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Budgie · 25-08-2012, 10:51

(08-02-2012 18:24)simoncn Wrote: MinimServer is designed to give you the ability to browse your collection by any combination of tags in any order. This means that your collection needs to be tagged with all the information you might want to look at while you're browsing. Classical music generally has a lot of information associated with it, and it's important to have a consistent scheme for recording all this information in your tags.

There's no right or wrong way to tag your music. I'm still experimenting with different approaches for my small but growing classical collection. I have a combination of downloads and CD rips, and for both of these I generally find the original tagging needs a bit (or a lot) of improvement. It's amazing how much variation there is in the standard of tagging between different record companies!

It would be great if people could share the schemes that they're using to tag classical music, so that we can learn from each other's experience. This thread is a place to do this and chat about different approaches. To start things off, here's the scheme that I'm currently using to tag my tracks.

1. Set the Album tag to the full official name of the album.
2. Use a separate Artist tag for each artist who's performing on the track. The order of these tags is significant, as it affects the order in which multiple artists appear on the control point display. I generally use the order in which the artists appear in the record company's descriptive material. I don't include the conductor (if there is one), but use a separate Conductor tag for that.
3. Use a Conductor tag for the conductor (if there is one).
4. Use a Composer tag (or multiple tags) for the composer. Don't include the composer name in the list of artists or in the track title.
5. Set the Date tag to the year of the recording / issue.
6. Set the TrackNumber tag to the track number (not including "/ totaltracks").
7. Use one or more Genre tags as appropriate. Each Genre is a separate tag.
8. Use the Group tag to group together any musical works with multiple movements that appear as consecutive tracks on the album. For example, I would tag each of the four movements of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 as Group=Symphony No. 5 and Composer=Beethoven. For some large musical works, I've used multiple groups rather than a single group.
9. Use the Composition tag for all multi-movement musical works, whether or not they're grouped. (They won't be grouped if they're not consecutive tracks.) Don't include the composer in the composition name.
10. Don't include the composer, conductor, artists or track number in the Title tag.

This is an evolving work in progress. I know it's not fully consistent at the moment. For example, I haven't currently got Composition tags on musical works that only consist of a single movement/track.

If you've read this far, you're probably interested in classical music and have a scheme of your own. Please share it so that we can all learn from each other's experience!

Hi Simon,
Have read this thread and the others and will have to do so again as I am still trying to understand how Minimserver works and difference between it and Twonky.

Meanwhile there are some beginners issues on which I seek guidance, the first being the structure of the music file collection. I have put my files in sub directories by genre and then by composer. This is OK until I start using multiple genres and then I have to remember where I put a particular file if I wish to edit tags etc. On reflection I might now consider by Composer but would appreciate your views and that of others with good sized classical collections.

I cannot get multiple genre tags to work. I have tagged a file for example Liturgical\\Choral and that is exactly how the genre it appears in Bubble ds. I had expected to have two genres with file appearing in Liturgical and Choral. I will check delimiters but how should the multiple genre tagging behave?

In reading the threads on albumartist tag I wondered if this might be used to discriminate between the Conductor/Director who spans the whole work and say the soloists performing in individual tracks. Need to study more on this as I have never yet been able to tag Conductor.

The functional requirement is to be able to select a work by the Conductor/Director, for example Messiah (Jacobs) because there are many Messiahs (recordings I mean!) and by year eg. B minor Mass (Herreweghe) (2011) where conductor has produced work several times. When playing one needs to know this information but also the track, eg. "ARIA: Mache dich, mein Herze, rein." (Mathew Brook, bass-baritone). I am sure you know all this but I have not achieved consistent tagging yet so my searching is not fluent. I do think we need some agreed standard for all this and hope you might lead the way.

I use Linux OS (openSUSE 12.1/KDE) so have been using Easytag as tagging editor to date but it does not have flexibility of mp3tag. I believe Puddletag is linux equivalent of mp3tag so will try that. If you have any Linux user advice it would be appreciated.

Budgie