How to organize and tag classical music

[Dieter Stockert]

There may be good reasons for keeping an album in its original form. But in the days of playing music from a hard disc the concept of an album is obsolete, at least with the majority of classical music. So why not get rid of it?

[Pastim]

(10-10-2014 16:03)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  There may be good reasons for keeping an album in its original form. But in the days of playing music from a hard disc the concept of an album is obsolete, at least with the majority of classical music. So why not get rid of it?

With non-classical I often play albums.

With classical I also play many recital albums. With major works such as Symphonies less so, but with shorter pieces I often still play a whole Album. The booklet is also in Album form, so it matches what I have filed on disc and may wish to play.

So the point for me is that I don't want to lose the Album concept. I want to keep all my options open. Who knows what groups of items I might want to play in 10 years time? If I dropped Albums I might just regret it one day, and that would seem to be somewhat careless of me, particularly when I had all the data available to keep it.

However, each to their own

[DavidHB]

(10-10-2014 16:03)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  There may be good reasons for keeping an album in its original form. But in the days of playing music from a hard disc the concept of an album is obsolete, at least with the majority of classical music. So why not get rid of it?

I don't think that the concept of an album is dead. For most genres other than classical, the album continues to have a strong identity as an often coherent and carefully designed body of work by a particular artist or group. Or, as a compilation, it presents a themed set of material. These concepts are alive and well, and you find them in the classical world also, not least through CD (and LP) couplings and collections, though classical music recording has always been (in my view) more about the composer and the work, and less about the artist, than is the case with other genres.

As I see it, streaming the music does not do away with the need for albums, but it tends to change the way they are used. Particularly with the capabilities of MinimServer, the user has more control over what constitutes an 'album' in any particular case. Multi-disc sets can be multiple albums, single albums with individual 'disc n' containers, or just a single set of tracks. They can be presented to control points as track lists or composition lists (or as a mixture, though that is something I prefer not to do). Both sets and individual CDs can be divided up into separate albums. In my not particularly large collection I use all of these approaches.

There is also the point that one's collection has been growing and developing over time (in my case, something like half a century), and the physical organisation of the LPs and then the CDs leaves its mark. We often tend to think in terms of particular couplings (the Grieg and Schumann piano concertos for example), and the sequence of tracks on a favourite CD may have a comfortable familiarity. So I quite often find myself playing an album, and not just an individual work.

If you 'get rid' of the album, the question arises as to what you replace it with. Any decent sized collection will have thousands of individual tracks. In the file system, these will need to be stored in some sort of coherent folder structure. On the server, they will need to be appropriately indexed. The album arrangement provides a convenient means of doing these things which is almost universally used. If you look at any 'consumer' streamed music application (iTunes, Windows Media Player, any DLNA media server etc.), you will find that it is album-based, sometimes to the exclusion of any other means of accessing the music.

No, like it or not, the album concept is by no means obsolete.

David

[Dieter Stockert]

(10-10-2014 18:11)DavidHB Wrote:  For most genres other than classical, the album continues to have a strong identity as an often coherent and carefully designed body of work by a particular artist or group. Or, as a compilation, it presents a themed set of material. These concepts are alive and well, and you find them in the classical world also [...].

Good point, I think you're right. So we should look at every album if it makes sense to keep it as an album or if it is meaningless

(10-10-2014 18:11)DavidHB Wrote:  As I see it, streaming the music does not do away with the need for albums, but it tends to change the way they are used. [...]

If you 'get rid' of the album, the question arises as to what you replace it with.

In classical music we have opus or 'work'.

[Pastim]

(10-10-2014 18:11)DavidHB Wrote:  .... If you look at any 'consumer' streamed music application (iTunes, Windows Media Player, any DLNA media server etc.), you will find that it is album-based, sometimes to the exclusion of any other means of accessing the music.

No, like it or not, the album concept is by no means obsolete.

David

Agreed, and not least because the systems we use often depend on the concept, whether we like it or not. The tagging mechanism for different audio formats can be woefully inadequate, sometimes not allowing for custom tags such as Work or Composition. I know some classical collectors use 'Album' for 'Work' for this reason.

I have based my whole system on FLACS, with custom tags, and employ multiple types of server (mainly LMS, Minimserver and foobar2000) not least so as to try and ensure I'm not going to find my tracks are unplayable and/or unsearchable due to some technological change. I try to keep my usage of the limited set of the standard tags as standard as possible, but there are many absurdities in the 'standard'.

[DavidHB]

(10-10-2014 19:00)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  

(10-10-2014 18:11)DavidHB Wrote:  For most genres other than classical, the album continues to have a strong identity as an often coherent and carefully designed body of work by a particular artist or group. Or, as a compilation, it presents a themed set of material. These concepts are alive and well, and you find them in the classical world also [...].

Good point, I think you're right. So we should look at every album if it makes sense to keep it as an album or if it is meaningless.

It will always have some sort of meaning. In the common case where we are ripping a CD, the containing folder will have to have a name, and normally the best name is the name of the album (that is the same as the Album tag in the files within the folder - consistency is something of a virtue here).

One of the user choices I do make with classical albums is to change the album title when ripping the CD, so as to maintain a reasonably consistent format. My practice is never to include the composer's name (because in my file system album folders always reside either in the relevant composer folder, the recitals folder or the compilation folder), and typically to have album names in the format 'Symphonies 4 and 6 [Karajan]' or whatever. I find that album titles of that sort help me select the performance I wish to listen to.

(10-10-2014 19:00)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  

(10-10-2014 18:11)DavidHB Wrote:  As I see it, streaming the music does not do away with the need for albums, but it tends to change the way they are used. [...]

If you 'get rid' of the album, the question arises as to what you replace it with.

In classical music we have opus or 'work'.

Indeed we do. But what about recitals, where the running order is as important as the content of the individual works? Classical music is such a rich genre (if it is a genre - I would say it is much more than that); there is no one way in which we can select all the pieces we wish to listen to, in the sequence we wish to listen to them.

That said, my album titling described above brings me quite close to your mindset. As I hope you would agree, the default logic for choosing classical music to listen to is Composer -> work -> performance/artist(s). When that logic is used, the album (or at least its artwork) is merely the signpost to the chosen performance. But sometimes we do not use the default logic; a favourite album may have its own identity, or we simply want to use a saved playlist. Having that kind of choice is very much part of the fun, and maintaining the range of selection options, in my view, enriches the user experience.

David

[mccormw]

I have not yet felt the need to explore the GROUP tag - YET.

I would like to say that I agree with just about everything DavidHB said about tagging - there is a lot of very sound advice in his posts. Mind you I am saying that because I pretty much use the same tagging that he talks about.

I do, however, like "separate" systems almost for classical and non-classical albums and I do this by having what I look upon as my "root tag" and this I call CLASSIFICATION. This can take one of the following values only {Classical, Rock, Jazz, Folk, Audio Books, Pop}. This fits in really well with the power of Simon's system. For example, for Classical albums I also use a tag 'Composition' but I only enter value for classical, not for any non-classical stuff. So when you select Rock for 'Classification' the composition tag disappears.

Thing is though, unless you are using minim you don't need to bother with all this because it won't work in most (or all?) other servers. That, to me, is the power of Minim. I also run Twonky from a WD Live Hub box as a backup server system, it ain't too bad for non-classical but classical Twonky is hopeless.

[Pastim]

My need for the Group tag was driven, at least in part, by the behaviour of my Control Point (CP), and a tendency to select duplicate tracks when playing a minimserver container at anything other than track level. By defining Groups some of the worst of this can be avoided, since a Group always just contains tracks, not a further breakdown of tags.

I'm committed to linux, which severely restricts my choice of CP (most are hopeless). I believe I have now found one that is very practical, called upplay.

What CPs are others using?

[mccormw]

My main uses a NAIM UnitiLite and so I use the CP in that device and it works pretty well with Minim. I am a member of a NAIM forum and it seems that most of the people in this forum use Twonky!!!! I have tried to sing the praises of Minim there but no one seems to take any notice. Mind you quite a few people in that forum believe you can spend serious money on an ethernet hookup cable and it will make your system sound better!!!
I do not get this problem with my CP that requires the use of the GROUP tag - thank goodness.
I have tinkered with Linux and I know what you mean about the available CPs being rubbish, in fact I find a lot of the software in Linux to be poor. Which is strange when you think about some of the truly great products written for Linux/Unix like Apache, Tomcat etc. To me the desktop tools just are not up to it. I think this is possibly because there are so many versions of X-Windows implementations around.

ps in Windows foobar is actually brilliant but it is a CP and music player, it cannot (I think) be used to control other devices. Please correct me if that is wrong anyone.

But I will have a look at upplay. I have an ASUS netbook which uses an Intel Atom and is as slow as old boots with Windows but I guess it would run Linux well and if I can find a good CP then it would make a good little tool.

after a brief search
upplay is an unfortunate choice of name because a search brings up all sorts of rubbish and even the author is pretty downbeat on it. I might wait a little bit.

[simoncn]

(13-10-2014 18:17)mccormw Wrote:  ps in Windows foobar is actually brilliant but it is a CP and music player, it cannot (I think) be used to control other devices. Please correct me if that is wrong anyone.

foobar can be used as a UPnP control point controlling an external renderer device.