all manually, be it rips or downloads. I just can't stand inconsistent syntax in tags! :lol:


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## Ethereality (Apr 6, 2019)

Does size really matter?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Kiki said:


> That's a good point, so I dragged everything onto foobar, surprisingly it didn't take long, only a few minutes.... and the total duration of the tracks is around 228 days.
> 
> I definitely don't give these 228 days of music equal play time though. Some are repeated quite frequently in fact. But then I suppose most people do that.


Thanks for that!

I am indeed very 'top heavy' with my listening. I have music of 461 composers in my collection -but the top 10 of them account for about 56% of everything I've listened to. The other 451 *together* only account for 46% of my listening. I am trying to adjust that over time, though. First, by keeping tabs on it and having weeks where I promise (to myself!) only to play non-top-10 composers.

Secondly, I also have a random number generator I turn to from time to time. If it pops up "256" one day, for example, then I'll make a point of listening to the music of whichever composer is listed 256th in my list of plays, thus giving it a chance of improving its ranking a bit.

It's either that or a daily diet of Britten, Bach, RVW, Handel and Sibelius -which, however nutritious it is in 'objective' terms, can get monotonous real quick!

But it's not prescriptive either. If I listen to Nino Rota because my random number generator tells me to, there's nothing to stop me also listening to Billy Budd or the Actus tragicus if I fancy it!


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

OK, Foobar stats incoming.

My entire collection is stored as digital files. Almost all of my classical music is ripped from CD as FLAC files (or downloaded as FLAC). As such, I can determine the relative size of the classical portion vs the other music in my collection.

-I have 292 GB worth of music in 10,046 files, of which 56.9% are FLAC. However, my complete Haydn and Mozart symphony sets are MP3, in 423 and 145 tracks respectively. So that works out to about 5716 + 423 +145 classical music files (6284 total, about 62% of my collection), and I would guess 260 GB of that file size total.

-I have 5 weeks and 3 days of music on my player, or 912 hours, so that would mean a minimum of 570 hours of CM about 3.4 weeks worth, though probably a bit more than that since many classical tracks run longer than pop music.

-Interesting side notes: of those 6284 classical tracks, it turns out that 1958 of them, or 119 GB, are Herbert von Karajan - around 31%. That's actually lower than I would have guessed, since I started my classical deep dive with one of the HvK decade box sets. The next largest artistic contributors would be: 
Daniel Barenboim (solo and with other players) at 474 files/7%, 
Michael Fischer/Austro Hungarian Haydn Orchestra at 423 files/6%, 
Trevor Pinnock at 274 files/4%, 
Beaux Arts Trio at 204 files/3%, 
Mozart Akademie Amsterdam/Jaap ter Linden at 145 files/2.3%
Sir John Eliot Gardiner at 110 files/1.7%.

-Side note#2, I have 309 tracks worth of John Williams movie score music. I will punt on the question of whether than counts, but it would mean that 6593/10046 tracks would be classical, for 65.6%.



Kiki said:


> Meta-data is in fact one of my pet peeves! Like you, dizwell, I also tag all my files, all manually, be it rips or downloads. I just can't stand inconsistent syntax in tags! :lol:


I too am a metadata stickler. When I rip discs, Exact Audio Copy does suggest metadata for most, but I do frequently alter them to fit my preferred syntax scheme. And for Blu-Ray audio discs I've ripped, I've typed up the metadata completely (which was quite a task for my Ring Cycle!).


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## TMHeimer (Dec 19, 2019)

I have been recording my concerts since the '70s--my solo playing, bands, orchestras I've played in, etc., and probably 99% of the school concerts I've conducted. Started with reel to reel, then cassettes, VHS's, then CDs and DVDs, etc. Have suitcases full- hundreds, maybe thousands. I was gifted a neat machine that looks like a walkman. Put the cassette in and transfer it to digital. Started doing this but one problem-- you have to listen to everything you're switching over as well as pick out which pieces you want to re-record from the old technology. Someday I may continue this process, but probably not.


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## premont (May 7, 2015)

Bulldog said:


> I have around 15,000 cd's. They are all over the house in a random order. When I go to any room in the house, I'm always surprised at what's there. I love good surprises!
> 
> Of course, how I handle the collection makes for one big problem - information retrieval.


I recognize this problem. I rely on my strong memory to maintain the order and continuity of my collection. But of course there are senior moments, like purchasing the same CD twice - fortunately relatively rarely.


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## Oldhoosierdude (May 29, 2016)

I have my digital collection on a 500 gb external drive. Currently it says 40 GB remaining. This drive includes classical, Jazz and some 60's through 80's rock. I also have about 200 cd's. I believe, compared to some, this is a modest collection.


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## Swosh (Feb 25, 2018)

Mine's a little above average, thanks...


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

i have about 120 days of music on my iTunes. It's been almost a decade since the last time my play count reset, and I still haven't listened to half of it in that time. I begin to wonder how many years I have left, and what I want to spend them listening to.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> OK, Foobar stats incoming.
> 
> -Interesting side notes: of those 6284 classical tracks, it turns out that 1958 of them, or 119 GB, are Herbert von Karajan - around 31%. That's actually lower than I would have guessed, since I started my classical deep dive with one of the HvK decade box sets. The next largest artistic contributors would be:
> Daniel Barenboim (solo and with other players) at 474 files/7%,
> ...


Thanks for that, though again: the size on disk of a digital collection or the number of files its comprised of don't really tell us much, given that (for example) the entire set of Solti Ring CDs contains only 190 tracks lasting 14½ hours, whereas the complete Bach Chorales recorded by Nicole Matt and the Chamber Choir of Europe runs to 305 tracks and lasts just 5¾ hours.

That said, it's interesting to see the proportional make-up of your collection, so thanks for sharing that information.

*Edited to add:* Sorry, I had missed this sentence from your post:



> I have 5 weeks and 3 days of music on my player, or 912 hours, so that would mean a minimum of 570 hours of CM about 3.4 weeks worth, though probably a bit more than that since many classical tracks run longer than pop music.


...which is a much better sizing determinant. Sorry for skimming past that before.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

science said:


> i have about 120 days of music on my iTunes. It's been almost a decade since the last time my play count reset, and I still haven't listened to half of it in that time. I begin to wonder how many years I have left, and what I want to spend them listening to.


I know the feeling! Can I recommend a random number generator to help you make that decision!?


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

dizwell said:


> I knew someone would make me feel inadequate eventually! :lol:


Yours will grow as you age. I'm 65. If you are younger you can still surpass me by the time you reach that age.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Enthusiast said:


> Yours will grow as you age. I'm 65. If you are younger you can still surpass me by the time you reach that age.


Actually, I don't want mine to get much bigger. I'm with those further up the thread that suggest they already have too much music to realistically listen to it all. I know I'll acquire more in the future, but the rate of acquisition will slow, I think/hope. I'd like to get out of the cataloguing business and get into the listening/enjoying business instead


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

^ Yes, but you never know what you will want to hear or why. I do sometimes think of pruning but the little that I have done has included some mild regrets. If I only listen to 10% of what I have between now and my demise I feel there is a value in having a wide choice.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I have 309 tracks worth of John Williams movie score music. I will punt on the question of whether than counts, but it would mean that 6593/10046 tracks would be classical, for 65.6%.


I think that counts, by the way! Am just listening to some Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings soundtrack), and I think that counts too. There are plenty of Vaughan Williams film scores in my collection; plus the Britten one; plus loads of William Alwyn and plenty of William Walton. Hans Zimmer also... just because it's a movie, doesn't make its accompanying soundtrack less a work of art, I think. RVW turned his 'Scott of the Antarctic' soundtrack into a "proper" symphony; Strauss's tone-poems are no less narrative in form than a film soundtrack, too.

Well, those are my excuses anyway!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Enthusiast said:


> ^ Yes, but you never know what you will want to hear or why. I do sometimes think of pruning but the little that I have done has included some mild regrets. If I only listen to 10% of what I have between now and my demise I feel there is a value in having a wide choice.


I pruned my Bach cantatas a while back. Instead of 5 each, I decided to settle on just Suzuki's. Out went the Gardiner, with some passing regret. Out went the Leusink, with gusto and zero regrets. But I know what you mean. I've never actually removed music *pieces* from my collection, just specific _recordings_ of pieces, so I am spared the sorts of regrets you mention.

I was also going to facetiously mention that no decent music has been written since December 4th 1976, making the size of the pool from which to select finite. But I realise I just contradicted that one post up by mentioning how much I enjoy Howard Shore! (Also, Michael Tippett). So I won't say that after all...


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## jurianbai (Nov 23, 2008)

The title is a bit provocative...... asking how big is...mine? :lol:

In the cassette tape era, I probably had 1000 cassettes for all genre. That was like 30 years ago.

At this moment, I have about 1 Terrabyte Hard disk, exclusively to backup my music files. Genre-wise, it's like a 30 - 70% percent ration. 300 GB should be on Classical music, and the rest 700GB for all other genre, mostly rock-metal-pop.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

dizwell said:


> I was also going to facetiously mention that no decent music has been written since December 4th 1976, making the size of the pool from which to select finite. But I realise I just contradicted that one post up by mentioning how much I enjoy Howard Shore! (Also, Michael Tippett). So I won't say that after all...


There we have the reason why yours is so small. You are missing so much! I was there once but found so much of real value to me in more recent music. Even more recently I have gone back in time - again with big rewards. Are your tastes no longer expanding?


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Enthusiast said:


> There we have the reason why yours is so small. You are missing so much! I was there once but found so much of real value to me in more recent music. Even more recently I have gone back in time - again with big rewards. Are your tastes no longer expanding?


I had to check with my Last.fm scrobbles, but these are composers whose works I listened to for the first time in the past 180 days:

Adolph Weiss
Alan Hovhaness
Alan Rawsthorne
Alessandro Striggio
Alexander Agricola
Alfredo Casella
Benjamin Godard
Brian Ferneyhough
Christoph Graupner
Cipriano de Rore
Danny Elfman
Domenico Cimarosa
Domenico Mazzocchi
Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek
Emilio de' Cavalieri
Florent Schmitt
Franz Schmidt
Franz Tunder
Gian Francesco Malipiero
Haydn Wood
Heinrich Isaac
Hieronymous Praetorius
Jacob Clemens Non Papa
Jacob Handl
Jan Dismas Zelenka
Jan Křtitel Jiří Neruda
Johan Heinrich Schmelzer
Johann Abraham Schmierer
Johann Christoph Altnickol
Johann Friedrich Fasch
Johann Georg Albrechtsberger
Johann Schobert
Joseph Martin Kraus
Julius Reubke
Lodovico Viadana
Louis Vierne
Martin Peerson
Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe
Ned Rorem
Nicola Popora
Nino Rota
Pēteris Vasks
Rheinhard Keiser
Rodion Shchedrin
Rued Langgaard
Sergei Vasilenko
Silvestro Ganassi
Vagn Holmboe
Valentin Silvestrov
Vassily Kalinnikov
Veljo Tormis
Vítězslav Novák
William Bolcom
William Busch
Xavier Montsalvatge
Zbigniew Preisner

I may have missed one or two. And there will be quite a few who I listen to via players that don't record their plays to Last.fm, but since there's no record of them, they can be ignored for the present discussion.

I don't say, either, that I loved all that are listed here (particularly the Ferneyhough!), but they only get scrobbled to Last.fm after I've taken the trouble to buy, rip and properly metadata-tag them, so they at least count as solid additions to the collection. I'd say this *wasn't* evidence of tastes that are no longer expanding, though I may be biased on the subject... 

The word 'facetious' in my original comment was there for a reason: it was a joke!


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

Well, as big as YouTube and Spotify archives


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

aleazk said:


> Well, as big as YouTube and Spotify archives


Ah, but then they aren't _yours_, but someone else's! :lol:

PS: Have a read of https://absolutelybaching.com/to-own-or-stream/ and let me know what you think!


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

dizwell said:


> PS: Have a read of https://absolutelybaching.com/to-own-or-stream/ and let me know what you think!


This quote is spot on for me:
"I treat my music like I treat my pets. It's something to own, care about and curate with attention to detail."

It covers all the things I treasure, and why I don't go digital, let alone streaming. I love looking at my cases filled with row upon row of CD's, carefully arranged so I can quickly find anything (if necessary helped my a catalog I'm putting together). I love the feeling of having an actual CD case in my hands, open it, and put the CD in the player - then browse the booklet. I love adding to my vast collection, even though I promised myself not to buy more CD's unless it's an irresistible bargain (just now I scored a 6CD Boccherini string quintets box from Brilliant in mint condition in the local thrift store for the grand sum of 50 euro cents).


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Art Rock said:


> This quote is spot on for me:
> "I treat my music like I treat my pets. It's something to own, care about and curate with attention to detail."
> 
> It covers all the things I treasure, and why I don't go digital, let alone streaming. I love looking at my cases filled with row upon row of CD's, carefully arranged so I can quickly find anything (if necessary helped my a catalog I'm putting together). I love the feeling of having an actual CD case in my hands, open it, and put the CD in the player - then browse the booklet. I love adding to my vast collection, even though I promised myself not to buy more CD's unless it's an irresistible bargain (just now I scored a 6CD Boccherini string quintets box from Brilliant in mint condition in the local thrift store for the grand sum of 50 euro cents).


I applaud the sentiment. I disagree only to the extent that the "why I don't go digital" appears to be a non sequiteur (to me!): one can care and curate digital files just as much as with CDs (which are, after all, already stores of *digital* music).

I agree with the tactile thing about booklets and so on: no amount of PDFs of the scans of booklets will ever feel quite the same. It's why my experience with e-book readers (Kindles etc) was quite short-lived.

But for something which you fundamentally just listen to, the lack of a physical CD or record or tape doesn't bother me.

Also: if you only deal with physical CDs (or LPs or pre-recorded tapes etc), then you don't get to curate your music. You get to own what someone else decided to curate for you.

But fundamentally, as I say, I applaud your 'pet' approach!
*
PS*: One of the things I'm enjoying learning from this thread is the diversity of approach in the classical music-listening world. Some insist on physical, some have badly-organised digital, some have a mix of pretty much everything, some have things nicely organised, some prefer surprises.... I observe all the diversity without any judgmental view of it. I am quite surprised by it, though. I thought serious classical music buffs would be much more rigorous in their approach, demanding to be able to find, within seconds, that one special recording Callas did on the Vibratone label on Friday 18th April 1953 etc.  It appears I was wrong!


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

dizwell said:


> Thanks for that, though again: the size on disk of a digital collection or the number of files its comprised of don't really tell us much, given that (for example) the entire set of Solti Ring CDs contains only 190 tracks lasting 14½ hours, whereas the complete Bach Chorales recorded by Nicole Matt and the Chamber Choir of Europe runs to 305 tracks and lasts just 5¾ hours.
> 
> That said, it's interesting to see the proportional make-up of your collection, so thanks for sharing that information.
> 
> ...


The thing about track numbers vs. track times is that, as you allude to, there can be just as much variation in CM as there is in Pop or Jazz. Generally, the tracks run from 1 to about 20 minutes, and so the averages are still probably relatively close.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> The thing about track numbers vs. track times is that, as you allude to, there can be just as much variation in CM as there is in Pop or Jazz. Generally, the tracks run from 1 to about 20 minutes, and so the averages are still probably relatively close.


Well, I'm not sure what is achieved by comparing classical track average times to that of any other type of music... but I don't think it's really true anyway, depending on all sorts of factors you can't control for, but which I hinted at in my first post.

For a long time, I ripped my CDs to single files with an embedded cuesheet. (Exact Audio Copy will do this, for example, if you select the 'Copy Image & CUE Sheet' option). It means what appears to be a 20-track CD is stored on your hard disk as a single FLAC file... with a "track length" of 74 minutes, unless your music player can properly understand and report on the 'embedded' tracks that reported in that internal cuesheet (which many do not). That stuffs up the "I have 50,000 tracks" calculation of course. It also potentially ruins your "my track length average is X minutes", because X will now be inflated massively.

But even when you're not doing single-file ripping, track averages are problematic. My collection's overall track length average is 4.2 minutes (251,824.65 minutes ÷ 59835 tracks). But if you take different composers, you get very different results:

Arvo Pärt: 3,660 minutes ÷ 232 tracks = 15 minutes
Benjamin Britten: 7,315.67 minutes ÷ 2,126 tracks = 3.44 minutes
Igor Stravinsky: 7,945 minutes ÷ 632 tracks = 12.57 minutes
Malcom Arnold: 926 minutes ÷ 171 tracks = 7.65 minutes
Percy Grainger: 1,333 minutes ÷ 371 tracks = 3.59 minutes
Phillip Glass: 4,025 minutes ÷ 697 tracks = 5.77 minutes
Ralph Vaughan Williams: 6,528 minutes ÷ 1,213 tracks = 5.38 minutes
Richard Wagner: 5,796 minutes ÷ 952 tracks = 6.1 minutes

So: anything from about 4 minutes to 15 minutes, depending on what floats your boat, music-wise -and very few of the composers I checked actually come in at the 'global' 4.2 minute average.

Hence my conclusion that the only _reliable_ determinant of size is 'how long does it play for'. 
Divide that (in minutes) by 74 to get a 'full CD equivalent' number.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

dizwell said:


> ...
> 
> Secondly, I also have a random number generator I turn to from time to time. If it pops up "256" one day, for example, then I'll make a point of listening to the music of whichever composer is listed 256th in my list of plays, thus giving it a chance of improving its ranking a bit.
> 
> ...


A random number generator? That's an inventive way of picking a piece, especially it might pick one that might not come into mind immediately when you want to listen to something.

I tried this morning. The first one that popped up was Michael Nyman's MGV. I passed, it's a bit too pushy to enjoy first thing in the morning. The next one was Eric Whitacre's Deep Field. OK, start play. Oh well, it's not exactly something that I'd usually listen to attentively, and it tured out to be quite "functional" as background music while I was doing other things in front of the monitor.

I did turn to RVW in the afternoon, as I've read your post in which you mentioned a few composers including RVW. Come to think about it, it has happened quite often that when a composer (or a piece, or even a performance) was mentioned on TC, I've had the tendency to put it on. I suppose this is also a good way for picking something to listen to, especially since, I have to confess, sometimes I looked at the directories on my PC but couldn't decide what to listen to!! :lol:



MatthewWeflen said:


> ...
> 
> -Interesting side notes: of those 6284 classical tracks, it turns out that 1958 of them, or 119 GB, are Herbert von Karajan - around 31%. That's actually lower than I would have guessed, since I started my classical deep dive with one of the HvK decade box sets. The next largest artistic contributors would be:
> Daniel Barenboim (solo and with other players) at 474 files/7%,
> ...


That's interesting stats!

I considered myself a big fan of Karajan, so I also checked - I have got around 26 days of Karajan, that's around 11% of classical music that I have. To be honest, I'd expected a higher percentage. :lol:

I didn't count soundtracks in my previous stat, although I did count John Williams' concert pieces. Soundtracks-wise, John Williams - 1 day. Howard Shore - 12 hrs. John Barry - 2 hrs :lol:.

That's quite a lot of Howard Shore... Well the Lord of the Ring soundtracks are pretty long. The Lord of the Ring Symphony alone also takes up almost 2 hrs!



MatthewWeflen said:


> I too am a metadata stickler. When I rip discs, Exact Audio Copy does suggest metadata for most, but I do frequently alter them to fit my preferred syntax scheme. And for Blu-Ray audio discs I've ripped, I've typed up the metadata completely (which was quite a task for my Ring Cycle!).


I understand that completely!! Ripping bitperfect audio from blu-rays (and from DVDs too) takes a lot of work. If the disc supports mShuttle, at least we can simply copy the tracks from the disc and then enter the tags manually (I always use a cuesheet). If it doesn't, we'll have to rip the whole stream (I rip only the 2-channel LPCM using eac3to) and copy the timings from the Table of Contents to a cuesheet, as well as entering the tags manually. I've always thought about writing a script to transform a Table of Contents into a placeholder cuesheet but never did. I suppose I don't rip blu-rays often enough to spend the effort. :lol:


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## OperaChic (Aug 26, 2015)

-----wrong thread---------


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

dizwell said:


> I applaud the sentiment. I disagree only to the extent that the "why I don't go digital" appears to be a non sequiteur (to me!): one can care and curate digital files just as much as with CDs (which are, after all, already stores of *digital* music).
> 
> I agree with the tactile thing about booklets and so on: no amount of PDFs of the scans of booklets will ever feel quite the same. It's why my experience with e-book readers (Kindles etc) was quite short-lived.


I haven't _completely_ gone digital -- I got rid of a good portion of my cds, but I still have a portion of them, primarily operas and vocal works with sung texts and librettos, that I can keep stored in a modest shelving unit:










If there is one thing I miss I suppose it is the informative booklets and essays that come with many cds, although I've found that with the wealth of program notes and information that can be accessed online, as well as a few books (like Michael Steinberg's The Symphony), I can get by just fine without them. What is more imporant to me is the lack of physical space my collection takes up as well as my ability to organize it, find a recording or artist I'm looking for in a matter of seconds, and access it virtually anywhere. Not only have ripped my collection, but I have it uploaded to my Google Play Music account, which means I can access it from my phone or computer at any location I have internet access and play any piece of music I possess. For me that overrides any sentimental feelings I have about holding or looking at a piece of physical media. Besides, I find that scrolling through my digital collection, looking at the artwork and deciding what to lsiten to is pretty pleasing in its own right 

Here's a video I just made of my music collection (with a few new albums I've added since I posted my stats at the beggining of this thread )


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

Kiki said:


> That's interesting stats!
> 
> I considered myself a big fan of Karajan, so I also checked - I have got around 26 days of Karajan, that's around 11% of classical music that I have. To be honest, I'd expected a higher percentage. :lol:


I enjoy quite a few Karajan recordings as well, but he doesn't occupy nearly as big of a place in my collection. A quick search tells me I have 31 albums by him consisting of 3.2 days of music, about 1.8% of my collection. Mind you I have more albums by any other conductor other than Bernstein...probably partly because of the sheer volume and vairiety of music he recorded I'm sure :lol:


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## Dimace (Oct 19, 2018)

I'm so much digital, as the democracy in the former USSR... :lol:

I have two or three USB sticks (almost empty) with electronic, Latin etc music and that's it. What I have is a very organized You Tube base, with thousands of quality videos. All are very well shorted. (I pay for this service and I have no commercials)


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## haydnguy (Oct 13, 2008)

WildThing said:


> I haven't _completely_ gone digital -- I got rid of a good portion of my cds, but I still have a portion of them, primarily operas and vocal works with sung texts and librettos, that I can keep stored in a modest shelving unit:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I used to have a CD case exactly like that. There were busts of Beethoven and Schubert on top and one time I was bending over and Schubert came falling down and almost cracked me on the head. He was heavy!

I had my CD's organized by genre. baroque, classical, etc. One genre on the left, one on the right, etc. One day my wife and the cleaning lady decided to take all the CD's out and put them in storage cases without my knowledge. They were never organized so well again. My collection is much bigger than that now.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

WildThing said:


> I enjoy quite a few Karajan recordings as well, but he doesn't occupy nearly as big of a place in my collection. A quick search tells me I have 31 albums by him consisting of 3.2 days of music, about 1.8% of my collection. Mind you I have more albums by any other conductor other than Bernstein...probably partly because of the sheer volume and vairiety of music he recorded I'm sure :lol:


See, what surprises me about that comment, and the one you were responding to, is that we all know that Karajan never wrote a note of music in his life (or not any that matter, at any rate)!

And how do you tell the difference between Bernstein conducting Mahler's 5th and someone else conducting the overture to Candide?!

I'm surprised, in other words, that the performer or principal artist takes the place of the composer in your own assessments of your collections.

It perhaps explains some of the metadata I see filled in automatically any time I rip a new CD, though!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Kiki said:


> A random number generator? That's an inventive way of picking a piece, especially it might pick one that might not come into mind immediately when you want to listen to something.


I make the 'power of random' do lots of work: I am otherwise a creature of habit. Left to my own devices, I will tend to eat the same meals day after day; or listen to the same music; or ...lots of other stuff!

For example, I put together a database of about 1000 English place names, grouped by initial letter (with some special exceptions: for example, a place with a 'Z' in it anywhere is regarded as a 'Z' town, not whatever its initial letter is. Thus 'Devizes' is a "Z" place, not a "D" one). Next, get a computer to make 26 random selections from each letter group: you now have 26 places to visit in England, in alphabetical order, selected at random. Left to my own devices, I would be forever visiting Aldebugh. But now I have a year-long program of places to visit which I wouldn't otherwise have chosen by myself. (The rules of that particular game also state that if you end up being taken to a really boring place, whilst you must visit the randomly-selected place, you are also allowed to drive to nearby places that might be more interesting. Hence, on our 'D' trip, which was to 'Dudley', we spent about 10 minutes in Dudley before heading off for the much-more interesting Ironbridge and the musically-appropriate Wenlock Edge. If you know anything at all about Dudley, you will understand why it was a flying visit there and an excuse to visit somewhere else! It all still counted as our 'D' day out, however).

I recommend random number generators to anyone who is ever in danger of getting stuck in a rut. It's why I put one on the bottom of every page of my website You just have to work out a rule that turns a number into something... that is, number->composer, or number->place name or number->main ingredient of meal etc etc.



Kiki said:


> I did turn to RVW in the afternoon, as I've read your post in which you mentioned a few composers including RVW. Come to think about it, it has happened quite often that when a composer (or a piece, or even a performance) was mentioned on TC, I've had the tendency to put it on. I suppose this is also a good way for picking something to listen to, especially since, I have to confess, sometimes I looked at the directories on my PC but couldn't decide what to listen to!! :lol:


This I very much agree with. I didn't even known Florent Schmitt existed until he was mentioned in this august forum, for example. That triggered some research, followed by some purchases. It's an excellent way to broaden one's horizons!


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

I don't know but for those who like opera - and Wagner in particular - and who are OK with downloads the Opera Depot site, with its generous monthly freebies of good but not commercially available recordings of whole operas (in the last six or so months I have had two complete Rings for free from the site!) and lots of bargains, seems like an inducement to grow your collection substantially.

https://operadepot.com/


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Recommendation definitely seconded! It's quite an amazing site, and I don't know how they get half their stuff in the first place, but am glad that they do! World premier recordings of Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream, Gloriana, Death in Venice, Paul Bunyan (not World premier, but first radio broadcast of 1976 version) etc. Plus original cast recordings of Albert Herring and Rape of Lucretia, for example.

It's an astonishing resource, cheap and worth every penny (imho).


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

I've got just short of 300GB of music in my iTunes library, comprising 944 "albums", many of which are multi-disc sets, mostly operas but also complete collections of symphonies, vocal, instrumental and chamber works. That's only a subset of what I've got backed up onto two SAN servers - my catalogue tells me that I've got 6,989 "albums" in total. The vast majority of those are downloads I've bought over the past 15-20 years, but I'd guess around 1,000 are ripped from my CD collection, which I've retained 'cos they look nice on the shelves 

For the past two decades I've only bought CDs if (a) I found a bargain in a charity shop; or (b) I couldn't find an electronic version of a recording I want. (The last time the latter happened was last year, when I bought a CD of Shostakovich's 13th Symphony by Eliahu Inbal, to plug a gap in an otherwise complete set of individual downloads from Presto Classical.)


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

dizwell said:


> See, what surprises me about that comment, and the one you were responding to, is that we all know that Karajan never wrote a note of music in his life (or not any that matter, at any rate)!
> 
> And how do you tell the difference between Bernstein conducting Mahler's 5th and someone else conducting the overture to Candide?!
> 
> ...


I wouldn't say the performer or principal artist takes the place of the composer in my collection -- with classical music the trick is to acknowledge the composer, the performing artist and the name of the work in the metadata within the set format of artist, song name, album title and composer that iTunes gives you.

As you can see from my video, I have my collection organized primarily by composers because it is arranged in alphabetical order by "album title", and I begin every album title with the last name of the composer. So for example "Beethoven: Piano Sonatas" would be the name of an album. If its a last name with several different well known composers I'll add their initials to differentiate. So I have a "Bach, C.P.E.: Cello Concertos" for an album by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, a "Bach, J.S.: Brandebenburg Concertos" for an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, etc. Then every track has the name of the composer under the "composer" field as well.

In the album artist field I will list the performer; if the album contains multiple perfomers then I will list the primary performers in the album artist field and then go into more detail with the individual "song artists". Here's an example of how I've organized an album by Johann Sebastian Bach that is a collection of Brandenburg Concertos conducted by Benjamin Britten and Keyboard Concertos conducted by Neville Marriner with multiple soloists:

Album title: Bach, J.S.: Brandenburg Concertos and Keyboard Concertos
Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
Album Artist: Benjamin Britten; Neville Marriner

The Song Title and Song artist are unique for each track then of course. For example:

Song Title: Brandenburg Concerto No.6 in B flat, BWV 1051 - 2. Adagio ma non tanto
Song Artist: Benjamin Britten: English Chamber Orchestra

Or on one of the Keyboard Concertos:

SongTitle: Concerto for Harpsichord, Strings, and Continuo No.5 in F minor, BWV 1056 - Arr./ Reconstructed Christopher Hogwood for flute & strings - Allegro
Song Artist: William Bennett; Neville Marriner: Academy of St. Martin in the Fields

William Bennett is the harpsichordist, Neville Marriner is the conductor, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields is the orchestra. On albums with multiple composers I follow the same principle, and add the composer's last name to the "song title" field.

I happen to have one recording of Bernstein's Candide Overure in my collection, labelled as such:

Album Title: Bernstein: Candide Overture, Symphonic Dances, Symphonic Suite, Fancy Free
Album Artist: Leonard Bernstein: New York Philharmonic Orchestra
Composer: Leonard Bernstein
Song Title: Overture to Candide - Allegro molto con brio
Song Artist: Leonard Bernstein: New York Philharmonic Orchestra

If I were to acquire a recording of the overture by a different conductor, then their name and the orchestra they were conducting would go under "song artist". So now on iTunes I can go to the "Composer" field, click on a composer like Ludwig van Beethoven and see I have 94 albums that his compositions appear on and 3,489 "songs" or tracks composed by him. I can also go to the search field and type in "georg solti" and all 25 albums and 3 days of music that he appears on shows up. Or I can search for "london symphony orchestra" and see that I have 95 albums and 11.2 days worth of music from that orchestra.

It's true that if I did a general search for "leonard bernstein" instead of looking him up under composers, it would show me albums where he appears as a conductor as well as albums of his compositions that someone else is performing. Actually I only have one album of music by Bernstein where he isn't the performer, and that's a couple of his symphonies by Marin Alsop. But those cases are rare, there's mostly a clear distinction between performers and composers. And besides, although most general searches will give me a rough estimate and not exact numbers because of outliers like that, I don't really care how many albums or how many hours of music I have by any given composer or performer. I was simply looking it up for fun in this case to see how my collection compared. What matters is being able to quickly and easily find something when I want to listen to it.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Yeugh! That is quite possibly the _worst_ tagging practice I've ever witnessed! (If it works for you, fine. I make no judgments in that respect). But from a data management perspective... You have composer's names appearing in album title tags, for starters. What is the artist or composer tag for, then? Oh, you're just going to duplicate the same composer information in two places, one of which is explicitly NOT for composer details?! Principle 1 of data cleanliness: record things once in the right place. You're violating that principle all over the place.

Now, personally, I think composers had first and last names (and often some middle ones too!), so I think you should use them. You prefer 'Beethoven', I would want 'Ludwig van Beethoven'. Funny thing about computers and digital music players: they'll find the word 'Beethoven' in a chunk of metadata whether it comes first or last or in whichever order. You already acknowledge the need to distinguish Bach J.S. from Bach C.P.E. (and P.D.Q.!), so why not be consistent about it? Principle 2 of data cleanliness: be consistent. If you're going to use first names or initials for some composers, use them for all.

And from your last example, it would seem to me that you've catalogued by CD. By that I mean, you've got one bit of metadata describing 'Candide Overture', 'Symphonic Dances', 'Symphoniic Suite', 'Fancy Free' -presumably because they were all supplied on the one CD (or maybe a double CD set?). But when I look at that, I think: you've got four different compositions there. They deserve four separate catalogue entries. The fact that they came on one CD, or on one DVD, is irrelevant. The physical CD is just the delivery mechanism. It's to the music what an envelope is to Aunt Maude's birthday card that she sent to you last year. You put her card up on your mantlepiece, not the envelope! At the point where we play digital music from a hard disk, what the original music was supplied on is (to me) and should be (to you, in my humble opinion) irrelevant.

So if you've got a Box Set of Beethoven Symphonies, supplied on 7 different CDs, it's still 9 separate catalogue entries. (Special exceptions might need to be made when a CD of Maria Callas singing 32 different arias by 16 different composers turns up, I will admit!)

Now some of this is surely down to the use of iTunes (with which I am completely unfamiliar as I won't have Apple hardware or software in the house). But the concept of a symphony or a concerto having a 'song artist' just floors me, really. In classical music, a song is a very well defined thing, and the overture to Candide isn't one of them!

Anyway, I could write a book about this stuff -and I apologise in advance if I sound like I'm attacking you or your cataloguing methods. I absolutely don't mean to do that at all. It's just that I come from a database background professionally, so getting data and metadata right, clean, precise, predictable and consistent is probably more important to me than to most.... and as I say, I'm really not trying to argue you into doing anything other than what you've chosen for yourself, as the system you've devised works for you, and that's entirely fine.

I'm just saying that I would hate to have my music organised that way 

I'll calm down now...


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

dizwell said:


> Yeugh! That is quite possibly the _worst_ tagging practice I've ever witnessed! (If it works for you, fine. I make no judgments in that respect). But from a data management perspective... You have composer's names appearing in album title tags, for starters. What is the artist or composer tag for, then? Oh, you're just going to duplicate the same composer information in two places, one of which is explicitly NOT for composer details?! Principle 1 of data cleanliness: record things once in the right place. You're violating that principle all over the place.
> 
> Now, personally, I think composers had first and last names (and often some middle ones too!), so I think you should use them. You prefer 'Beethoven', I would want 'Ludwig van Beethoven'. Funny thing about computers and digital music players: they'll find the word 'Beethoven' in a chunk of metadata whether it comes first or last or in whichever order. You already acknowledge the need to distinguish Bach J.S. from Bach C.P.E. (and P.D.Q.!), so why not be consistent about it? Principle 2 of data cleanliness: be consistent. If you're going to use first names or initials for some composers, use them for all.
> 
> ...


I admit I don't know or care anything about the principles of data management! :lol: I hear what you're saying, but none of what you mention impedes my ability to find, listen to, or enjoy my music in any way. My method basically replicates my organization of _physical_ media in a digitial form. When organazing cds, its common practice to sort them alphabetically by composer: by putting the composer's last name in the "album" field I'm able to accomplish this. The fact that I'm duplicating the composer in two different fields doesn't matter to me. There are some albums I own with the music of multiple composers on them of course, and if I want to see a detailed list of albums and tracks that the music of a composer appears on, all I have to do is go to the composer list where I have all the composers in my collection listed by first, middle and last name. John Adams. Ludwig van Beethoven. Johann Sebastian Bach. And yes I'm putting a name of a movement of a symphony or an overture in a "song" tag, but it doesn't matter in the least to me that they aren't actually songs. I'm able to identify the work in question, that's what matters to me.

You're absolutely right that essentially the original albums are now basically irrelevant, and I actually considered organizing my collection by individual "works" (like Beethoven's 7th symphony) instead of by the albums they were released on. But this would create all sorts of other issues and problems to address, the Maria Callas example you pointed out being just one.

The fact is I chose this method because of A) ease and B)I still largely consume my music in collections or albums, and like hearing works that artists paired together on an album in one sitting. Of course if I only want to listen to a particular work off of an album, or if I want to listen to several recordings of Beethoven's 7th symphony instead of the entire albums they appear on, I can still do that quite easily. That's what I create playlists for.


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

dizwell said:


> Yeugh! That is quite possibly the _worst_ tagging practice I've ever witnessed! (If it works for you, fine. I make no judgments in that respect). But from a data management perspective... You have composer's names appearing in album title tags, for starters.


I do exactly the same; that way the albums "self-sort" by composers' names by default, whether they're loaded into a music player or stored on an external drive.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

WildThing said:


> The fact that I'm duplicating the composer in two different fields doesn't matter to me.


It should do. True story. I tagged all my Bartok as Bela Bartok. He is, of course, actually Béla Bartók. If you have the composer name in one place, it's one change. And if the composer's name is *all* there is in a field, it's trivial to do a bulk update. But if you put the same data in multiple places, that's multiple changes required (unless you care to have data inconsistency). And if the composer's name is mixed up with other stuff, then it's not necessarily easy to do a simple substitution of one for the other.

In the database business, we call this "normalization". It means you don't repeat data, because otherwise you never know if you change it, that you've changed all of it consistently.

The Maria Callas example I mentioned is actually trivially simple to fix. There's one special "composer" called "Compilation". The fact is, I listen to her singing because she's the star turn and she could be singing 'She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes' for all I care: I'd still want to listen to *her* singing it! So at that point, the *specific*, "real" composer is irrelevant. It's the fact that it's a compilation of Maria that's the important thing. But that sort of multi-composer album where the actual composer(s) is/are irrelevant is really quite rare.

I won't go on about it. As I say, if it works for you, fine. The real issue I have is precisely what you said it was: you've followed the organisation of your *physical* media whilst moving to digital media. But that ignores minor details like search engines, which can find a piece of data no matter where it's stored. We wrote things like 'Britten, Benjamin' on library card indexes because that made sense in the days of pen and ink. It makes zero sense to do it in a digital world, when you can find Britten's work whether it's first, last, or inbetween.

The other thing I don't think you've yet experienced (or maybe you have, but I can only go on what you write): the song tag is not present in most digital music players. They have 'title' tags. But not songs. Thus the data you store in there probably won't be visible if you were ever to move your files to a non-iTunes related player. Now, again, that might not matter to you, because you're invested in the Apple ecosystem, but I would prefer to be sure that whether I play my music with Clementine, DeadBeef, Foobar2000 or Windows Media Player, they will all display (and allow searching on) the same data. Proprietary tags are just a no-no for me for that reason.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

If you tag your music correctly, with Artist tags=Composer=proper name of composer, there isn't a media player out there that won't sort them correctly by composer, since they all provide the ability to display by Artist.

I don't have composers names in my Album tags and yet they appear to "self-sort by composer" perfectly well:









I mean, the great thing about digital music players is that they can actually understand and work with digital data, so that it becomes trivially easy to re-display things in whatever order you fancy:









Thus ordering my music by Album Name (i.e., composition name) also becomes trivially easy:









Make your players and software do the work. Don't scramble your metadata in an attempt to do it for it, basically.

Of course, if you're not using a media player, but relying on files merely stored on an external drive, you'll say I lose this ability. Except I don't:









There's everything swiftly accessible in composer/genre/album order, without me labelling album names with anything other than the composition name and the 'distinguishing artist' (i.e., the conductor or soloist that makes one recording of Symphony x distinct from another).

Now, I can rely on operating system tools to find anything I want:









Personally, I can't imagine why having things "self-sort by composer name" is a desirable goal anyway. Surely, what you want from a catalogue of any description and sorted in any order, is to actually be able to *find* the things you're interested in? As you can see, I can do that without putting composers names anywhere other than where they are meant to be in tags, and by replicating the resulting tagging hierarchy on the hard disk.

I mean, do whatever makes you comfortable... but what you're describing is not particularly efficient for maintenance purposes and is, besides, unnecessary.


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## Kiki (Aug 15, 2018)

WildThing said:


> I enjoy quite a few Karajan recordings as well, but he doesn't occupy nearly as big of a place in my collection. A quick search tells me I have 31 albums by him consisting of 3.2 days of music, about 1.8% of my collection. Mind you I have more albums by any other conductor other than Bernstein...probably partly because of the sheer volume and vairiety of music he recorded I'm sure :lol:


Such stats are revealing.

I started exploring the repertoire back in the early 80s. Back then Karajan, Bernstein and Solti were the super stars. People bought their records. I was only a teenager and spending power was limited, so what I bought was only a very small subset of their output. Much later in life, whenever I saw a re-issue on CD/download of a record that I missed out in my teenage days, I would often have a strong desire to get it! :lol:

Further checked my stats - Karajan (26 days), Bernstein (8 days), Solti (4 days). Only Abbado (7 days) and Rattle (5 days), whom I developed an obsession with later in life, have overtaken Solti. And they made the top five in my table.

I suppose Karajan's significantly higher stats is due to those so-called "complete" boxes of Karajan that I've got, while I haven't bitten the bullet for Bernstein and Solti.

The one shock about the conductor stats is Neville Marriner (23 hrs), who is way down in my table. Wasn't he the second best-selling conductor after Karajan? In fact, I like his records, but for some reason I have got so few of them. Maybe it has something to do with his repertoire not being my favourite.

Also looked at the stats of composers - Mahler (26 days) and Beethoven (23 days) lead the table, followed by Shostakovich (10 days), Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, RVW (8 days each), then Ravel, Bruckner, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Wagner (6 days each).

Other war horses include Schumann (5 days), Mozart (5 days), Schubert (4 days), Brahms (4 days), Bach (3 days), Richard Strauss (3 days), Mendelssohn (3 days), Haydn (3 days), Dvořák (2.5 days).

The shock for me is Mozart and Brahms. I didn't know I have this much of their music. I am not into either of them. Still am not. Although I've been trying.

Having said that, some of my favourite composers would never feature at the top of the table - Martinů (6 days), Schnittke (1.5 days), Britten (1.5 days), Messiaen (1 day); while Berg, Rautavaara, Poulenc, Penderecki, Panufnik, Gubaidulina, Aho, Lutosławski, Bacewicz, Ge Gan-ru etc. all feature less than a day's music each.

This should not be a surprise I suppose, since most of them are not exactly central repertoire composers on records, so there is no way they would be as widely recorded as the warhorses, and therefore there's much fewer records to collect... which is not really a bad thing for my wallet.


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## WildThing (Feb 21, 2017)

dizwell said:


> I won't go on about it. As I say, if it works for you, fine.


It does. True, I've largely had to adapt and organize my collection based on the constrictions and limitations of digital music platforms and metadata tags for classical music. All of the suggestions you make would simply create a major _headache_ for what I'm interested in: the ease and practicality of organizing and listening to my collection in digital format on a given media player. I like consuming my music through albums, or collections of compositions by a particular performer. And I like album artwork!

If I wanted to be strict about it and limit the data I put into each of the 4 fields I'm given when organizng my digital media, then I would end up with a situation where I would have to make a decision about what constitues an album. I might make Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 an album, Ludwig van Beethoven the composer, Herbert von Karajan the artist and then the individual movements labelled under the "title" or "song title". Of course Symphony No.7 in A major, Op. 92 is not technically an album, but so be it. However under this scenario, each of Schubert's individual lieder would also be a different composition or "album", and each song would be separated from the original album it was released on. And I don't see any way around these individual songs, which constitute different compositions, having the same album name as their "track title" or "song title". So much for no duplication. Besides, if I want to listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's recording of Schubert's Goethe Lieder, I want to hear that particular collection of songs. But now "Wandrers Nachtlied, Op.4, D. 224" has been separated from the next song on the album, "Ganymed, Op.19, Op.3, D. 544". Now I would then have to take the extra step of creating a playlist to replicate the collection of songs I want to listen to in the first place, just for the sake of data normalization, when with my method its already in the form in which I want to consume it!

Digital media and my method still grants me a lot more _freedom_ in my listening. I can make a playlist of selected works off different albums and listen to them together, which wouldn't be possible on physical media without removing one cd and putting in another. I can now listen to the Prologue and Act 1 of Wagner's Gotterdammerung uninterrupted without having to break immersion, stand up and change cds in the middle of the music because I've hit the 80 minute celing on the cd. But none of this would be enhanced by being stricter and more precise with my digital organization. It's quick and easy to do as it is.

I haven't had any trouble with the song tag not being present in other digital music players. My files are still labelled correctly and easy to identify when I use other players. As I said, I've uploaded my music to Google Play Music so I can stream my collection anytime I wish, and it matches iTunes perfectly. I see the albums and album art in my collection there on Google Play just as they show up in iTunes. The individual tracks do not show up under "song title" any longer, but in Google Play Music are now under the label of "name". If I import my music to Window Media Player, again they show up exactly as I have them, with song names under the "title" tag. And I've used mp3 players on my phone and the metadata shows up correctly, just as I have it labelled in iTunes everytime.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

I think I'd need about a year to listen to all my Beethoven stuff. Scary.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

WildThing said:


> It does. True, I've largely had to adapt and organize my collection based on the constrictions and limitations of digital music platforms and metadata tags for classical music. All of the suggestions you make would simply create a major _headache_ for what I'm interested in: the ease and practicality of organizing and listening to my collection in digital format on a given media player. I like consuming my music through albums, or collections of compositions by a particular performer. And I like album artwork!


If you look at my screenshots above, you'll notice that I do too. Not quite sure why you'd mention it as if anything I've suggested would prevent you from enjoying your album artwork! The fact that I apply the same artwork to multiple compositions doesn't mean I'm not relying on it and enjoying it any the less!



WildThing said:


> If I wanted to be strict about it and limit the data I put into each of the 4 fields I'm given when organizng my digital media, then I would end up with a situation where I would have to make a decision about what constitues an album. I might make Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92 an album, Ludwig van Beethoven the composer, Herbert von Karajan the artist and then the individual movements labelled under the "title" or "song title". Of course Symphony No.7 in A major, Op. 92 is not technically an album, but so be it.


You've already mentioned that in terms of nomenclature, we have to put up with "Song Title" and "Artist" where classical music fans would probably prefer "Movement" (maybe) or "Composer". So yes, it's slightly unfortunate that "Album" really is "Composition", but that's exactly what constitutes an 'album'.



WildThing said:


> However under this scenario, each of Schubert's individual lieder would also be a different composition or "album", and each song would be separated from the original album it was released on.


Not at all. There's no need to throw common sense out of the window. For starters, would *all* his lieder count as separate compositions? Were some of them, at least, not published as collections? Winterreise is a single 'album' for these purposes, not 24 separate albums.

Secondly, I have a somewhat arbitrary rule: if a track lasts more than 5 minutes, it's potentially worth cataloguing on its own as its own composition; but less than that (and it's not a hard-and-fast rule), it doesn't necessarily qualify. Thus:









Yes, I'm having to decide what constitutes the album at this point, but it's really not a difficult decision to make.



WildThing said:


> And I don't see any way around these individual songs, which constitute different compositions, having the same album name as their "track title" or "song title".


Sure there is. You don't have to take things literally. The point of a good catalogue is to be able to query it for information you require. How many times do I sit there thinking 'I'd like to listen to Britten's The Ash Grove!'? None, basically. Therefore, I don't need my album to be called 'The Ash Grove', because I'd never actually query by that. (However, digital being what it is, if on the Blue Moon day I decided I _did_ want to find just that song, my player will find it without difficulty buried within the 'Folksongs' album you see above, because that's what search engines can do for you).

I might well, however, sit there thinking 'I fancy listening to some folksongs', but that's about as specific as I'd get. So the point is to aggregate that which you would seldom, if ever, listen to as a standalone work and keep distinct that which you would want to query and listen to as significant works in their own right.



WildThing said:


> So much for no duplication.


Ah, see, I didn't say to eliminate duplication. I said to stop duplicating information that didn't need to be duplicated. Repeating a composer's name in an album tag is unnecessary duplication, because we already have a Composer tag for that, and also an Artist tag. Repeating it in the Album is thus bad duplication. Repeating 'Ludwig van Beethoven' three times because your CD contains Symphony 1, Symphony 2 and The Coriolan Overture is *necessary* duplication because you have three compositions and each needs to be attributed correctly to a composer.



WildThing said:


> Besides, if I want to listen to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's recording of Schubert's Goethe Lieder, I want to hear that particular collection of songs. But now "Wandrers Nachtlied, Op.4, D. 224" has been separated from the next song on the album, "Ganymed, Op.19, Op.3, D. 544".


No. That's a misunderstanding of 'what constitutes an album' rule. See above. If they're called 'Goethe Liede', and if you think of them as only meaningful in the aggregate, then aggregate them. And since only one track on that recording lasts more than 5 minutes (Prometheus), I'd probably just rip the whole thing as a single CD too.

That doesn't alter the fact that you then don't stick the composer in the Album tag!



WildThing said:


> Now I would then have to take the extra step of creating a playlist to replicate the collection of songs I want to listen to in the first place, just for the sake of data normalization, when with my method its already in the form in which I want to consume it!


I've been digitising and tagging my music since 1999. I have yet to use the playlist functionality of any music player I've employed in that time. It's simply never necessary.



WildThing said:


> I haven't had any trouble with the song tag not being present in other digital music players.


Well, we'll come on to that in a moment when you describe what happens when you try playing your music in other players! But as a matter of technical fact, just take a look at Easytag (a Linux equivalent of MP3Tag on Windows, which despite its name is happy to correctly tag FLAC files too):









The program exposes (and invites you to fill in) what I'll call the 'standard' tags. Song Title isn't one of them. It's why you *can* tag your FLAC files with the key of the work, or who the recording engineer was, or who the tea-lady was on the day. FLAC's _Vorbis Comments_ tag system lets you create whatever name=value pairs of tags you like, up to a limit of there being no more than 4 billion of them. But no music player on the planet is going to display the tea-lady tag, no matter that it is there in the file.

My point is that "song title" is not exposed by Easytag, MP3 Tag or dbPowerAMP as one of the 'standard' tags. So by using it, you're in tea-lady territory.



WildThing said:


> My files are still labelled correctly and easy to identify when I use other players. As I said, I've uploaded my music to Google Play Music so I can stream my collection anytime I wish, and it matches iTunes perfectly. I see the albums and album art in my collection there on Google Play just as they show up in iTunes. The individual tracks do not show up under "song title" any longer, but in Google Play Music are now under the label of "name".


Right. So now we get to the nub of the problem. What you've just described is that your proprietary music player can cope with 'song title', but when you transfer your music over to another proprietary player, you're relying on that second player doing an automatic and uncontrollable conversion of the 'song title' tag into something it can use and display. And Google Music is doing what you need, so no problem, right?

Well, not really. Google Music might decide to change what sort of tag conversions it performs one day: you have no control over that. And some other media player you might fancy using one day might not do that type of tag conversion at all.

What you're describing, in other words, is not portability. It's non-standard tagging and a reliance on other people's software making up the difference.



WildThing said:


> If I import my music to Window Media Player, again they show up exactly as I have them, with song names under the "title" tag. And I've used mp3 players on my phone and the metadata shows up correctly, just as I have it labelled in iTunes everytime.


Basically, see above. You are relying on the software to re-interpret your tags. But I'm suggesting that you should use 'standard' tags that port between players without reliance on closed-source software that may or may not be maintained correctly in the future.

Now, this has all slightly gone off the rails as to the size of your digital media collection and into the dark woods of correct tagging of classical music. So I won't respond further to that here, though I might well start a new post specifically about tagging at another time. I will happily accept that you tag as you do because you think it flexible and well-organised and you're fine with the way you've been doing it for years. I'll post this by way of final rebuttal of that argument and in a spirit of what I hope comes across as self-deprecating humour:









And over and out!


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## pianozach (May 21, 2018)

WildThing said:


> According to my iTunes, in my classical collection I currently have 1,715 "albums" (which ranges between everything from single discs to 16 disc operas to box sets) coming in at 171.5 days of music.


According to my iTunes I have 50.4 days of music.

Sorting by Classical genre I have 7 days of music.

There's a decent amount of duplicate tracks, as well as different versions of the same song or work.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

So you don't differentiate between symphonies, masses, concertos, chamber works, operas, oratorios and so on? Everything classical-related is just tagged "classical"?


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

"Artist" for me is always Conductor/Orchestra. Or, in the case of chamber music, the individual performers. This is the same for any other genre. If I were listening to Michael Jackson or Patsy Cline or something, I wouldn't want to search for songs by the songwriter.

"Title" Will be Work, Op.#, Movement (preceded by Roman numeral) 

"Album" is the album title.

MP3Tag, which I use for metadata, has a "Composer" field. That's where "Ludwig van Beethoven" goes. I use the full name First/Last.

"Genre" is "Classical." I can't be buggered to separate the work of a given composer, or of a given artist, into the sub-genres of Classical. I want it to be differentiated as a group from the other music (e.g. Jazz/Pop/Rock) on my players.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> "Genre" is "Classical." I can't be buggered to separate the work of a given composer, or of a given artist, into the sub-genres of Classical. I want it to be differentiated as a group from the other music (e.g. Jazz/Pop/Rock) on my players.


To my mind, that is the equivalent of lumping all oranges, strawberries and apples together and then saying you're off to the shops to buy "fruit"!

That said, I can see why you do what you do. It's a piece of functionality you need -and which I don't because, although I do have some non-classical music, it's vastly less extensive a collection than my classical and I can play it straight off the file manager should the mood ever strike. It's never catalogued with my classical: to me, that would be like having a database for photographs (which would capture things like shutter speed and aperture and lens make/type) and using it to store details of paintings (which would need to capture things like artist name, provenance/sale history, approximate date, materials used and so on). Fundamentally, they're all "pictures", but they are so vastly different sorts of pictures that shoehorning them into the one database would be a really bad thing to do. Hence, I don't let non-classical music get into the same database as my non-classical.

But I can see why you do what you do with genre.



MatthewWeflen said:


> "Title" Will be Work, Op.#, Movement (preceded by Roman numeral)


But on this one, I don't see why you do that! Are you Roman or speak Latin natively? Why would you choose to use Roman numerals when there are perfectly good Arabic ones to use?!  Why use numerals in the the title tag at all, in fact?

The only answer to that I can come up with is: I bet you rip CDs in one sitting. That is, if you've ripped a whole CD such as this one:









...and then I can see you'd end up with the track number tag reading '5', and you needing to tag that as 'no, really, it's the first movement of Symphony No. 3' and thus tagging it as 'I. Allegro con brio'.

Do you add Roman numerals under any other circumstance than that? I'm genuinely curious to know why, if so.

Personally, that 'DISC 1' is simply a piece of plastic that contains two 'albums' and I'd rip them separately as 'Symphony No. 1' and 'Symphony No. 3' and thus have two track 1s, and thus would never need to stick a numeral, Arabic or Roman, in the title of any of the resulting tracks. YMMV, naturally.



MatthewWeflen said:


> MP3Tag, which I use for metadata, has a "Composer" field.


Most tagging software does, actually, since it's one of the 'standard tags'. Unfortunately, few media players expose it, or if they do, they certainly don't use it as a way to 'organise' your media library. Thus WMP, for example:









You can organise and re-arrange the display by Artist, Album or Genre by default, but not by Composer. In an idea world, I'd love to just tag classical music with the composer tag, but until all the players catch up, if you don't stick the composer in the Artist tag, you're doomed to not be able to organise your collection by composer. But naturally, if you don't care to do that in the first place, your placement of the composer details in the composer tag alone makes sense.

But I see I'm getting involved 'how to rip and how to tag' issues again, when in this thread I was really only interested in how large other people's classical collections were. So, I'll just say that my guide to what I consider a good way to tag classical music is to be found here and I won't mention it again in this thread!


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

I don't mark "Disc 1" or "Disc 2" for anything. A box set is one album, for me. So a Beethoven cycle, for instance, will be one album with 38 tracks. My music players (Sony Walkmen) can discriminate by composer, so I utilize that tag at times (though usually I just look in the "Artist" category and choose pieces from there). As far as Roman Numerals go, I like the way they look  I don't need them strictly speaking, since the track numbers are hard coded into the metadata. But If I Want to look and see what movement I'm in, it helps quite a bit, especially for symphonies I listen to less frequently.


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## Rogerx (Apr 27, 2018)

Merl said:


> I think I'd need about a year to listen to all my Beethoven stuff. Scary.


I need a whole new life for going once again trough all my stuff .


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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I don't mark "Disc 1" or "Disc 2" for anything. A box set is one album, for me. So a Beethoven cycle, for instance, will be one album with 38 tracks. My music players (Sony Walkmen) can discriminate by composer, so I utilize that tag at times (though usually I just look in the "Artist" category and choose pieces from there). As far as Roman Numerals go, I like the way they look  I don't need them strictly speaking, since the track numbers are hard coded into the metadata. But If I Want to look and see what movement I'm in, it helps quite a bit, especially for symphonies I listen to less frequently.


I would like to put the different discs within albums together, but whenever I've tried it, it gets messed up. The track numbers will go 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, etc. even if I change the track numbers on the second disc to add to the last track number of the first disc, etc. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

Dizwell, I find what you say a about tagging really interesting. I have a couple of TBs of music on HDs and I have my own way of organising it. If I followed your guidelines it would take me about 6 months or so to retag everything I have and frankly I can't be a*sed. Just retagging stuff to my tastes (when I get it) takes long enough. Retagging my entire collection is non-negotiable at the moment. I think your idea of starting a thread about tagging is a good one and I would enjoy seeing a step-by-step guide of how you tag your stuff (screenshots would be nice for a visual learner like me). :tiphat:


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

dizwell said:


> If you tag your music correctly, with Artist tags=Composer=proper name of composer, there isn't a media player out there that won't sort them correctly by composer, since they all provide the ability to display by Artist.
> 
> I don't have composers names in my Album tags and yet they appear to "self-sort by composer" perfectly well:
> 
> View attachment 131708


By putting the composer's name in the title, there's no need to load the files in a music player; a simple file-browser will do nicely:


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## Malx (Jun 18, 2017)

On a couple of occasions reading through this thread my eyes have glazed over and I wonder if the route of computer based music storage is worth the fuss. I can't imagine myself ever going to the bother of entering or playing around with 'metadata' whatever that is.
I have some downloads - which I have burned to disc as backup, I have a cd collection of over 3,000 discs (last count) and I have no problem finding what I'm after to listen to. I also stream newer recordings via Qobuz.

I'd rather spend my time listening and enjoying the music - just my view.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Reichstag aus LICHT said:


> By putting the composer's name in the title, there's no need to load the files in a music player; a simple file-browser will do nicely:
> 
> View attachment 131849


Um. See below:









My albums do not contain composer names (and if they did, they'd be *correct* composer names, not just surnames: this isn't an English Public School taking the morning register), and yet lo! I am able to access them all perfectly well directly from the file manager/browser too.

Edited to add: Incidentally, that's the Dolphin File Browser, because I'm not using Apple or Windows. I realised, in re-reading, that it might look like the left-panel of a music player, so here's a better screenshot to show it's truly just a file manager/browser:


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Malx said:


> On a couple of occasions reading through this thread my eyes have glazed over and I wonder if the route of computer based music storage is worth the fuss. I can't imagine myself ever going to the bother of entering or playing around with 'metadata' whatever that is.
> I have some downloads - which I have burned to disc as backup, I have a cd collection of over 3,000 discs (last count) and I have no problem finding what I'm after to listen to. I also stream newer recordings via Qobuz.
> 
> I'd rather spend my time listening and enjoying the music - just my view.


If you take any hobby that involves collecting something, there are either good ways of organising the collection or there are bad ways. If you were a keen philatelist, you could choose to place your stamps carefully into nicely-organised albums, or you could throw them all in a pile on the floor. The discussion is simply the musical equivalent of discussing what's the best way to organise a stamp collection (by country, by theme, by year, by colour.... etc). I think we've all agreed that simply throwing 50,000 music files into a single directory on disk isn't a good way to do digital music!

And you *do* "bother playing around with metadata", even if you don't realise it, since your 3000 CDs each come with a nice printed booklet describing the music contained on the CD. That booklet is thus data about the music, and that makes it metadata. All that you're actually doing is giving up control of that metadata to whatever record company decided to print it for you, in whatever format they decided to use.

For digital music stored on a hard disc, metadata is the key to being able to sort, find, access and re-arrange your music at will: all things which actually allow you to spend time listening to and enjoying the music.

If you were to suggest 'cut out all that complex stuff and just enjoy the music!', that's really the equivalent to saying 'don't bother passing a driving test or learning the highway code: just enjoy driving!' It happens to be the case that to get to the one state, you have to go through the other mundane business first -and as someone who I bet has carefully organised their CD collection on their shelves, I think you probably know that too.

The only real difference between us is that I don't have to dust my CD collection. Oh, and I get to spend time listening and enjoying my music wherever and whenever I like -whereas your CD collection sounds somewhat house-bound to me.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Merl said:


> Dizwell, I find what you say a about tagging really interesting. I have a couple of TBs of music on HDs and I have my own way of organising it. If I followed your guidelines it would take me about 6 months or so to retag everything I have and frankly I can't be a*sed.


I get that, I really do. As someone who has just re-tagged their entire collection of Mozart, I realise the scale of the problem. I also realise this professionally: when you design a database, you have to get the primary key right up-front, because changing it once the thing's been in production for three weeks is a right pain in exactly the part of the body you're referring to!

It's why I've written the articles I have about it, and written the tagging software I have, because I'd like people new to classical music to get the organisational principles right, from the get-go.



Merl said:


> Just retagging stuff to my tastes (when I get it) takes long enough. Retagging my entire collection is non-negotiable at the moment. I think your idea of starting a thread about tagging is a good one and I would enjoy seeing a step-by-step guide of how you tag your stuff (screenshots would be nice for a visual learner like me). :tiphat:


I used to be a computer/database trainer in my past life: writing visually-helpful guides was something I did for a living. I will certainly accelerate my pre-existing plans to do this sort of guide in the light of your comment.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

adriesba said:


> I would like to put the different discs within albums together, but whenever I've tried it, it gets messed up. The track numbers will go 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, etc. even if I change the track numbers on the second disc to add to the last track number of the first disc, etc. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.


Well, you don't say what operating system/software you use, but the right software can help.

Fundamentally, you need to rip your second CD of a set with a track number that starts at something other than 1. Or, you rip every CD in a set into separate folders with track numbers starting at 1 and then fix it up in post-rip tagging.

On Windows, dbPoweramp can rip with non-1 track numbers and MP3tag can fix things up in post-rip tagging. You could also use my own, entirely free!, Classical CD Ripper or Tagger to do the same things on Linux or Windows. The ripper will let you rip a CD with a track number starting at any number you fancy; and the tagger will let you tag tracks afterwards with a non-1 starting point. As a simple example: Take this 2-CD set of Mahler's 9th:









So the first track on CD2 needs to be numbered '4', not '1', as I rip the second CD, right? And then the 2nd and 3rd tracks on that second CD need to be numbered 1 and 2, because they are the first tracks in an entirely separate Schubert symphony. Well, in what follows, let's say I don't manage to rip them right. Let's say I just ripped each CD to separate folders, each folder starting at track 1. We'd get this sort of thing:









So you can see that CD2 has three tracks, number 1 to 3, but the first of them is the conclusion to CD1's Mahler symphony. So: open up MP3Tag and navigate to the CD2 directory. It will display the contents of that directory:









All the tags in all the files are currently empty -and I'm only going to get the track number ones and track titles correct here, but I'd get everything right in real life!

First, fill in the track number tag and title tags for all of the files, starting at 4, then going back to using numbers 1 and 2 for the remaining Schubert files:









So, select a track, fill in the 'track' box in the left-hand panel, click save, then move on to the next track and so on. Now you can see on the right that all three tracks are correctly numbered as far as their track number tag is concerned.

Now for the tricky bit. It's not enough (as you've found out) to have the track numbers correct. You also need the file names to reflect those numbers: at the moment, that first track is still named '01-Mahler....' even though it's correctly tagged as track 4. Most tagging software will automate this for you. In MP3Tag's case, click the Convert menu option:









What you want it for your tags to define your file names, so select that top option to convert tag -> filename.

I'm going to stop here, because apparently, you're only allowed to include 5 images per post. So part 2 will follow shortly!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

So here's a continuation of the earlier post. You've just clicked Convert -> Tag - Filename:









By default, the program proposes a 'format string' that will take different tags and incorporate their values into your physical file name. The default format string is too complex for my tastes, so I'd just change it to read:

$num(%track%,2) - %title%

...which means "take the value from the track tag and pad it to two digits in length, throw in a hyphen, then take the value of my title tag and stick that on the end". Once the format string matches that, click [OK]:









Now you can see that the first track is numbered '4' in the track tag -but its physical file name is also '04 - something or other'. So repeat the convert -> Tag - Filename trick for the remaining two files:









And so now the two Schubert tracks are correctly numbered *and* physically named too. The whole of CD2 now looks like this:









And now I'm about to hit the limit on the number of images I can include in a single post again, so I'll stop now. I hope you can see that it's now trivially easy to use the file manager to move the file "04 - Adagio..." out of the CD2 folder into the CD1 folder. That will then mean the CD2 folder *only* contains the Schubert tracks. It's then equally trivial to rename CD1 to read 'Symphony No. 9 (Giulini)' and CD2 to read 'Symphony No. 8 (Giulini)', and to move those renamed folders into their respective Gustav Mahler and Franz Schubert home directories.

What you were describing in your original post, I think, is that you successfully got the track number tag right but failed to translate that into physical file names, so you ended up with two files numbered '1' on disk, two numbered '2' and so on. In this example I just worked through, I successfully re-tagged track 1 to read track 4 and then used my tagging software's *physical* file re-naming functions to make that track number change also affect the file names on disk. Once you've done that, moving files around using your operating system's standard tools will correctly get you distinct albums, correctly numbered, no matter how many CDs they were supplied on, or how many CDs they were spread across.

Hope that helps a little.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MatthewWeflen said:


> I don't mark "Disc 1" or "Disc 2" for anything. A box set is one album, for me. So a Beethoven cycle, for instance, will be one album with 38 tracks.


Oh God. Really? You call Beethoven's 9 symphonies one album? You are indeed doing what I thought you were doing (IE, dealing with track number 5 which is actually movement 1 of a symphony), except you're doing it even more er... strangely... than I had expected. You're going to be looking at track 35 needing to be marked up as movement 1 of the ninth symphony, too! (The specifics might not be right, because I can't remember how many movements there are in Symphony No. 3 or 6 off the top of my head, but you get the gist of what I'm saying, I hope).

I don't think I know anyone else that would tag that way, even on these august fora! But you know: whatever floats your aquatic vessel of choice!

I just point out about Roman 'numerals' that they are always text, and every sort engine ever written, will deal with them accordingly. One hundred and one will thus sort before ten, because CI comes before X in the alphabet. Great that they make you happy... but I hope you never need to sort your tracks by their title tags!

In the world of digital, it sometimes pays to think like a computer


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## adriesba (Dec 30, 2019)

Thank you, dizwell! :tiphat:
I have been using Windows Media Player. I think you have answered my problem. It also seems that mp3tag works better than Windows Media Player for editing tags, such as when I needed to edit album art. So I'll start using it more and try editing the tracks and file names like you just showed me.
Thanks.


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

dizwell said:


> My albums do not contain composer names and if they did, they'd be *correct* composer names, not just surnames: this isn't an English Public School


We all refer to composers by their surnames anyway, so I don't see any proble. Besides, I do use *correct* composers' names... in the "Composer" tag. Things like "Kaikhosru [Shapurji] Sorabji" would be pretty cumbersome in an album title.


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

Ah, this tagging business. I sometimes feel like I have a second job doing data entry, going through track names collected from some database by iTunes, fixing capitalization (Adagio Molto E Cantabile, anyone?) and checking everything against the CD track listing as there are so many errors.

I'm only mildly obsessive about these things so I don't have a perfect system, but my system in iTunes is basically:
- Artist field is the orchestra or soloists
- Album artist is the conductor, except when the soloist is more important. For R. Strauss' Four Last Songs with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and George Szell, Schwarzkopf is the album artist.
- Composers are always "Beethoven, Ludwig van" to make it easier to find what I'm looking for in an alphabetized list.
- Track names are such that only the first movement of a large work carries the whole title, so I don't repeat "Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 49 - [movement]" for every track, mostly so that I can follow along when listening on my iPod Classic.
- If an album is on 3 CDs I keep it the same in iTunes, mostly to stay in sync with booklets and scanned back covers. Even if a symphony is split between discs - makes no difference when listening as there is no gap between discs when playing in iTunes. For box sets with a variety of artists, composers and conductors, often made up of older individual releases, I'll split them up accordingly.
- Album titles usually start with the last name of the composer, as this is often how albums are named in classical music. But it bothers me a little so I might go and strip the names from the titles, except in cases where the title would stop making sense, for example "Furtwängler Conducts Brahms" and the like.


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## Malx (Jun 18, 2017)

dizwell said:


> If you take any hobby that involves collecting something, there are either good ways of organising the collection or there are bad ways. If you were a keen philatelist, you could choose to place your stamps carefully into nicely-organised albums, or you could throw them all in a pile on the floor. The discussion is simply the musical equivalent of discussing what's the best way to organise a stamp collection (by country, by theme, by year, by colour.... etc). I think we've all agreed that simply throwing 50,000 music files into a single directory on disk isn't a good way to do digital music!
> 
> And you *do* "bother playing around with metadata", even if you don't realise it, since your 3000 CDs each come with a nice printed booklet describing the music contained on the CD. That booklet is thus data about the music, and that makes it metadata. All that you're actually doing is giving up control of that metadata to whatever record company decided to print it for you, in whatever format they decided to use.
> 
> ...


I'll just make a couple of points before I take my leave of this thread:

I have looked up the definition of 'metadata' and the online dictonary defines it as 'a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.' So I respectfully suggest that the information in the cd booklets provide data about the music not other data, I don't regard music as data.

Your analogy with reference to taking a driving test or learning the highway code is, at best, hard to agree with - I am not aware of any test I have to pass, or set of hard and fast rules that apply to storing my music collection.

You are of course correct my music collection is pretty immobile and that suits me just fine - my hobby of listening to music is something I enjoy using a reasonable quality hifi system at home and I do not use portable devices when out and about. I drive hundreds of miles every week as part of my job and as I have stated before on the forum I firmly believe you cannot _listen_ while concertrating on the road so I have no need for my collection there.

I do accept that if anyone is so inclined to have a computer based music system then a means of accessing it is essential, I merely stated that it was not for me.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Reichstag aus LICHT said:


> We all refer to composers by their surnames anyway, so I don't see any proble. Besides, I do use *correct* composers' names... in the "Composer" tag. Things like "Kaikhosru [Shapurji] Sorabji" would be pretty cumbersome in an album title.


No we don't all refer to composers by their surnames. I certainly don't.

Go talk to me about Bach and then tell me which Bach you're talking about.
Go talk to me about Haydn, and then clarify whether you're talking about Michael or Joseph.
Go talk to me about Strauss ...and then explain which of the many possible you're talking about.

So you *have* to introduce first initials. And if you're going to do that, you may as well make friends with the guys (and occasional gal) whose art you love and get to know them by their full first names. And if you're going to do that for the composers whose surnames are not unique, you may as well do it for all of them, for consistency's sake. (And for the not-so-minor matter of data consistency, which helps data maintenance).

And yes, Kaikhosru [Shapurji] Sorabji would be terrible in an album title. I absolutely agree... which is why it belongs only in the composer and artist tags. But so would [Richard] Wagner and [John] Bull, for precisely the same reason. It's cumbersome to put it there and entirely unnecessary.

Tell me: do you ever access your music on a mobile phone? Have you ever seen a screen-full of album titles that read:

Wagner - Die M
Wagner - Die W
Wagner - Das R

...and kind of wish the word 'Wagner' wasn't there because you already selected him in your player software and it's now just taking up precious screen real estate for no practical benefit -and rather taking away useful screen real estate for telling you the actual names of the Music Dramas you want to play?!

Regardless of that minor detail, even so: you haven't addressed the issue that you claimed that because you put the composer name in the album title on disk, that let you access things via a file browser just fine... and yet I am able to do exactly the same without doing that. So no, it's not necessary ...and not doing so gets you benefits when it comes to playing music on different devices that don't involve a 24" monitor.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Helgi said:


> Ah, this tagging business. I sometimes feel like I have a second job doing data entry, going through track names collected from some database by iTunes, fixing capitalization (Adagio Molto E Cantabile, anyone?) and checking everything against the CD track listing as there are so many errors.
> 
> I'm only mildly obsessive about these things so I don't have a perfect system, but my system in iTunes is basically:
> - Artist field is the orchestra or soloists
> ...


"Album titles usually start with the last name of the composer, as this is often how albums are named in classical music"

I think what you mean is that "album names often have the composer names in their front artwork jewel case insert" -hence, you buy a CD called "Beethoven's 9th". But that's to misunderstand what an album is to begin with. What composer name do you propose to use in your album name when faced with this CD, then?









That's a CD containing works by two composers -and that's not exactly uncommon, I think you'll agree. So no, albums are not named with composers' last names. Some of the artwork CDs are supplied with mentions them, usually by last name (though the CD booklet usually gives them their full names... but you just ignore that detail, I guess?)

Practically, I don't think you've understood the concept of 'data hierarchy'... which is just a fancy way of saying: try using a phone where every album is listed as 'Beethoven Symp', 'Beethoven Symp' or 'Beethoven Pian'. Because that's what limited screen real estate will do for you. And because you've put the least interesting piece of information up-front, where it consumes whatever limited screen real estate available to you, you cannot effectively display the difference between 'Symphony No. 1', 'Symphony No. 2' and 'Piano Concerto No. 5' (the actual album names which are *really* the things you care about).

And unless you're using very odd software, in order to select an album, you must have selected an artist first (i.e., a composer). So since you already clicked 'Beethoven' in order to reveal all the albums 'owned' by Beethoven, why would you need the word 'Beethoven' repeated 587 times on the next screen you see?

"Composers are always "Beethoven, Ludwig van" to make it easier to find what I'm looking for in an alphabetized list". That's because you know your composer by his last name. If you knew him as Ludwig or as Benjamin or as Wolfgang or as Johann, you wouldn't think that was a better way of ordering things at all. Meanwhile, we're talking about how to tag *digital* music files, which are happy to find "beethoven" whether your tag your files as BEETHOVEN, BeEtHoVeN, Ludwig Beethoven van, Beethoven van Ludwig or any other combination you care to come up with.

A lot of your other points are just statements that you're inconsistent in your tagging and do things differently if its the first track compared to any other track and so on. It lacks coherence or consistency, I'm afraid. I'm happy for you if it works for you. However, I'm rather sad that your mangling of the tags associated with CDs is part of the reason why CDDB is an absolutely useless resource for any classical music lover: its metadata for classical tracks is just 100% useless, every time, all the time. It's somewhat ironic that you complain about the poor quality of online tagging/metadata resources.... your sort of tagging approach is most of the reason why that's the case!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Malx said:


> I'll just make a couple of points before I take my leave of this thread:


OK, I realise you won't see this reply then, but whatever...



Malx said:


> I have looked up the definition of 'metadata' and the online dictonary defines it as 'a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.' So I respectfully suggest that the information in the cd booklets provide data about the music not other data, I don't regard music as data.


The music is data, whether you choose to regard it as that or not. It's data that's been quantized from an audio stream as a set of digital samples taken at a certain rate and with a certain bit-depth. It's about as much data as you can make data, in fact!

The artist who painted your favourite watercolour: his name is metadata associated with that painting. The author who wrote your favourite novel: his or her name is metadata about that book on your shelf.

And you used that metadata when you put the CDs on your shelves. I'm betting you didn't just shove your next CD at the end of the first available shelf. I'm betting that you've got Beethoven at one end of your collection and Zemlinsky at the other end. So you've used the composer's surname, supplied on the CD booklet and artwork, to organise your CD collection -precisely and exactly as I do to organise my music files on a hard disk. And that means you've used metadata to organise your music collection, too -precisely and exactly as I do to organise my music files on a hard disk.

There's literally no difference.



Malx said:


> Your analogy with reference to taking a driving test or learning the highway code is, at best, hard to agree with - I am not aware of any test I have to pass, or set of hard and fast rules that apply to storing my music collection.


As I say: I will lay odds your CDs aren't just thrown in a pile on the floor, but are carefully organised. So, before you get to the joys of listening to your music, you've gone through the travails of organising the CD collection. That's the point of the analogy.



Malx said:


> You are of course correct my music collection is pretty immobile and that suits me just fine - my hobby of listening to music is something I enjoy using a reasonable quality hifi system at home and I do not use portable devices when out and about. I drive hundreds of miles every week as part of my job and as I have stated before on the forum I firmly believe you cannot _listen_ while concertrating on the road so I have no need for my collection there.


And no-one was ever questioning that. I was, rather, questioning the idea that you can loftily look down on us mere mortals who use digital music files as though you were somehow apart from that, or above the fray, when it's my fairly safe assumption that you curate your collection of 3000 CDs just as carefully as we digital music listeners do our files. (And you know that CDs are sources of digital music too, right?)



Malx said:


> I do accept that if anyone is so inclined to have a computer based music system then a means of accessing it is essential, I merely stated that it was not for me.


 Your CD player is a computer based music system, too, you know. Those 44.1 KHz samples taken at 16-bit depth aren't resolved into analogue sound waves by magic. Again, it isn't a good look to make out you do anything that the rest of us don't do too. If you were to say that you liked needles and valves and the 1960s vinyl (because the 1970s vinyl was made too soft) but you rather prefer shellac anyway... then, fine: at that point we're talking about entirely different music listening realms. But you aren't, so we're not.


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

dizwell said:


> "Album titles usually start with the last name of the composer, as this is often how albums are named in classical music"
> 
> I think what you mean is that "album names often have the composer names in their front artwork jewel case insert" -hence, you buy a CD called "Beethoven's 9th". But that's to misunderstand what an album is to begin with. What composer name do you propose to use in your album name when faced with this CD, then?
> 
> ...


Jesus!

If I were submitting tags to a database for others to retrieve I would make sure to follow the publisher's naming conventions, but for my own collection I do what makes sense to me.

I use "Beethoven, Ludwig van" for composers because my way of finding the music is by looking at an alphabetized list of composers in iTunes. Simple as that.

Regarding composer names in album titles: search for Brahms symphonies on Presto Classical and you will get albums named "Brahms: Symphonies" or "Brahms: Complete Symphonies" or whatever. This is how they show up in iTunes and I rarely bother to change the title, although as I said I'm now considering it.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

adriesba said:


> I would like to put the different discs within albums together, but whenever I've tried it, it gets messed up. The track numbers will go 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, etc. even if I change the track numbers on the second disc to add to the last track number of the first disc, etc. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.


Oh, it's a pain in the rear to be sure.

The way I deal with it is this:

I rip CDs using Exact Audio Copy. EAC has an option (a button the the right side) that reads "Continue From Last Track Number." Be sure that is clicked. Rip each disc into the same folder. It will hardcode track numbers regardless of what the titles are. Then, when you're done with the box set, you can go into the folder with MP3Tag and just ensure that the album title/artist/composer all match, so they show up as one "album" in your player.


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

I gave up the idea of tagging my music. I simply use the folder+filename system so the files will show consistently across different software (explorer in windows, mpd in my network player, file manager in NAS web interface etc.)

For the album "Downes, Sinaisky - The Glière Orchestral Collection", the two conductors and album title consist of the folder name, and the tracks are like this







If there are multiple composers in the same album, their names get placed in front of the title. 
Unfortunately the ensemble is omitted
If I ever need to find out more info, I'd just google it or dig out the booklet.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Helgi said:


> Jesus!
> 
> If I were submitting tags to a database for others to retrieve I would make sure to follow the publisher's naming conventions, but for my own collection I do what makes sense to me.


Fine. But people tagging badly does pollute a collective resource (CDDB, for example).



Helgi said:


> I use "Beethoven, Ludwig van" for composers because my way of finding the music is by looking at an alphabetized list of composers in iTunes. Simple as that.











That's iTunes with an alphabetic sorting of composers by their natural names. So it's got nothing to do with iTunes and everything to do with '[your] way of finding'. Which itself is fine, too. I know it's a jump for a lot of people to look for Beethoven's music in the L section.

But you know why we historically have indexed things in what I might call "reverse order", don't you? It's because we go from the general to the specific. Thus Engineering is a broad topic, so Engineering, Electrical (much more specific) to distinguish it from Engineering, Mechanical. Same with names: we have usually used lastname, firstname because we go from all the possible Smiths to the one specifically called Jason. Hence Smith, Jason.

And as I say, if you want to persist in that naming convention, I have no issue with that. My point only is that the pool of composers people have in their music collections is already limited. We don't have a real need to go from the generic to the specific on the whole because the collection is already highly specific. There will be one Beethoven in your collection, one Brahms, one Britten. We simply don't have the need to use the generic->specific conventions, because we're already on the right-hand side of that spectrum.

So sticking with lastname, firstname is _convention_ only. There's no functional need for it, and your music playing software certainly doesn't mandate, require or benefit from it. But we do it because every encyclopedia and card index we've ever experienced uses it.



Helgi said:


> Regarding composer names in album titles: search for Brahms symphonies on Presto Classical and you will get albums named "Brahms: Symphonies" or "Brahms: Complete Symphonies" or whatever. This is how they show up in iTunes and I rarely bother to change the title, although as I said I'm now considering it.


You mean like this:









Absolutely true. I imagine space is limited on a CD cover, where font sizes are necessarily big to create eye-catching designs conveying maximum information in minimum time. Or maybe they are fearful about the consequences of having to produce CDs of music by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber. Or Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville.  In any event, open the booklet of that collection of 'Brahms Symphonies' and what do you see?









Right on page 2. The first thing you see when you open the booklet's cover... *Johannes* Brahms.

Look: you continue to do what you want to do. I'm not mandating (or trying to mandate!) anything. I would like to _persuade_ people to think about their tagging practices from more of a data hierarchy and management point of view, that's all (because those things improve data retrieval efficiency, and thus contribute to the ease with which a large music collection can be accessed). I have no problem with people saying 'I do it because I've been doing it that way for years. It's habit'. So long as they don't claim "the software/music industry/hardware made me do it that way!". Because in the present matter, that's simply not the case.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

rice said:


> I gave up the idea of tagging my music. I simply use the folder+filename system so the files will show consistently across different software (explorer in windows, mpd in my network player, file manager in NAS web interface etc.)
> 
> For the album "Downes, Sinaisky - The Glière Orchestral Collection", the two conductors and album title consist of the folder name, and the tracks are like this
> View attachment 131902
> ...


I can't comment on your storage system since I didn't really understand it! Sorry! I do look at your list and think, 'God knows how he ever finds anything within it'.

But I like your last sentence a lot: "I'd just google it or dig out the booklet". I think that's a point that gets underplayed: your music catalogue/player/whatever isn't the only source of information about a piece. There's a whole universe of information _outside_ your catalogue. You therefore don't need to cram every last known piece of information into your tags. Leave some for out-of-cataloge research!


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

dizwell said:


> View attachment 131904
> 
> 
> That's iTunes with an alphabetic sorting of composers by their natural names. So it's got nothing to do with iTunes and everything to do with '[your] way of finding'. Which itself is fine, too. I know it's a jump for a lot of people to look for Beethoven's music in the L section.
> ...


Yes, it has everything to do with what I'm used to and with ease of access. When scanning a list for Rimsky-Korsakov, I'm looking for "Rimsky" and not "Nikolay" so having him under N is confusing to me. Even if I could probably get used to it, given the limited pool of composers as you say.



dizwell said:


> You mean like this:
> 
> View attachment 131905
> 
> ...


When I buy the album (FLAC) and add it to my library, the album title is "Brahms: The Symphonies". Which leads me to think that this is the official title from Decca.



dizwell said:


> Look: you continue to do what you want to do. I'm not mandating anything. I would like to _persuade_ people to think about their tagging practices from more of a data hierarchy and management point of view, that's all (because those things improve data retrieval efficiency, and thus contribute to the ease with which a large music collection can be accessed). I have no problem with people saying 'I do it because I've been doing it that way for years. It's habit'. So long as they don't claim "the software/music industry/hardware made me do it that way!". Because in the present matter, that's simply not the case.


That's all well and good, but "data retrieval efficiency" also has to do with me and my ability to find Rimsky-Korsakov quickly in a list of composers. I'm not a computer.

As for "the music industry made me do it" I like to keep things organized by albums as they were published, even if it makes more sense to group and catalogue by individual works regardless of how they were pressed on a CD. The integrity of the albums as historical documents is more important to me than the principles of data management, for better or worse. In other words I'd like to view my digital collection as a bunch of CDs!


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## Reichstag aus LICHT (Oct 25, 2010)

dizwell said:


> No we don't all refer to composers by their surnames. I certainly don't.
> 
> Go talk to me about Bach and then tell me which Bach you're talking about.
> Go talk to me about Haydn, and then clarify whether you're talking about Michael or Joseph.
> Go talk to me about Strauss ...and then explain which of the many possible you're talking about.


My system works for me and, luckily, I'm not so full of my own importance that I feel inclined to impose it on others, or to criticise their way of doing things.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Helgi said:


> Yes, it has everything to do with what I'm used to and with ease of access. When scanning a list for Rimsky-Korsakov, I'm looking for "Rimsky" and not "Nikolay" so having him under N is confusing to me. Even if I could probably get used to it, given the limited pool of composers as you say.


As I say, that's entirely up to you. That you don't know your composers by the first name ...well, I think that's your loss, but so be it.



Helgi said:


> When I buy the album (FLAC) and add it to my library, the album title is "Brahms: The Symphonies". Which leads me to think that this is the official title from Decca.


Er. I cannot believe you seriously think that what some executive in Decca calls a release then makes that the "official title"!
In any event, their records will show it as being 4785344.
And in a few years time, they'll re-release those exact recordings under a different name, perhaps as a collection called "The Complete Brahms", at which point they'll probably refer to it internally as 4785344-1 or something else entirely.



Helgi said:


> That's all well and good, but "data retrieval efficiency" also has to do with me and my ability to find Rimsky-Korsakov quickly in a list of composers. I'm not a computer.


Well, if you can't remember Ludwig or Wolfgang or Modest or Nikolai, so be it.



Helgi said:


> As for "the music industry made me do it" I like to keep things organized by albums as they were published, even if it makes more sense to group and catalogue by individual works regardless of how they were pressed on a CD. The integrity of the albums as historical documents is more important to me than the principles of data management, for better or worse.


The music industry is forever re-releasing the same recordings in different packaging and with different fillers and mixes of compositions on the same disc(s) to make a marketable package. It's marketing, pure and simple. Nothing 'historical document' about it.



Helgi said:


> In other words I'd like to view my digital collection as a bunch of CDs!


Which is entirely your privilege and right, of course. But let us not pretend that it's an efficient way of cataloguing _music_.

As an exercise and since you are clearly a Rimsky-Korsakov fan, tell me how long it takes you to find a recording of the overture to The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga in your collection. Me, I'd click 'N -> Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov -> Opera and tell you I don't own it. Or if I did, I'd see it listed there under 'N' (possibly: I would probably stick with the English translated name, rather than the Russian original, *B*oyarïnya Vera Sheloga, but even so it's not like there'd be sixty different operas to scan through, so scanning them all would not take long). It would take me seconds, either way.

Meanwhile, good luck finding this work with _your_ cataloguing strategy if the only recording of it you have happens to be this one:









...because it's not even mentioned anywhere on the CD front cover that the opera overture concerned is part of that CD. I don't know whether you'd catalogue that as 'Pan Voyevoda, Sadko, May Night, Overture on Russian Themes' or not, but I think that's what you said you would do. Trouble is, it doesn't even mention Vera Sheloga there, even though it's actually track 9.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Reichstag aus LICHT said:


> My system works for me and, luckily, I'm not so full of my own importance that I feel inclined to impose it on others, or to criticise their way of doing things.


Funny you think I'm imposing things on people or full of my own self-importance, when it wasn't me who grandly declared that "we all refer to composers by their surnames".

I'm not imposing anything. I am merely pointing out that you _cannot_ just refer to composers by their last name, because on occasion you *must* reference their first names to avoid ambiguity. Even you must do so.

I get it. You are used to doing things a certain way and don't take kindly to the person that points out that there are inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the way you've got used to doing things. Feel free to use _ad hominem_ to avoid confronting uncomfortable facts if that makes you feel better about it.


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

dizwell said:


> As I say, that's entirely up to you. That you don't know your composers by the first name ...well, I think that's your loss, but so be it.
> ...
> Well, if you can't remember Ludwig or Wolfgang or Modest or Nikolai, so be it.


It's not that I can't learn their full names, only that when scanning a list I would rather find Beethoven under B than L. It's more efficient.



dizwell said:


> Er. I cannot believe you seriously think that what some executive in Decca calls a release then makes that the "official title"!
> In any event, their records will show it as being 4785344.
> And in a few years time, they'll re-release those exact recordings under a different name, perhaps as a collection called "The Complete Brahms", at which point they'll probably refer to it internally as 4785344-1 or something else entirely.
> 
> The music industry is forever re-releasing the same recordings in different packaging and with different fillers and mixes of compositions on the same disc(s) to make a marketable package. It's marketing, pure and simple. Nothing 'historical document' about it.


It's the official title of that particular Decca release, and I want to have that particular release in my collection - along with the accompanying booklet and cover etc.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Helgi said:


> It's not that I can't learn their full names, only that when scanning a list I would rather find Beethoven under B than L. It's more efficient.


Well, I think we've discussed this enough. I can only say that whilst it's more efficient for you, it's not actually in and of itself more efficient. It's your expectations and what you're used to doing, true enough. And that may be all the justification that you need. I'm fine with that. I think you lose something by continuing to do it that way, that's all. It's a subtle thing: getting familiar with a composer as you would a friend. But it is probably not worth getting too worked up about.



Helgi said:


> It's the official title of that particular Decca release, and I want to have that particular release in my collection - along with the accompanying booklet and cover etc.


So you won't take my Rimsky-Korsakov challenge? I get that you want to catalogue CDs, but when the CD title doesn't tell you what's in it (fully), what use is that approach to cataloguing and finding and playing _music_? Is doing what I suggested something you never do? IE, do you never pull up a *part* of a CD to play in isolation? Again, if that's true for you and your approach to playing things, I can see why you do what you do... and why it wouldn't be a great way for people who want to access parts of CDs to follow suit. I'm genuinely curious as to how you'd go about playing that overture from that CD I mentioned last time, that's all.


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

dizwell said:


> I can't comment on your storage system since I didn't really understand it! Sorry! I do look at your list and think, 'God knows how he ever finds anything within it'.
> 
> But I like your last sentence a lot: "I'd just google it or dig out the booklet". I think that's a point that gets underplayed: your music catalogue/player/whatever isn't the only source of information about a piece. There's a whole universe of information _outside_ your catalogue. You therefore don't need to cram every last known piece of information into your tags. Leave some for out-of-cataloge research!


Usually when I want to listen to some music I have the specific pieces in mind to listen. I also have a rough idea of what CDs I own so I'm able to find the albums. The list I posted above is one album. It is a collection of Glière's orchestral works and I remember that. So whenever I fancy a Glière's symphony I'll look for this folder, which "Glière Orchestral Collection" is right there in the folder name. Alternatively I can search for "Glière" and this folder will come right up. (along with other albums or individual tracks that consist his works) The filename is pretty self-explanatory : the title of the work (symphony no.xx), the movements which come immediately after that. Roman numerals are used when some movements are not in a single track. This is a system that works rather for my habit.

Remembering what I own can be a problem when the collection grows bigger and bigger, but it's a nice surprise to find out I already own the music I'm looking for!


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

I have so little Rimsky-Korsakov that I can tell you without looking that I don't have it.

Don't see why it would be difficult for me to find it, though. If I want to find something like Brahms' Academic Festival Overture I simply search for "Academic Festival Overture" in iTunes and it returns a list of tracks.

I have an album from DG with Fauré Requiem by Giulini and Philharmonia Orchestra. Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte is used as "filler", and if I want to play only that piece I can either go to Composers > R and find it that way, or I can search for "Pavane pour" and find it that way in a matter of seconds. So there's no problem finding it.

When I listen to the album from start to finish, it's important to me that Ravel's Pavane comes after the Requiem just as intended in the album release.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Helgi said:


> I have so little Rimsky-Korsakov that I can tell you without looking that I don't have it.
> 
> Don't see why it would be difficult for me to find it, though. If I want to find something like Brahms' Academic Festival Overture I simply search for "Academic Festival Overture" in iTunes and it returns a list of tracks.


I used the Rimsky-Korsakov as an example.

You said you catalogued your CDs as CDs and by their 'official names', right?

If your CD name doesn't mention something that's on the CD (as in my R-K example above), how do you (a) know you own that overture (assuming you did), or (b) find it, when your album names don't tell you of its existence?

Your Brahms example suggests to me that you wouldn't catalogue the TITLE for that R-K overture as 'Overture' (as it's listed on the CD), but as something like "The Noblewoman Vera Sheloga Overture" and then rely on iTunes title search to find it that way. Is that right?

I am just confused as to which bits of info you're putting into what tags.



Helgi said:


> I have an album from DG with Fauré Requiem by Giulini and Philharmonia Orchestra. Ravel's Pavane pour une infante défunte is used as "filler", and if I want to play only that piece I can either go to Composers > R and find it that way, or I can search for "Pavane pour" and find it that way in a matter of seconds. So there's no problem finding it.


Right, as I thought with your Brahms example. What I think you're saying is:

ALBUM = Whatever is on the front of the CD
TITLE = Work name and track movement name

So iTunes search can find named pieces in the TITLE tag, but not by searching the ALBUM tag. Right?



Helgi said:


> When I listen to the album from start to finish, it's important to me that Ravel's Pavane comes after the Requiem just as intended in the album release.


As I say, I get that's how you listen. I think it's quite important to know that's the way you listen to things, because it's so _sui generis_ to you that it makes your cataloguing approach also something that is likely to be pretty unique to you. I think anyone who knew that the Pavane was composed in 1899 and the Requiem in 1887-90, and thus that the two pieces have absolutely nothing to do with each other, might well want to listen to one, the other, or both as the mood took him or her -and therefore realise that your tagging strategy wouldn't be of much use to them in that endeavour.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

rice said:


> Usually when I want to listen to some music I have the specific pieces in mind to listen. I also have a rough idea of what CDs I own so I'm able to find the albums. The list I posted above is one album. It is a collection of Glière's orchestral works and I remember that. So whenever I fancy a Glière's symphony I'll look for this folder, which "Glière Orchestral Collection" is right there in the folder name. Alternatively I can search for "Glière" and this folder will come right up. (along with other albums or individual tracks that consist his works) The filename is pretty self-explanatory : the title of the work (symphony no.xx), the movements which come immediately after that. Roman numerals are used when some movements are not in a single track. This is a system that works rather for my habit.
> 
> Remembering what I own can be a problem when the collection grows bigger and bigger, but it's a nice surprise to find out I already own the music I'm looking for!


Fair enough. Did you say how many CDs you own? I may have missed it if you did.

I can't see memory helping when you own 3000 of them, for example!


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

dizwell said:


> I used the Rimsky-Korsakov as an example.
> 
> You said you catalogued your CDs as CDs and by their 'official names', right?
> 
> ...


A search will return both tracks and albums featuring "Academic Festival Overture", so I find the piece whether or not it is in the name of the album.



dizwell said:


> As I say, I get that's how you listen. I think it's quite important to know that's the way you listen to things, because it's so _sui generis_ to you that it makes your cataloguing approach also something that is likely to be pretty unique to you. I think anyone who knew that the Pavane was composed in 1899 and the Requiem in 1887-90, and thus that the two pieces have absolutely nothing to do with each other, might well want to listen to one, the other, or both as the mood took him or her -and therefore realise that your tagging strategy wouldn't be of much use to them in that endeavour.


Well, they chose to put the Pavane after the Requiem and personally I find that it's a really nice pairing. It's now a pairing that I've come to associate with that particular performance of the Fauré Requiem and I like that.

Edited to add: that the two pieces have nothing to do with each other; Ravel composed the piece while studying with Fauré and they fit together very well, in theme, period, influence and just in general.

Another example is Jordi Savall's decision to end his album of Mozart symphonies Nos. 39-41 with Maurerische Trauermusik, K. 477. That's an album I like listening to from start to finish and the odd piece at the end is part of the experience.


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## rice (Mar 23, 2017)

dizwell said:


> Fair enough. Did you say how many CDs you own? I may have missed it if you did.
> 
> I can't see memory helping when you own 3000 of them, for example!


I think I have close to 1000 of them.
I have a narrow taste of music so most are romantic/late-romantic works, by a relatively small number of composers
For the works I like I have multiple cycles of those, for example I have 9 cycles of Mahler's symphonies
That makes remembering them somewhat easier. 
3000 CDs...I don't think I'll reach there in the foreseeable future. As long as I don't grow a sudden urge for classical/baroque/modern music, I already have everything I want!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Helgi said:


> A search will return both tracks and albums featuring "Academic Festival Overture", so I find the piece whether or not it is in the name of the album.


OK, but if it's not in the name of the CD, and thus not in your ALBUM tag, you're relying on your search engine finding the name in the TITLE tag instead. Which in turn, I think, means that if you had a CD containing 20 tracks of an opera (let's say, since we were on a Ravel theme, L'heure Espagnole (as listed at https://www.prestomusic.com/classic...el-lenfant-et-les-sortileges-lheure-espagnole), you'd repeat the "l'Heure Espagnole' bit 21 times in the TITLE track. Just want to make sure I understand what you'd do.



Helgi said:


> Well, they chose to put the Pavane after the Requiem and personally I find that it's a really nice pairing. It's now a pairing that I've come to associate with that particular performance of the Fauré Requiem and I like that.


You know, you and I are not entirely dissimilar in this regard. I sometimes like to think of the albums I buy as 'entities' in their own right, too. But I handle it rather differently: I use good-quality pictures in the ALBUM ART tag to make the connection between separate pieces. The Album Art will (usually) tell me what else was on the source CD for the tracks I'm listening to, and I have the option to go find them and play them as I choose.

I do find that cataloguing two entirely disparate pieces together just because they happened one day to share the same polycarbonate disk too much, however. I will run with the visual cues when I need to, but otherwise rely on the ALBUM telling me the piece of music and the TITLE telling me the name of the movement etc.



Helgi said:


> Another example is Jordi Savall's decision to end his album of Mozart symphonies Nos. 39-41 with Maurerische Trauermusik, K. 477. That's an album I like listening to from start to finish and the odd piece at the end is part of the experience.


 Right: I don't respond quite like that to a 'record release', on the whole.

I can think of some of my early Karajan Beethoven symphony pairings, where if I'd listen to the one, I'd sort of want to listen to the other. And in my system, I'd find which was the second symphony by looking at the artwork whilst listening to the first.

But I don't do that commonly, I think.

I find this interesting though: it's a bit like when you attend a concert. You are kind of at the mercy of the impressario as to what program he thinks will best boost ticket sales as to what music you're going to get. Last Shostakovich 11 I went to, I had to put up with something weird for the first 10 minutes, because that's what the concert organiser had deemed I would have to listen to. I enjoyed the concert a lot, but I remember it for the Shostakovich 11th, not for whatever it was I was subjected to to start with! The analogy I'm getting at is: you're happy to take what the Decca executive (or Savall, whoever) decides to prepare for you as a musical collection. Where I think I'd prefer to program my own listening experiences (and concert programs, come to that!).

Not saying either approach is right or wrong, just that they are quite different.

I wonder if we'd not had CDs, but had gone from LPs straight to BluRays, where each disk contained (say) 30 hours of music whether you'd think the same way


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

rice said:


> I think I have close to 1000 of them.
> I have a narrow taste of music so most are romantic/late-romantic works, by a relatively small number of composers
> For the works I like I have multiple cycles of those, for example I have 9 cycles of Mahler's symphonies
> That makes remembering them somewhat easier.
> 3000 CDs...I don't think I'll reach there in the foreseeable future. As long as I don't grow a sudden urge for classical/baroque/modern music, I already have everything I want!


Thanks for the update and clarification. I'm a database guy; whilst I want my file system to be navigable and searchable too, I couldn't cope with recording things the way you do, in a very un-normalised manner (i.e., where you repeat the same bits of information for multiple tracks, because they share a 'piece name' or a conductor etc). I want to state something as few times as I can get away with: a file system hierarchy does that job for me, just as tagging in a similar manner means a music player can interpret the corresponding logical model.


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## MaxKellerman (Jun 4, 2017)

A couple questions for a problem I've come across with classical music tagging --

How does everyone differeniate separate performances of a work by the same artist? For example, if I have two performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, one made in 1962 and the other made in 1977, or two versions of the Moonlight Sonata by Wilhelm Kempff, one in mono and the other in stereo, when I load my music to iTunes or another music player it will group those two performances together as the same "album". Listing the different years doesn't make a difference, as the year seems to make no difference for sorting.


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## Helgi (Dec 27, 2019)

MaxKellerman said:


> A couple questions for a problem I've come across with classical music tagging --
> 
> How does everyone differeniate separate performances of a work by the same artist? For example, if I have two performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, one made in 1962 and the other made in 1977, or two versions of the Moonlight Sonata by Wilhelm Kempff, one in mono and the other in stereo, when I load my music to iTunes or another music player it will group those two performances together as the same "album". Listing the different years doesn't make a difference, as the year seems to make no difference for sorting.


A simple way to do it would be to add (1962) and (1977) to the album titles for each


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

MaxKellerman said:


> A couple questions for a problem I've come across with classical music tagging --
> 
> How does everyone differeniate separate performances of a work by the same artist? For example, if I have two performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, one made in 1962 and the other made in 1977, or two versions of the Moonlight Sonata by Wilhelm Kempff, one in mono and the other in stereo, when I load my music to iTunes or another music player it will group those two performances together as the same "album". Listing the different years doesn't make a difference, as the year seems to make no difference for sorting.


See https://absolutelybaching.com/the-axioms-of-classical-music-tagging/, and specifically Section 2.4 (the 'Album' tag).

Make the Album tag unique by whatever device suits your needs. Personally, I would simply say *Symphony No. 9 (Karajan - 1962)* and *Symphony No. 9 (Karajan - 1977)*, exactly as I do for Boult's two recordings of Vaughan Williams' 9th symphony.

I wouldn't put "mono" or "stereo" in for your Kempff ones myself. If the date is before 1958, it's almost certainly going to be mono, and if after 1958, it's almost certainly going to be stereo. So, for me, a date indicator in the album name will do duty for both examples you mention.


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## MatthewWeflen (Jan 24, 2019)

MaxKellerman said:


> A couple questions for a problem I've come across with classical music tagging --
> 
> How does everyone differeniate separate performances of a work by the same artist? For example, if I have two performances of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, one made in 1962 and the other made in 1977, or two versions of the Moonlight Sonata by Wilhelm Kempff, one in mono and the other in stereo, when I load my music to iTunes or another music player it will group those two performances together as the same "album". Listing the different years doesn't make a difference, as the year seems to make no difference for sorting.


I have the same performances. Sorting by "album" resolves the issue, since the 1962 is called "Beethoven 9 Symphonien" and the 1977 is called "Ludwig van Beethoven 9 Symphonies" and then it is easy enough to see the different covers on my player.

But yes, if I truly could not differentiate between the 2, or they came from the same "album," I would put a year in the title. I have this situation with a Karajan Strauss box set. It has two performances apiece of Don Juan and Salome. I just popped a parenthetical (1943) or whatever in the track title.


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## apricissimus (May 15, 2013)

dizwell said:


> See https://absolutelybaching.com/the-axioms-of-classical-music-tagging/, and specifically Section 2.4 (the 'Album' tag).


Thanks for the link. It was an interesting read, but I disagree with some of your recommendations, although a lot of it is just a matter of personal preference. Just to name a few:

I still use the "album" tag to reference the physical (or digital!) volume that the files were originally delivered in. I still like to listen to albums (CDs, LPs, whatever) sometimes, and the "album" tag makes that possible. But I have also availed myself of the customizable VORBIS tags to add a "work" tag that uniquely identifies a particular composition. It's non-standard, so it won't work on many music players. But it works very well with Quodlibet, the player I use at home. When I'm out and about, my music player is on my phone, but the storage capacity is small enough that it's no trouble (for me) just to deal with albums. I know what's on my phone and the albums are easy enough to find. (Not so on my home computer, where I have almost 200 days of music stored, hence the usefulness of the "work" tag.)

Keeping things in "album" format (based on the CD, typically) also plays well with my non-classical collection, which comprises about half my total collection. The files are also stored in my file stystem by album (CD, etc.) from which they came, though I will usually rip multidisc sets as one "album" (unless each disc is really a separate thing, as in some 50-volume mega-CD reissue sets, which case it would be nuts to do that). It has never caused me any problems. I think the artist for which I have the most albums is Duke Ellington, with around 80 or so.

I don't embed album art in the files. Album art exists in the folder with the album, and all music players I've encountered pick it up fine. In 10+ years and tens of thousands of individual FLAC, OGG, and MP3 files, I've never had a problem.

I handle genres completely differently. I'm very liberal with genre tagging, and I might attach five or six or seven different genres to a particular work (which VORBIS tags allow). For example, for a cello concerto, I might assign the following genres: Classical, Orchestral, Concerto, Cello Concerto. And maybe some others depending on the period of the work. The results is a very long list of overlapping genres to choose from. In Quodlibet, I can select any of them from a list, or search on them, resulting in just those files with the genre tag applied. It works nicely. You don't have to worry about non-overlapping genre designations, which could be arbitrary in nature, and I think it's truer to the music itself.

Some other things: I don't really see the problem with redundant information in composer/album/title/whatever tags. I do use redundant information sometimes to make sure that things display and sort nicely across different players and platforms. I also do store composer tags as "Bach, J.S." rather than "J.S. Bach". Again, I really don't see the harm, and at least things sort in the usual order, which is more important to me than seeing first name before last name.

I do agree with you on several other things though. I had to figure out my own tagging system several years ago, and it's good to get confirmation of someone else agreeing with my decisions! At one point, I was even using the "artist" tag for whichever name was highlighted most prominently on the release. This proved to be unworkable and just confusing in the end. I agree that using the composer's name for the artist tag is the best choice.

Anyway, all that really matters is whether your tagging system works for you and how you listen to your music. Thanks for sharing the interesting post.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

One quick question. If you are used to looking for your music in a certain manner does it matter what you put in your tag fields as long as you understand how it works? I'll put a few screenshots up of the way I do it at the end of the week. However, what I will say is that using the system that I do Ive never had a problem finding tracks on my phone, tablet or computer. For example, I have ridiculous numbers of Beethoven symphony cycles ("Really Merl? You do surprise me!") and even if I put them on my phone I can navigate to the ones i want really easily using my system of tagging. On tge computer I can find them even easier yet in the artists field I put in the name of the conductor and orchestra, which you say I shouldn't. Ive read through your article (that must have taken an eternity to write) and even though I class myself as an intelligent man, I cant see how your method of tagging would work for me. However, I'm absolutely ***** with written instructions so that's not surprising. I can show you what I mean when ive got time to take screenshots. Right now im frantically running round trying to sort out a plan of work for my class should we have to close the school in the near future.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Merl said:


> One quick question. If you are used to looking for your music in a certain manner does it matter what you put in your tag fields as long as you understand how it works? I'll put a few screenshots up of the way I do it at the end of the week. However, what I will say is that using the system that I do Ive never had a problem finding tracks on my phone, tablet or computer. For example, I have ridiculous numbers of Beethoven symphony cycles ("Really Merl? You do surprise me!") and even if I put them on my phone I can navigate to the ones i want really easily using my system of tagging. On tge computer I can find them even easier yet in the artists field I put in the name of the conductor and orchestra, which you say I shouldn't. Ive read through your article (that must have taken an eternity to write) and even though I class myself as an intelligent man, I cant see how your method of tagging would work for me. However, I'm absolutely ***** with written instructions so that's not surprising. I can show you what I mean when ive got time to take screenshots. Right now im frantically running round trying to sort out a plan of work for my class should we have to close the school in the near future.


Short answer is "yes it does matter".

If you tag weirdly, it may not work across multiple media players. Or you may find it difficult to update/correct your tag data (because you may not know in which tag a particular bit of data is lurking.

You can get by with the most awful tagging system that 'suits your needs' for years (ask me how I know!). And then you change computer, or operating system, or the way you listen to music and you'll find your unique tagging strategy just isn't up to the job.

I will do you a visual guide ASAP. Just one question: what operating system and media player do you use?

Also: got any particularly hairy CDs you think my tagging system won't be able to handle? It would be good to have some challenging examples to play with!


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

apricissimus said:


> Thanks for the link. It was an interesting read, but I disagree with some of your recommendations, although a lot of it is just a matter of personal preference. Just to name a few:


First, let me say that I really appreciate the constructive feedback. If I disagree with some of the things you say, it's nevertheless from a point of happy interaction with someone who's taken the trouble to think about this stuff.



apricissimus said:


> I still use the "album" tag to reference the physical (or digital!) volume that the files were originally delivered in. I still like to listen to albums (CDs, LPs, whatever) sometimes, and the "album" tag makes that possible. But I have also availed myself of the customizable VORBIS tags to add a "work" tag that uniquely identifies a particular composition. It's non-standard, so it won't work on many music players. But it works very well with Quodlibet, the player I use at home.


I find your approach a bit coach-before-the-horses. I myself don't care to organise by physical CD (largely because the same recordings will come in multiple different configurations over the years!), but if I did, I'd do it by creating a custom tag called something like CDID and sticking the Decca, DG, whoever catalogue number in there. I'd then have separate ALBUMS, with no apparent connection with each other (except they'd share the same album art), but I could re-construct the physical CD by sorting and grouping by CDID (or whatever you decided to call it).

So it's good to see someone who knows about custom tags and takes the effort to use them properly -but I'd want my 'standard' tags to be the things which stores the 'standard' information, and the custom ones to be the things which give added functionality. Your way of doing it seems a bit the other way around to me.



apricissimus said:


> When I'm out and about, my music player is on my phone, but the storage capacity is small enough that it's no trouble (for me) just to deal with albums. I know what's on my phone and the albums are easy enough to find. (Not so on my home computer, where I have almost 200 days of music stored, hence the usefulness of the "work" tag.)


I listen to music on my phone, too. I use Android and Cloud Player. I have an Office 365 subscription, so I get 1TB of 'cloud storage' with that. It's not big enough to store my collection of FLACs, however, so I copied my FLACs and converted the copy to fairly low-rate (192kbps) MP3. That brought the collection down to around 500GB, which fits in Onedrive just fine. Cloud Player than streams off that 'cloud drive' just fine. So I get to have all my music collection with me at all times, not just the bits and bobs I select to copy onto an SD card.

However, that means I need the storage/search mechanisms that work well on the desktop to also work well on the phone. Another reason why I stick with standard tags to do the standard and basic hierarchy. A custom tag that works for you when you're only dealing with a small subset of your collection on your mobile device wouldn't be useful to me in Cloud Player (which wouldn't know how to interact with the custom tag). So, if I were in your shoes, I'd have the ALBUM as the 'work' and the CDID as the 'physical CD grouping tag'. On the desktop, with software that will work with a custom tag, I could re-construct the physical CD; on the phone, which is oblivious to the custom tag, I can still play my 'works' as their composers intended.

Basically, I can see why you do what you do, but it wouldn't work for me, and I think it's got things the wrong way round.



apricissimus said:


> Keeping things in "album" format (based on the CD, typically) also plays well with my non-classical collection, which comprises about half my total collection. The files are also stored in my file stystem by album (CD, etc.) from which they came, though I will usually rip multidisc sets as one "album" (unless each disc is really a separate thing, as in some 50-volume mega-CD reissue sets, which case it would be nuts to do that). It has never caused me any problems. I think the artist for which I have the most albums is Duke Ellington, with around 80 or so.


Ah, see.... there was a reason I carefully called that article The Axioms of *Classical* Tagging! It was specifically meant only to apply to classical music, largely because I wouldn't presume to speak about non-classical music, since I haven't the faintest idea of what that parallel universe's tagging requirements are. More broadly, I didn't and don't want to develop a tagging strategy that works for "all music", just as I wouldn't want metadata about my paintings and my photos to be stored in the same database. The data realms are too different to successfully combine them, I suspect... therefore I don't try to. My non-classical music tends to be played in different players or via direct access off the hard disk. I don't ...ahem... "pollute" my classical database with non-classical elements, and I don't imagine my tagging strategy is appropriate for both (and wouldn't want to use one which claimed to be).



apricissimus said:


> I don't embed album art in the files. Album art exists in the folder with the album, and all music players I've encountered pick it up fine. In 10+ years and tens of thousands of individual FLAC, OGG, and MP3 files, I've never had a problem.


You've never used Windows Media Player, then?! Seriously: that thing defaults to fetching album art for you at the drop of the hat and will over-write your folder.jpg files without so much as a by-your-leave. 'Twas the bane of my existence in the early 2000s! The other Windows-based media players I reviewed here also have this ability -some of them are configured to do it by default, which is why I actually used that capability as a determining characteristic in assessing each player.

Now these days I use Linux, and its media players tend not to be quite so aggressive about this by default. But even so, Clementine and Strawberry both have a Tools -> Cover Manager which, if you're not carefully, will run off to the Internet hinterlands and fetch you all manner of album art which may or may not be appropriate.

It's probably true that a knowledgable user can configure any player *not* to behave in this way; but the novice using a default-configured player may well run into problems. Embedding album art is then a much safer proposition.

In the past, I've also copied all my music by doing the equivalent of "copy *.flac d:". Which is great. Transports all my music beautifully... but neatly forgets to copy all my folder.jpgs, of course. Embed the art and that sort of thing ceases to be a problem.



apricissimus said:


> I handle genres completely differently. I'm very liberal with genre tagging, and I might attach five or six or seven different genres to a particular work (which VORBIS tags allow). For example, for a cello concerto, I might assign the following genres: Classical, Orchestral, Concerto, Cello Concerto. And maybe some others depending on the period of the work. The results is a very long list of overlapping genres to choose from. In Quodlibet, I can select any of them from a list, or search on them, resulting in just those files with the genre tag applied. It works nicely. You don't have to worry about non-overlapping genre designations, which could be arbitrary in nature, and I think it's truer to the music itself.


First thing I want to say about that is: how many examples of non-classical cello concertos do you know of? How many cello concertos do you know that don't require an orchestra to be present? So when I see the word 'cello concerto' in my ALBUM tag, I already know it's 'classical' and 'orchestral' and don't need either of those things spelled out anywhere. Thus, your 'nested tags' are really just a set of redundancies.

Second thing to mention: all my tags will be reading 'Concerto' only at this point, but I can retrieve just my cello concertos if I wanted:









In other words, you don't have to have the genre tag get so specific in order to be able to search and find by the particular instrument involved. Basically, I'm saying that you don't *need* a complex, nested genre tag to be able to filter by genre (and perhaps very specific genres).

For me, in any case, I don't make a lot of use of the GENRE tag. It's there to provide the *physical* sub-division of the music, so that my 7000 Bach tracks don't all sit in one folder on the hard disk. I don't need it to do much more than that. I don't think most people need to be, either: the functionality of getting at a violin concerto versus a xylophone one is there thanks to the ALBUM tag. It doesn't need to be anywhere else.



apricissimus said:


> Some other things: I don't really see the problem with redundant information in composer/album/title/whatever tags. I do use redundant information sometimes to make sure that things display and sort nicely across different players and platforms.


It's a perfectly good question. The fundamental reason is data management and consistency. If you store the same data in more than one place, it becomes possible for the data stored in one place to become different to what's meant to be the same piece of data stored in a second or subsequent place. You may remember to update it in place A, and forget to update it in place B. Or you may do two different updates by mistake.

So, the true story I mention in my article. I had set ARTIST=Bela Bartok, and then realised it should have been Béla Bartók. Since I'd only stored it in ARTIST, I could just do a simple subsitution in my media player's tagging editor. Select all files, type in new name, press OK. Job Done.

If I'd stored the artist name in my ALBUM tag too, however, as some people in these parts seem to like to do, I would then have had things like Bela Bartok - Four Romanian Folk Songs and Bela Bartok - Bluebeard's Castle. Now how do you replace the "Bela Bartok" bits of those tags, in bulk, without altering or damaging the non-composer-name bits of those tags? You can only do it in the media player by selecting tracks album by album. There's no way to just select all Bartok tracks and do a global substitution. Now, if you break out your MP3Tag or EasyTag software, sure: it's do-able. But it's not trivially easy to do it, even so.

So, duplicating the ARTIST information in the ALBUM tag means (a) I'd have to remember that the piece of data was in both ARTIST and ALBUM; (b) I'd have to do two updates, not one -and the more times you do things, the more chances of introducing a typo or other error; and (c) the fix for the ALBUM tag would be much harder to do than the fix for the ARTIST tag.

I could, of course, choose not to update the ALBUM tag at all: and at that point, I'd have my composer listed as 'Béla Bartók' *and* as 'Bela Bartok': inconsistency.

If you were a database professional, you would instantly recognise this as being the problem of "normalisation". Unnormalised data is just not a good thing to have in a database of any description. It causes trouble. If you're interested, a quick guide to it is available here. And some might object that a catalogue of music isn't a database and doesn't need to be normalised... but they'd be wrong! Any store of coherent information that you want to use for data retrieval purposes can be considered a database for these purposes: so an Excel spreadsheet can be a database (and I often see clients who use them as such when the complexity of their spreadsheets tell me they should be using a proper, dedictaed database package instead! But I digress...)

Repeating things in different places is just not good for future maintenance, consistency and flexibility. And those things can affect functionality, too.



apricissimus said:


> I also do store composer tags as "Bach, J.S." rather than "J.S. Bach". Again, I really don't see the harm, and at least things sort in the usual order, which is more important to me than seeing first name before last name.


If that was the only point you disagreed with me on, I'd be a happy man! It fundamentally doesn't matter whether you store it in what I call 'reverse notation' or in 'natural word order'. Most people will be familiar with reverse notation (i.e, Britten, B) from their interactions with card indexes, encyclopedia indexes and so on. So it's quite likely to feel more 'natural' to do it that way than otherwise. I entirely understand that.

My point is only that reverse notation was invented for large collections of data to be usefully searchable. With a large amount of data, you needed a search hierarchy that went from the general to the specific. Flowers -> Roses, Roses -> Dog Rose. Or Colours -> Reds -> Vermillion. But if you are already in a data realm that is highly specific, you don't need to use that general->specific way of thinking of things. You're already into the specifics, so you can tackle them head-on. Additionally, computer technology gives us search indexes that will work with whatever data you want to feed it (See: Google!). In the digital age, there's just no need to structure your data in non-human forms.

So, personally: I think the use of reverse notation for data input makes no sense in a digital age and when you're already dealing with maybe just a few hundred composer names, most of which are highly distinct (if not unique) anyway.

But as I say, I do understand that this is a sea-change in the organisational structure of most people's music, so if you prefer finding your Bach under B, not J... I'm not going to argue that one too much. But I may think you a tad old-fashioned 



apricissimus said:


> I do agree with you on several other things though. I had to figure out my own tagging system several years ago, and it's good to get confirmation of someone else agreeing with my decisions! At one point, I was even using the "artist" tag for whichever name was highlighted most prominently on the release. This proved to be unworkable and just confusing in the end. I agree that using the composer's name for the artist tag is the best choice.
> 
> Anyway, all that really matters is whether your tagging system works for you and how you listen to your music. Thanks for sharing the interesting post.


And thank you for constructively critiquing it! I wrote it because I don't think tagging should be a 'system that works for you', in the sense that no-one should have to "figure out my own tagging system". I realise that those who are invested in one particular way of doing things, with massive collections tagged one way, no matter how bad it might be, are not lightly going to be able to change to another. But hopefully newcomers to classical music won't have to invent their own systems, but can adopt one -perhaps with personalised tweaks!- that follows sound data management principles.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

dizwell said:


> Short answer is "yes it does matter".
> 
> If you tag weirdly, it may not work across multiple media players. Or you may find it difficult to update/correct your tag data (because you may not know in which tag a particular bit of data is lurking.
> 
> ...


As regarding operating system.... On the computer I'm on Windows 10. I usually use VLC to play most music files. Use VLC on my tablet too. Use my Honor 20's bog standard media player to play music on my phone. I know what you mean about tagging and generally understand what you're saying (I've tried to use a few media players that don't like my way of tagging) but there are numerous players out there which are comfortable with it (and believe me I've tried them all). I don't think I've got any hairy cds that your tagging system couldn't handle as it's an intelligent system. I just don't think it would suit me and I really would lose the will to live if I had to retag over 2TB of music including over 100 Beethoven cycles and a similar number of Brahms and Schumann cycles, Bach Cello Suites and LVB String quartets. I realise there's limitations in my Penguin Guide /old album style of tagging but it works for me. It might not be as efficient as other ways and may fall apart on some systems or with some players but it suits me at the moment.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Merl said:


> As regarding operating system.... On the computer I'm on Windows 10. I usually use VLC to play most music files. Use VLC on my tablet too. Use my Honor 20's bog standard media player to play music on my phone. I know what you mean about tagging and generally understand what you're saying (I've tried to use a few media players that don't like my way of tagging) but there are numerous players out there which are comfortable with it (and believe me I've tried them all). I don't think I've got any hairy cds that your tagging system couldn't handle as it's an intelligent system. I just don't think it would suit me and I really would lose the will to live if I had to retag over 2TB of music including over 100 Beethoven cycles and a similar number of Brahms and Schumann cycles, Bach Cello Suites and LVB String quartets. I realise there's limitations in my Penguin Guide /old album style of tagging but it works for me. It might not be as efficient as other ways and may fall apart on some systems or with some players but it suits me at the moment.


Sweeping generalisation coming up... but VLC isn't really a media manager. It's an absolutely top-notch media player, in the sense that if you feed it a video or audio file of practically any format direct from the hard disk, it will play it with ease. It has playlist functionality. It even has 'Media Library' functionality, but it's pretty basic, allowing you to navigate your music files by the physical folder structure they exist in on disk, and not a lot else.

So, I use VLC all the time to play music that I haven't tagged up and added to my collection yet. Rip a CD, files not yet tagged, sitting on my desktop, urge to listen comes upon me: right-click and 'Open with -> VLC'. I can even then queue up other files into a 'playlist'. Works a treat and is indispensible. But its playlists aren't 'persistent' and it's not a permanent store of information about the media I just played,

But it's not a media _manager_. Management functionality requires that you should be able to order your music in different ways, search, filter etc, play when selected, queue things up and so on. VLC is quite rudimentary at most of those tasks (in my experience at least).

So I'm not surprised that if you've tailored your collection to work direct from the file system/hard disk, into VLC, and have never built up a permanently-stored library of your music, that your tagging doesn't work well with media managers that do have a permanently-stored library and depend entirely on the quality of the tagging to make management of it work properly.

Let me mull things over a bit: I shall try putting out some guides as to how I'd rip examples of CDs of various levels of complexity and how I'd re-catalogue things if I were of a mind to have ripped/tagged it "incorrectly" in the first place. 

Thanks for the reply ...and enjot that Beethoven! 100 Beethoven cycles?! I thought I was bonkers having 5 Messiahs.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

dizwell said:


> Thanks for the reply ...and enjot that Beethoven! 100 Beethoven cycles?! I thought I was bonkers having 5 Messiahs.


I have way more than 100. It's probably around the 150 mark now.


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## Guest002 (Feb 19, 2020)

Merl said:


> I have way more than 100. It's probably around the 150 mark now.


Yikes!

Anyway. I have started putting together the 'very visual' (i.e., lots of screenshots) guide to how I rip and tag classical CDs. See this page. It's obviously very much a work in progress: I'm pledged to produce at least 8 different articles -and so far have managed to complete 1! But I hope you can be patient. At least you'll have some Beethoven to listen to while you're waiting!!


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