Tagging classical music

[DavidHB]

I strongly support the points made by Simon in his last post.

If anyone knows why early tagging schemes and digital music applications failed to provide a proper means of browsing classical music by composer (which, I believe, is the way most people do it), I should be grateful to know the history. What is clear is that, for all the reasons given by Simon, the kludge of trying to use a Pop-style browsing sequence for classical music by putting composer data in the Artist or AlbumArtist tags doesn't really work. While, as previously discussed in this thread, there is room for different ways of doing things, it is difficult to find a good reason for putting composer data anywhere other than in the Composer tag.

I'd also strongly support the use of the Genre tag advocated by Simon. If you are going to use it in this way, it is probably best to use only a small number of high level genre values (Classical, Pop, Jazz, Folk etc.), and not to sub-divide the Classical genre. MinimServer will work with multiple Genre values, but I find that that complicates browsing and isn't really helpful for me.

David