not all albums are shown - album art in confusion, multiple values as a reason?

[DavidHB]

@Thomas

Thanks for the many interesting points in your reply. I suppose the main point is that we all have our own approach to the tagging process; there is no one 'right' way of doing things.

My own approach developed in two ways. I started from the order in which I store my physical CD and LP collections, which developed over a number of years. I also learned about the limitations of the most widely used tagging schemes in the course of early (and mostly unsatisfactory) experiments in ripping CDs to MP3. About four years ago, I decided to standardise on FLAC and also, somewhat by accident, discovered MinimServer, which, for the first time, allowed me to use the organisation of my physical media collections as the starting point for organising the digital collection.

The key point is that, for me, tagging is simply a means to browse and search the collection; I am not using tags to create an encyclopedia of music. While I have considered adding multiple genres and/or sub-genres to my files, the fact is that (other than during the main classical period - say 1750 to 1830) every composer is different, and I have thought it unlikely that I would ever want to browse by detailed genre classifications. Indeed, just 'classical' and 'non-classical' would probably work for me.

Similar considerations apply to the 'work number', by which I suppose you mean opus number. For me, the opus or catalogue numbers are part of the work name and so belong in the COMPOSITION tag. They too tend to have different significance for different composers. With some exceptions (the Haydn string quartets for example) I tend not to use them for browsing.

I note your interest in GROUP. This makes something of a pair with COMPOSITION, and often, but by no means invariably, I give the two tags the same value. GROUP is for selecting works (particularly multi-track works) within an album. COMPOSITION is for selecting a work without selecting an album first; indeed ALBUM may be selected after COMPOSITION to choose between different recordings of the same work. These options are all part of the richness of the MinimServer 'intelligent browsing'.

As regards the C.P.E. Bach symphonies, which ought to be better known than they are, I think you would enjoy the lively Rebecca Miller interpretations, on Signum Records. I have them as a 96kHz/24bit download, which is available on the Hyperion website.

David