Two tagging questions for classical music

[magister]

Thank you Simon -- sorry for the slow reply.

(18-02-2013 21:31)simoncn Wrote:  I'd be very interested in references that say this "main artist" should not be tagged as Artist in addition to being tagged as AlbumArtist.

Some people say to not bother with Albumartist, some say to complete it (in various ways). Much depends on the player in use, since some ignore Albumartist. I did find one piece of info on the Mp3tag site that indicated that some Android players don't work well with Albumartist; one person said "The safest thing which works with all players is dropping the ALBUMARTIST field completely." So we're all over the map.

The bottom line is that as I've experimented and gotten more experienced with MinimServer I ended up doing what you suggest . . . so all is well. Hopefully I will never want to use a player like those I've read about that don't handle common tags well.

Quote:The Group tag is handled specially by MinimServer: it creates an intermediate level between an album and the individual tracks from that album. For example, when viewing the contents of an album, you'll see each group within the album as a single item instead of seeing all the tracks as separate individual items.

But this is exactly what happens with my Composition tag. I can search Composers --> Beethoven --> Symphony No 5, and I see a nice "Play all" item that enables me to load the whole symphony at once, if I want, as well as the individual movements listed below.

Quote:There's nothing special about the Composition tag. . . . The benefit of using this tag is to provide an index entry that enables you to find all your recordings of a particular composition (for example, Bach's Mass in B Minor).

So I'm still uncertain about this. I read in another thread that Group can handle situations where the tracks making up a work are not contiguous -- is that the only difference? For the next release of MinimServer, I'd suggest expanding the section in the user user that deals with this.

Maybe the best thing for me to do is use Group exclusively but display it as Composition, since I prefer the latter term for classical works ("group:Composition" in the properties file).

David