Tagging classical music

[simoncn]

(30-04-2014 13:45)DavidHB Wrote:  For instance, if you want to browse your library by composer as I do, each composer's name has to be spelt consistently throughout the library - you have to decide whether you are going to use, say, Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Serge Rachmaninoff or Sergey Rakhmaninov (all of which are in use), and then stick to your choice. Thankfully, MP3Tag provides an easy means of applying a tag value to a whole selection (possibly hundreds) of tracks at once.

Another option that might be worth considering is to leave the original spellings in your files and use the tag update facility of MinimServer to rename them all to a single consistent spelling.

[DavidHB]

(30-04-2014 16:36)gnomus Wrote:  I think I am pretty close to getting what I want from the tagging scheme that I have adopted. With only a few taps, I can find a piece of music, I can see how many versions of it I have; and I can choose one of those and get it playing. (I was surprised at how many times the Egmont Overture popped up as an extra on my CDs.) I can also choose something from a specific conductor, orchestra or singer within seconds. This is well beyond the functionality that I had [note use of past tense]with my CD collection.

A salutary reminder. We agreed a couple of days ago that adding a streamer to one's music system can be a game changer. Things have come a long way in the seven years since Linn brought out their first network player.

(30-04-2014 16:36)gnomus Wrote:  The initial ripping and tagging job is a complete nightmare, but once I get through my library, I am hoping that adding the odd, new CD will not be too arduous.

I bet you start buying more CDs ... I have . However, once ripping and tagging settles into a familiar workflow, it all becomes easier in any case. I now have about 500 fully tagged CDs on line, and finishing the job seems a lot less daunting than when I started.

(30-04-2014 16:36)gnomus Wrote:  However, the only thing I really miss is the album notes, cast list and libretto, although with my worsening eyesight reading the liner notes on a CD is getting pretty tough.

It seems to me that this "liner note" issue cannot be too difficult to get around - it is surely a Control Point issue. All I need is a way of tapping within the CP to bring up a PDF (or similar) of "liner notes" that I have associated with the "Composition" to which I am listening. I could, of course, do this outside of the CP, but having that little "button" would be awfully helpful.

Its a lovely pipe dream. Sadly, I don't share your optimism. Getting CD booklets into PDF format at home is not a practical proposition (rendering small multi-page booklets as PDF on an A4 scanner is certainly not my idea of fun). Current tagging formats are not designed to support document formats, so any add-on to a control point has to work outside the normal tagging structure. This is probably not the kind of thing manufacturer-produced control points will readily support.

I accept that none of the technical problems are insuperable. The logistics are another matter. When the online libraries of basic metadata are so inadequate (see Simon's views on this and related issues in his previous post above), the likelihood that music companies will provide us with their back catalogue of classical CD booklets in PDF format seems very remote. And I don't see how accessing the booklet can become a normal part of the streamed music experience without such a library. But I'd love to be proved wrong.

(30-04-2014 16:36)gnomus Wrote:  Overall, however, this streaming business is pretty good.

Fully agree. It makes the music we already have that much more accessible and therefore that much more enjoyable.

David

[DavidHB]

(30-04-2014 21:41)simoncn Wrote:  

(30-04-2014 21:21)DavidHB Wrote:  .... it is a matter of great disappointment to me that neither Lumin nor Naim have an Android version of their app., and that the promised iOS versions of the Bubble apps. never made it to market.

I am not sure this was ever promised by the Bubble* developer. I recall that you showed me a link to a third-party website that seemed to imply this, but I suspect this incorrect information originated with the third party.

I believe Bubble* is written in Java, which would mean there is no practical option for making it run on iOS. This also applies to MinimServer and MinimWatch.

Ah. Thank you for this information. I have to keep my prejudice against Apple products within bounds (at least I'm writing this using a lovely Apple monitor, so perhaps there's hope for me yet), but it seems both unfortunate and typical that iOS cannot host such a widely used cross-platform development language as Java.

David

[DavidHB]

(30-04-2014 22:38)simoncn Wrote:  

(30-04-2014 13:45)DavidHB Wrote:  For instance, if you want to browse your library by composer as I do, each composer's name has to be spelt consistently throughout the library - you have to decide whether you are going to use, say, Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergey Rachmaninov, Serge Rachmaninoff or Sergey Rakhmaninov (all of which are in use), and then stick to your choice. Thankfully, MP3Tag provides an easy means of applying a tag value to a whole selection (possibly hundreds) of tracks at once.

Another option that might be worth considering is to leave the original spellings in your files and use the tag update facility of MinimServer to rename them all to a single consistent spelling.

I think that the example given in the Tag Update section of the User Guide, of using this feature to test out possible system-wide metadata changes without committing to them, makes sense. But I prefer to make the change itself by, so to speak, baking it into the dataset.

MP3Tag makes such changes easy for me, certainly easier and quicker than writing multiple tag update statements. This is partly because of the way my music folder is structured, so I can make good use of MP3Tag's ability to select the contents of a folder recursively, and amend dozens or perhaps hundreds of tracks in a single action. I can see that using tag update might be the easier option if the hard edit had to be separately made in many folders.

David

[classical11]

(30-04-2014 22:58)DavidHB Wrote:  

(30-04-2014 16:36)gnomus Wrote:  However, the only thing I really miss is the album notes, cast list and libretto, although with my worsening eyesight reading the liner notes on a CD is getting pretty tough.

It seems to me that this "liner note" issue cannot be too difficult to get around - it is surely a Control Point issue. All I need is a way of tapping within the CP to bring up a PDF (or similar) of "liner notes" that I have associated with the "Composition" to which I am listening. I could, of course, do this outside of the CP, but having that little "button" would be awfully helpful.

Its a lovely pipe dream. Sadly, I don't share your optimism. Getting CD booklets into PDF format at home is not a practical proposition (rendering small multi-page booklets as PDF on an A4 scanner is certainly not my idea of fun). Current tagging formats are not designed to support document formats, so any add-on to a control point has to work outside the normal tagging structure. This is probably not the kind of thing manufacturer-produced control points will readily support.

I accept that none of the technical problems are insuperable. The logistics are another matter. When the online libraries of basic metadata are so inadequate (see Simon's views on this and related issues in his previous post above), the likelihood that music companies will provide us with their back catalogue of classical CD booklets in PDF format seems very remote. And I don't see how accessing the booklet can become a normal part of the streamed music experience without such a library. But I'd love to be proved wrong.

David

Hi David, gnomus,

This has been the major issue (possibly the last) that's keeping me from fully embracing the streaming concept. Not being able to access album booklets via the control point means that I am reluctant to buy albums in digital format. Instead I continue to buy CDs so that I have access to the booklets. And at times when I have the CD that I want to listen to in front of me anyway, the benefits of a streaming system are less clear.

The situation of PDF booklets has improved somewhat - Chandos for example makes these available for free (you can download them even if you have not bought the digital album). Naxos makes theirs available but only if you have access to Naxos Music Library (which BTW is a great source of classical music and local libraries sometimes give away free accounts). The other classical music labels seem less keen to share the booklets for their back catalogues but going forward I think the situation should improve. I found that whenever I purchase a digital album it almost always comes with a PDF booklet (however I have not purchased that many digital albums so far).

I have entered a feature request a while ago about this issue and both Simon and the Bubble developer seemed very open to implementing this at some point in the future:
https://forum.minimserver.com/showthread.php?tid=567

I know this is a major feature request and it is difficult to implement properly but if it could be done it would make the streaming solution incredibly powerful - especially if the implementation was flexible enough to allow multiple PDF documents to be sent to the control point, such as CD booklet, libretto, sheet music, etc.

[DavidHB]

@classical11

Thank you very much for the information in your post. I had not realised that things have advanced as far as they have on the 'PDF booklets' front. Perhaps I do not need to be quite so pessimistic about the issue; certainly, with your pointers I need to make time to do some web searching. So far, I have been too busy ripping my existing CD collection to get into digital downloads.

As you clearly are at least experimenting with streaming music, I should be interested to know what, for you, constitutes "fully embracing the streaming concept". Is it about committing the cost of a high end player that can provide the remarkable sound quality that can be had from a digital stream? Or are you concerned about the effort required for a major ripping and tagging exercise? Both of these issues were concerns for me, but I now know that neither problem was insuperable. I am with gnomus in believing that the advance that streaming music provides over previous media delivery systems is such that the technology is already well worth adopting.

David

[classical11]

(01-05-2014 09:59)DavidHB Wrote:  @classical11

...

As you clearly are at least experimenting with streaming music, I should be interested to know what, for you, constitutes "fully embracing the streaming concept". Is it about committing the cost of a high end player that can provide the remarkable sound quality that can be had from a digital stream? Or are you concerned about the effort required for a major ripping and tagging exercise? Both of these issues were concerns for me, but I now know that neither problem was insuperable. I am with gnomus in believing that the advance that streaming music provides over previous media delivery systems is such that the technology is already well worth adopting.

David

Hi David,

By "fully embracing streaming" I mean mainly putting away my CD collection (storing it for backup purposes) and buying digital downloads instead of CDs. And (probably the hardest part) demoing the new system to my wife and convincing her to use it.. :-)

In terms of the streaming equipment I use - it's very basic but it works well for me: I use raspberry Pis with external USB DACs recommended in this forum:
https://forum.minimserver.com/showthread...757&page=5

I run Pete's MediaPlayer renderer on the Pis in conjunction with mpd. The renderer software supports OpenHome extensions and I also get gapless playback working flawlessly. I am more than satisfied with the quality - if I were to upgrade anything it would probably be the speakers.

The tagging effort is certainly an issue. I have a system that works reasonably well but it is a fairly time consuming task. I do think it's worth the investment though because I will (most likely) always be listening to my classical collection (as opposed to some other stuff that I will eventually get bored with).

I definitely agree that streaming has many advantages and is definitely worth adopting. This is thanks mainly to developers like Simon who appreciate the importance of standards. I was never very interested in it in the past when only proprietary systems were available (such as Sonos).

[Alpina_Lux]

(30-04-2014 22:58)DavidHB Wrote:  A salutary reminder. We agreed a couple of days ago that adding a streamer to one's music system can be a game changer. Things have come a long way in the seven years since Linn brought out their first network player.

I am only beginning to realise this, and I fully agree. I only just got my first streamer (Pioneer N-30 S) a few days ago, and already find it incredibly useful. Mind you, I'm only using it with an iPod / iPhone or USB stick right now as the network still needs to be installed in my house, but this is already giving me an excellent idea what to expect. To be able to browse - even on the very limited iPod screen - a few hundreds of CDs and being able to play them immediately without rummaging through my CD collection is very good. Then, putting a few live recitals recorded from radio (e.g. Nelson Freire's recital from La Roque d'Anthéron last year or Martha Argerich playing with Evgeny Kissin in Paris in 2012) on a USB stick and - snap! - playing them without needing to laboriously transfer them to a CD (and swearing when the recital was too long to fit on one CD...), proves already very useful.

I can't wait to implement the next steps, hooking the streamer up with the NAS and starting to get familiar with MinimServer and a control point (whichever that may be; I'm also thinking about Lumin due to the lack of an Android device right now).

On a sidenote, my wife was totally enthusiastic about the streamer and its possibilities. Even if that means being exposed to country music, let no one say women aren't technically interested!

[Alpina_Lux]

(30-04-2014 23:55)classical11 Wrote:  The situation of PDF booklets has improved somewhat - Chandos for example makes these available for free (you can download them even if you have not bought the digital album).

Hyperion as well. They also have most of their CDs available as a download, and you can choose between MP3, FLAC and Apple Lossless. For many new recordings (and some older ones) they even make high resolution studio masters available (24bit, 96 kHz).

I agree it would be extremely useful to have the booklets available as well, at least with music that one is not very well acquainted. And even if, sometimes the notes are very well written or contain thoughts of the musicians on their recordings which I always find very interesting to read. To have that available at least for the booklets that are available as PDFs would be quite a boon!

[magister]

In addition to Hyperion and Chandos, eClassical (which sells recordings by Bis, Harmonia Mundi, and a few smaller labels) also provides booklets in PDF form with almost every album, and in fact you can download the booklets without buying if you want to check things out first. Also, many orchestras now sell their own recordings and include booklets--e.g., the Boston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony (wonderful Mahler and Beethoven cycles).

I agree completely about the utility of having access to the PDF books. I realize there is no UPnP/DLNA standard for such things, but if MinimServer could simply allow the user to open a PDF with the default PDF reader installed on one's device/computer, if there is a PDF in the album folder, that should work without breaking anything for the future. One could verify the presence of a PDF in Folder view and double-tap it there.