How to organize and tag classical music

[DavidHB]

It's now almost exactly a year since I faced exactly the question swdick is asking. My collection is much smaller than some (700-800 CDs, about 85% of them classical), but it still seemed a formidable task to get it all ripped and tagged. Even so, the job is now done, and, except for additions to the collection and correction of tagging errors, hopefully will not need to be done again. Here's some of what I learned along the way, and also from this and other forums.

There is no one right way of doing the job. The key thing is the way that you yourself have been using, and intend in future to use, your music collection. If you are used to accessing music in a particular way, it's probably best to keep the option of organising your music in the way you organise it now. MinimServer's 'intelligent browsing' allows you to access the music in different ways, so you are not forced to stick to one method, but what you know is usually a good place to start, and you can work out from there.

Start small. I ripped and tagged about 25 of my favourite albums, and experimented with different ways of accessing the collection. Initially, I tended to use the [folder view], but soon I switched to the browsing sequence Genre -> Composer -> Album. Later refinements were adding ComposerSort tags to all classical tracks (so that I could select composers alphabetically by surname - this was before MinimServer could reverse names on the fly), adding Composition and Group tags (so that the main browsing sequence became Genre -> Composer -> Composition) and implementing alphabetical grouping.

All this was done through experiment, and discovering what I liked. I find, for instance, that I rarely wish to select classical music by artist name, so I haven't bothered with an ArtistSort tag or reversing Artist names. Others will have a different view. But I do think that most people organising classical music will probably want to add the Group tag, with its particular usage described in the MinimServer User Guide, to Simon's basic list of tags you need to populate. It is good to be able to list the contents of an album on a work-by-work rather than a track-by-track basis, particularly as many classical albums have dozens of tracks.

The file system still matters. You occasionally come across the view that, when the server indexes all the tracks, it doesn't really matter where they are stored, so long as they are where the server can find them. That is not my experience. You will need to be able to find tracks for maintenance (including tagging) and file operations such as backup or conversion to different file formats. I regard file and folder naming as an essential part of my metadata structure.

My file organisation on the server is very similar to that used by swdick. For classical music it is media/music/composer/<albumgroup [if needed]>/<album>/<track name>, with separate folders outside the composer list for recitals and compilations. For music other than classical, I use the conventional media/music/<artist>/<album>/<track name> form of organisation.

Be fanatical about consistency. You want all the music a composer to be listed in the same place, and you want an artist to have the same name wherever he or she appears in your browse tree. It is more than a little annoying when different performances of the same work are listed under 'Bach, J.S.', 'Johann Sebastian Bach', 'J.S. Bach' or whatever.

Data gathered, perhaps as part of the ripping process, from on-line sources often provides a useful start but it almost invariably requires editing and correction for both accuracy and consistency. Music tagging programs provide a number of tools to help you do this. You will need both a good ripping program (I use dbPoweramp) and a good tagging program (MP3Tag in my case); the time spent in learning to use them well will be more than recovered as the ripping and tagging of the library proceeds.

Have a consistent 'workflow'. The ripping and tagging process will be much easier if you develop some sort of 'muscle memory' in the way you do it, and follow a consistent sequence of steps each time round. My sequence is:

1. Set up the rip (specify target folder etc.) and load disc;
2. [if required] Scan the CD art;
3. Edit and correct the suggested metadata (paying particular attention to album and track names as in my case these are the folder and file names respectively);
4. Rip the CD to the music folder on my desktop computer;
5. When the current batch of CDs are all ripped, edit the tags to make any further corrections needed, and to add ComposerSort, Composition and Group data;
6. Copy the files to the NAS (I use the Microsoft SyncToy to produce an exact copy of my music folder on the NAS, from where the music is streamed), and rescan with MinimServer.

The whole business is also much easier if you have a place and equipment that are comfortable to work in and with. If you are going to rip 800 CDs, it is as well to have a reasonably fast desktop machine with a robust optical drive. Editing will be easier with a large, good quality monitor than on most laptop screens. Desk space helps you keep the piles of CDs in some sort of order. My great luxury is a slide-out scanner drawer; the scanner is to hand when I need it for the album art.

Conclusion. Some of these points may be surprising, as they may seem to have only a tenuous connection with the original question. But organising the music in the collection is actually only a part (albeit a crucial part) of the task of making one's digital music available for streaming. Decisions on which tags you will use, and how you will go about populating your files with those tags, will depend in part on the effort you can devote to the task; having a consistent and efficient workflow enables you to be a bit more ambitious in your tagging, and gives you a wider range of ways to enjoy your music. Which is, after all, what this hobby is all about.

David