How to organize and tag classical music

[DavidHB]

I find that, with classical music, the ways in which I most commonly wish to browse my library are

• a particular performance of a work (browse sequence Genre>Composer>Composition>Album);
• a particular album (Genre>Composer (or Artist)>Album>[Complete Album - if needed]).

Otherwise, I tend to use UPnP search to find what I need.

I can sympathise with the desire to keep tag length manageable. Early on in the ripping and organisation of my library, I decided

1. to omit composer names from track and (usually) album titles and to display composer names using tagFormat ("Title.displayFormat={$composer$title^^^: }");
2. to use album titles that were sensible within each composer grouping, and often with the principal performer's name in brackets, for example "Symphonies 1 to 9 [Davis]"; this is often completely different to the title on the Album cover; I also use the album title as the folder name (within a composer folder), so that the path for my example album is "E:\Music\Classical\Beethoven\Symphonies 1 to 9 [Davis]";
3. to create a "Composition" field/tag, so that, within a composer selection, I can browse for all the recordings of a particular work - an example would be "Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21";
4. to use Groups within albums, typically to identify individual works or sections of a work (for example, acts of an opera); often, but by no means invariably, the contents of "Group" would be the same as "Composition", but separate tags are needed because they are used at different points in the browsing sequence.

Of course for all this to work, I do need to be careful that the tagging is consistent throughout the library, so that, for instance, "Symphony No. 1 in C, Op. 21" is so tagged in all my recordings of the work, that composer names are consistently spelt throughout, and so on.

If you were to make changes along these lines (which follow fairly closely the suggestions in the MinimServer User Guide), it would require a fair amount of work, but I think you would find that the results were worthwhile.

David