Search or Browse Folder View

[tommyrot]

Hi folks,

Happy New Year.

I wanted to canvass your views on this whole business of tagging classical music. For me there's a recurring pattern. Every few years, in hope of advances in tagging practice, UPnP standards and control software, I set about getting my music library in order. And every time it ends is disappointment.

Let's take the example of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. (I have 172 albums of Beethoven.)

Let's assume I want to find it by browsing (on virtually all iOS control points). I find it absurd to navigate starting at Composer and painfully scrolling through endless composers. When I do find Beethoven albums, there are scores of albums with titles beginning 'Beethoven Sym...'. The limitations of control point design means that invariably, that's all that is shown. With scores of recordings, systematically tapping each result to see if it's the one I want is a thankless task, so it ends in frustration.

It's just as absurd navigating a tree from 'Album', because even if you jump to 'B' in the alphabet, it's a case of scrolling past the many dozens of albums beginning with 'B'. Remember that it's not nested in any sort of hierarchy, so it means scrolling through endless jazz, rock, pop and all other classical albums beginning with 'B' find Beethoven. When I do find Beethoven albums, there are scores of albums with titles beginning 'Beethoven Sym...' and the limitations of control point design means that, invariably, that's all that is shown. With scores of recordings, systematically tapping each result ... yadda, yadda, yadda. It's that same end point of frustration each time. That's the case for browsing.

Let's see how search fares using the query 'Beethoven'. The result list is overwhelming, but it's grouped by Artists, Tracks or Albums containing 'Beethoven'. Beethoven isn't the artist, so that leaves tracks and albums. The number of tracks and albums containing the string 'Beethoven' is eye-wateringly long, so it ends with frustration again. The most joy (pun intended) I've had is to use a album naming convention that might support the case for search e.g. "Beethoven: Symphony No. 9". Using this string produces a manageable number of results. This convention could be applied to piano concertos, piano sonatas, violin sonatas, etc.
It could also work for other large works. For example, Bach: English Suite, Bach: French Suite, but it runs aground with smaller works like partitas, overtures which tend to be recorded and bundled together.

So, there ends the case for search.

Every time I contemplate the ongoing herculean task of wrestling with these shortcomings, I ask myself what the point is because, ultimately, the way I think about classical orchestral music is Composer+Work+Conductor+Orchestra+Year. That's four data points. Each one is logical nesting. Not surprisingly, that's how my collection is hierarchically organised. So, using Folder View, navigating to Beethoven>Symphonies> it's a few taps to choose the conductor and year I want to play the recording I want. E.g. Beethoven>Symphonies>Symphony no. 1>Karajan>Berlin Philharmonic>. Ordering and navigating the collection this way alleviates the migraine of discoverability where some music comes with the composer and conductor tag, while others not and overcomes the readability shortcomings of control point sw.)

Every few years, I come to this conclusion. Usually with a sense of defeat after wrestling with the staggering inconsistencies in tagging practice and shortcomings of technical standards which all combine to produce this a feeling that I'm building on quicksand.

I just wondered how many of you feel likewise. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Thanks.

[simoncn]

Happy New Year!

MinimServer allows you to browse by any tags in any order. With your Beethoven example of browsing by folder, if your files and your indexTags setting include Composer, Work, Conductor, Orchestra and Year, you can browse from the top level by selecting Composer > Work > Conductor > Orchestra > Year and see exactly the albums that you want, just as you do at present.

In addition, you have the option to browse by these tags in a different order if you wish. Perhaps you would like to see all albums in your library with a certain combination of Conductor and Orchestra. Just browse by Conductor > Orchestra to see these. You could also extend your tagging to add soloists without needing to reorganise your folder structure, and make two selections to view all Schubert works with a particular soloist (for example).

At every stage, you are presented with lists of all albums/items in your current selection and a list of index choices for further refinement. It provides everything that folder browsing provides and much more, and is especially suited to a library like yours.

[stefano_mbp]

I have a quite huge classical music library and the use of Work tag among Composer, Conductor, Orchestra, Solists, Artist and recording date is fundamental.
To avoid inconsistency in these tags, Work over all, I realized some spreadsheets, one for each Composer, where I collected all the works name. This helps a lot writing down metadata perfectly identical in syntax.
And more, I use Yate/2manyrobots (macOS only) as tagging app that store into its db all the metadata used for each tag, this helps too as a drop-down menu is available for each tag where I can select the right metadata without the need to write it again.
Fundamental as well is to spend few minutes for each added album to fill every tag you decided to use, and more about this, the ability of the tagging app to define a customized set of tags to be filled can help a lot (Yate can do this)

[tommyrot]

(10-01-2023 11:28)simoncn Wrote:  Happy New Year!

MinimServer allows you to browse by any tags in any order. With your Beethoven example of browsing by folder, if your files and your indexTags setting include Composer, Work, Conductor, Orchestra and Year, you can browse from the top level by selecting Composer > Work > Conductor > Orchestra > Year and see exactly the albums that you want, just as you do at present.

In addition, you have the option to browse by these tags in a different order if you wish. Perhaps you would like to see all albums in your library with a certain combination of Conductor and Orchestra. Just browse by Conductor > Orchestra to see these. You could also extend your tagging to add soloists without needing to reorganise your folder structure, and make two selections to view all Schubert works with a particular soloist (for example).

At every stage, you are presented with lists of all albums/items in your current selection and a list of index choices for further refinement. It provides everything that folder browsing provides and much more, and is especially suited to a library like yours.

Thanks for your reply, Simon. I appreciate that, theoretically, with consistent tagging, one might be able to browse the index in a nested pattern Composer > Work > Conductor > Orchestra > Year, but I'm afraid this is where theory gets a flat tyre because reality rears its ugly head.

Let's overlook the glaring truth that when you buy music, Work is hardly ever pre-tagged. Even in a perfectly tagged collection, tapping on Composer would present all the composers across your entire collection. This list includes all jazz, rock, pop, blues music which have composers tagged. If your control point alphabetises this and you jump to 'B', that's still a long list and too unwieldy to be practical. You're already lost.

Add another dose of reality. Imagine you decide to pan for gold and you scroll past all the unwanted "B's". Given the wildly different and imperfect tagging practices used down the years, the number of possible Beethovens (in my collection) looks something like this:

Beethoven
Beethoven Ludwig Van
Beethoven Ludvig Van
Beethoven, Ludwig Van
Beethoven, Ludvig Van
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Ludvig Van Beethoven
Beethoven [Wilhelm Furtwangler, Berliner Philharmoniker, 1953], Beethoven Ludwig Van
Beethoven [Wilhelm Furtwängler, Berliner Philharmoniker, 1953], Beethoven Ludwig Van
Beethoven Ludwig Van, [Pablo Casals, The Marlboro Festival Orchestra, 1963], Beethoven, Ludwig Van
... [there are plenty more, but I'll stop here for the sake of brevity.]

Just accounting for poor tagging practice (of adding other data into the composer tag) and European characters, never mind the typos, there are far too many variants of Beethoven for these results to be practical. So, this quest fails after the first tap on Composer. I don't even get to the next stage to select the Work.

I know this reflects on the state of metadata in the library, but it also points to the unending and thankless labour required to preen, weed and sanitise classical music just to be able to find our music. With a music collection in nested folders, music from any source, however badly tagged, can be easily stored and browsed. When storing it, for example, one can ignore variations that wreck your experience searching or browsing-by-tags. For example, variations in spelling and convention e.g. Symphonie/Symphony/Symph or Piano Concerto/piano concerten are all the same – saved together. Other subtle distinctions are also ignored e.g. Furtwangler or Furtwäengler. When I compare the effort-to-reward balance, the level of vigilance required to constantly equalise this in musical metadata feels (to me) like a fool's errand.

[simbun]

Most of the weaknesses you assign to browsing by tags is because you've assumed poor tag quality. If you had an equally poor folder structure then you'd still be better off browsing by tags, so ultimately your point is just that it's easier to maintain a folder structure than it is tags, and to that I think most will agree. On the other hand, if you were to clean up your tags you'd have a much richer visual and functional experience which is why many/most people do.

I know nothing about classical music but I would have thought there were some decent tagging programs out there, have you not tried any?
Depending on your collection size it should pretty straight forward to tidy up composer, conductor and maybe orchestra (I use foobar2000 and the sqlite plugin for this type of work), or, if your folder structure is just as you like it then bring those values into the tags themselves, which is trivial in foobar2000.

At the end of the day you get out what you put in, like most things really.

[tommyrot]

(10-01-2023 16:21)simbun Wrote:  Most of the weaknesses you assign to browsing by tags is because you've assumed poor tag quality. If you had an equally poor folder structure then you'd still be better off browsing by tags, so ultimately your point is just that it's easier to maintain a folder structure than it is tags, and to that I think most will agree. On the other hand, if you were to clean up your tags you'd have a much richer visual and functional experience which is why many/most people do.

I know nothing about classical music but I would have thought there were some decent tagging programs out there, have you not tried any?
Depending on your collection size it should pretty straight forward to tidy up composer, conductor and maybe orchestra (I use foobar2000 and the sqlite plugin for this type of work), or, if your folder structure is just as you like it then bring those values into the tags themselves, which is trivial in foobar2000.

At the end of the day you get out what you put in, like most things really.

Hi Simbun,
Yes, you're right to grasp the most salient point, which is how much easier it is to maintain a folder structure (which imposes a logical grouping and hierarchy to the music which makes browsing music a doddle) than it is to get lost in the weeds of tags.

To answer your other question, yes, I've tried countless tagging applications including MusicBrain, Picard, SongKong and Metadatics, and I've nothing but the highest admiration for the developers. I think they do a fine job. But their achilles' heel is that they're only as good as the DBs they use – mainly MusicBrainz. It matches music recorded after 1980s fine, but much of my treasured collection predates that. I've recordings that go back to 1930s and 1940s. For anything earlier than 1980, I find MusicBrainz lacking.

[stefano_mbp]

Never totally relied on MusicBrainz, Discogs and other public db (Picard, Songkong, Metadatics rely on them) as they are maintained by the community and there is no guarantee about a coherent naming convention as I could often verify myself and if tagging is important coherence in naming convention is much more important. An incoherent naming convention is worst than no tagging at all.
They can be just used as a starting point, nothing else

[paultaylor]

(10-01-2023 17:01)tommyrot Wrote:  To answer your other question, yes, I've tried countless tagging applications including MusicBrain, Picard, SongKong and Metadatics, and I've nothing but the highest admiration for the developers. I think they do a fine job. But their achilles' heel is that they're only as good as the DBs they use – mainly MusicBrainz. It matches music recorded after 1980s fine, but much of my treasured collection predates that. I've recordings that go back to 1930s and 1940s. For anything earlier than 1980, I find MusicBrainz lacking.

One thing about MusicBrainz is it is an actial database with recording/work/release and artist enitities not just a simple spreadsheet. So when you match an album to MusicBrainz it links that release to artist entities for the artist/composer/conductor ectera, and artist entities usually have an artists name in their native language/script and in English and therefore you can quite easily have consistent names for the people. For example with SongKong if you enable Romanize non-Latin scripts artist names wherever possible it would use the same variation of Ludwig Van Beethoven for all occurences of him as composer or album artist even if the name on the release was different.

It would be interesting if you were to run SongKong Fix Songs just as a preview (no license required) to see what percentage it matched, and the quality of the matching, would be happy to work on this with you.

[DavidHB]

This is an old discussion, going back at least to the early days of MinimServer, but it is always interesting.

Like, I am sure, many others, I encountered the issues with tagging classical music (and therefore with using my music library effectively) when I first started streaming music a decade or so ago. I found that poor tagging was certainly an issue, but that the root problem was the fixation of the music industry on the Artist>Album>Track system of organising music, which simply doesn't work with classical material. In fact, there is no single basis of organisation that works with every classical recording. This is why intelligent browsing in MinimServer is so useful; it doesn't constrain you to one way of doing things.

Like the OP, I stated off using folder view and trying to maintain a coherent folder structure, which I still do, to keep the library manageable. But it soon became apparent that I would have to confront the tagging issue. I eventually came up with a 'layered' system for dealing with tags.

Layer 1 is the download or ripping stage. For ripping, I use dBpoweramp, which not only accesses several libraries (thereby offering a selection of tagging options), but also has facilities for basic tag editing before the ripping process takes place. With downloads, I try to use suppliers who take tagging reasonably seriously; both Hyperion and Linn are pretty good in this regard, for example, as was Channel Classics in the days before it (sadly) closed its download library.

Layer 2 is fine tuning the tags, particularly to make sure that I use consistent naming of composers and works. For this I use MP3Tag, which has a really good 'consistency' feature, whereby one can open several albums at once, go to the tag where there are inconsistent values, and use a drop-down menu of all the values in the current track selection. Selecting one of these values (or just entering a new value once) and saving the result makes the tag values consistent. Tricks like this make the tagging process bearable (in fact, I found it to be quite therapeutic), as well as giving the user a new appreciation of his or her music library.

I also make use of the ComposerSort and CompositionSort tags to deal with oddities and inconsistencies. This allows me to deal with problems in alphabetical listing (Ludwig van Beethoven, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Josquin des Prez) and issues such as the ordering whichever of Domenico Scarlatti's 550 or so keyboard sonatas are in the library (I simply put the Kk number of the sonata in the CompositionSort tag, which is not actually displayed).

All in all, I'd argue that systematic tagging of classical music is well worth the effort. I suspect that most of us reach the stage at which the pace of new acquisitions slows down, and then maintaining the library requires very little work, while we continue to enjoy the benefits of earlier work delivered through the good offices of MinimServer.

David