Tagging classical music

[rb73]

(20-02-2012 00:35)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks very much for sharing this! It's interesting to talk about the solutions that different people have found for this.

One thing I've learned in the past few years that you need quite a bit of flexibility to arrive at a good solution. Flexibility in the tags you use, and how you use them, flexibility in deserting one tagging scheme in favour of a new one, but most importantly flexibility in how a control point can use the information in the tags. I must confess that I'm completely hooked on MinimServer. It's so much better than the traditional approaches

Simon Wrote:

JW Wrote:First of all, I dropped the concept of CD/album.

I understand why you would do this with Twonky. I prefer not to lose the album information (though I can imagine that over time I won't use it so much), so I added the Group concept to MinimServer as a way of capturing this information without losing the Album information.

I ran through the majority of my classical music today while a bunch of solar panels were installed, and I found some CDs where I might want to use different values for Album and Composition. Mostly these are compilation-like CDs. I only have a handful of those, but as I'm making the switch to using Composition instead Album to find a work for the reasons you outlined below, I may have a play with using Composition tags that differ from the Album tags.

Simon Wrote:

JW Wrote:As I was using Twonky until recently, I added the composer and the artist to the Album tag: otherwise all different recordings of "KV543 Symphony no.39" would end up together. I.e. if I happen to have to recordings, under "KV543 ..." Twonky would show two first movements, two second movements, ...
I assume that MinimServer handles this case properly, but haven't had the time to check it. If so I can get back to proper tags for the work (Album).

This should work OK in MinimServer for both Albums and Groups. I solved this problem by limiting an Album or a Group to a single directory, so if two Albums or Groups have the same names but are in different directories, they won't be merged together.

With MP3tag and some clever regular expressions I removed all the composer and performer junk from the Title and the Album. Works perfectly.
I have each work in a separate directory already. Each CD has its own subdirectory, and within that directory I have one directory for each work. That way even if I screw up the tags I can usually find which CD it was, and using the track name determine what the proper tags should be. It's a last resort kind of thing, but it's proven useful a few times in the last few years.

Simon Wrote:This could be a problem for multi-disc Albums or Groups, and I'm working on a solution for that.

Haven't thought about that, as I treat multi-CDs as a rather large CD myself

Simon Wrote:I think you would find the Composition tag useful, because you can do a tag search by Composition but you can't do a tag search by Album. So you could do something like Composer->Beethoven->Composition->Symphony No. 5->Conductor->Karajan->Orchestra->Philharmonia. You can't do that with Album because after doing Composer->Beethoven->Album you'll just get a flat list of all albums (works) by Beethoven.

Thanks for pointing that out. It hadn't really sunk in that I couldn't refine the Albums list. I now have the Composition tag populated, and it's made the browsing experience even better.

Simon Wrote:If you have Composer and Artist in the Album tag, an alphabetical sort for classical albums is effectively a sort by Composer first and Artist second. That's still different from your sort order for non-classical albums, though.

Ah, but the Title of a track is (or rather, was) formatted as "Work - Movement - Composer - Performer" for composers that don't have a proper catalog of their work, and "Work - Movement - Performer" for those that do. As it's for disambiguation only, it's safe to infer that any Work that starts with a KVxxx or BWVxxxx is by W.A. Mozart and J.S. Bach respectively.
Album tags are formatted as "Work - Composer - Performer", or "Work - Performer". So, if I see a list of Albums using the non-classical sort order I'd have to drop the Date tag to get them in the order I want (alphabetically by Work).
Anyway, that's a thing from the past now

Simon Wrote:I've tried to think of some way for MinimServer to support multiple album sort orders, but none of these works if there's any possibility of having a list of albums that includes a mixture of albums with different sort orders. Running two servers with disjoint content directories is an effective way of eliminating that possibility.

Yup. I assume that running two servers isn't much of a problem for those of us who install manually. It might be a bit more of a challenge if you want to wrap it all up in a QPKG, but I wouldn't know about that.

Still, I guess most people would be happy to run a single MinimServer.

Simon Wrote:I suppose if someone has a lot of historic classical recordings, it might be important for them to be able to sort by recording date.

I ran into one such situation today: I have several recordings of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto, including 2 by Kovacevich. To keep them apart I gave one a Composition tag with the year in it, and the other a plain Composition tag without the year added to it.
Reading your comment about subdirectories makes me wonder how MinimServer would have handled things if I hadn't distinguished both recordings by adding the year to one Composition
Didn't have the time to change the tags and restart the server to check it out

JW