How to organize and tag classical music

[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 But in the days of playing music from a hard disc the concept of an album is obsolete, at least with the majority of classical music.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