Tagging classical music

[magister]

@Alpina_Lux,

Simon's suggestion about starting off small and experimenting is a very good one. Here are some other thoughts.

My personal belief is that it's much better to put all your tagging into the actual music files, as opposed to having the information in a database created by a particular music management program. It might be difficult or impossible to get the information out of such a proprietary format if you ever wanted to move to a different program.

So you need to store your music in a format such as FLAC that stores the tags inside each file. Music management programs like MusiCHI may have an option to do this. In other words, even if you do the tagging inside MusiCHI, the information is written into each music file. Even so, I recall that MusiCHI keeps its own database and allows you to define some "custom" tags and I'm not sure how portable those would be. I think you should come up with a system that works for you and make sure all your information travels with each file. Some time ago Simon put up here the details of how he tags music, and some other people added more info. Look at the very first post in this thread, on the first page -- it's a great starting point. My system is similar to what Simon describes, although I added a couple of additional custom tags. As you use MinimServer, you will learn how you like to search. For instance, I have a lot of recordings of music by Beethoven. I added a "subgenre" tag that lets me pick Beethoven and then go immediately to the symphonies, bypassing chamber music, concertos, etc. if I want to hear one of the symphonies. Even with your own system, you can still use MusiCHI for tasks like making sure that your tags are consistent.

For tagging on Windows, you can use the very nice mp3tag program (despite its name, it writes many kinds of tags including FLAC). It's donationware so you can try it and see if you like it. If you are fairly computer-savvy, foobar2000, a player for Windows, also does tagging. It's free but the setup is tougher for non-geeks. Creating custom FLAC tags is easy with mp3tag, which is what I use.

For classical music, you will probably need both Group and Composition tags. See the info above in this thread and read the relevant sections of the MinimServer manual. To distinguish multiple performances by the same artist, one way is to adjust the titles of the albums. For instance, I have one album by Glenn Gould called "Goldberg Variations [1955]" and another "Goldberg Variations [1980]".