Tagging classical music

[DavidHB]

(12-04-2014 21:20)Dieter Stockert Wrote:  One word to the album tag: Downloading music instead of buying compact discs makes album more and more meaningless. And this is even the case with most classical compact discs, as long as the respective cd is not some kind of concert or musical 'program me' where the artist will show us different works in a special kind of comparison. What is important for most of classical cds is not album but work.

+1 here.

That said, splitting or merging albums (as compared with ripping CDs or sets 'as is') involves, in my experience, a bit more work, and more often than not it is quite convenient to leave the album structure unchanged. There is also the fact that CDs one may have owned for decades can have an identity of their own, and those of us who grew up with LPs and then CDs on shelves may sometimes want to go back to something like the old way of doing things.

That will not be relevant to those who follow us, to whom, I agree, the concept of an 'album' may well become less important, especially with classical music. Even now, the familiar CD player-style transport controls used by the renderer no longer relate to the album as such, but to the playlist, and that change brings with it a significant change of mindset.

I often change album titles to reflect the contents (the works) more closely. And I always make sure that the folder name is the same as the tagged album title, so that if I find an error in my tagging, I can easily trace the offending file(s), because there is no mismatch between what I see in the control point and what is in the file system.

If I do split an album, I save the separate sections in separate album folders, so that the tagged album title and the relevant folder name still match.

The point for this thread is that, particularly with classical music, there will for most people be a need to think how the 'album' is to be divided and described in each instance. This is another of those cases where there is no one right answer; there will be an interaction with other tags (in particular track title, work/composition and composer). Users do also need to pay attention to the way in which Minimserver identifies particular albums from tag data, as described in the User Guide.

David