Tagging classical music

[simoncn]

(22-02-2012 15:51)rb73 Wrote:  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

Glad to hear that! I've responded to a few of your comments below.

JW Wrote: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

My earlier comment was based on the incorrect assumption that you had placed Composer and Artist at the start of the Album tag.

JW Wrote: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.

The QPKG installation will assume a single server. However, it would be possible for me to provide an option for a single MinimServer installation to start two independent server instances with different property settings. If there's significant demand for running multiple server instances, I'll pursue this further.

JW Wrote: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

In my view of the world, these would be the same Composition because the Composition is the musical work rather than a specific recording of that work. So if you selected Composer->Beethoven->Composition->Piano Concerto no. 5->Artist->Kovacevich you would end up with a selection showing 2 albums and the Date tag. You could then choose between these albums by selecting Date->year1 or Date->year2.

However, if you were looking at a flat album list of everything recorded by Kovacevich, you would need some way to distinguish these two recordings in that list. You could do this by putting the recording years in the album names. This would be a situation where it makes sense for the Album tag and Composition tag to have different values.

Simon