Tagging classical music

[DavidHB]

(14-04-2014 15:20)gnomus Wrote:  OK, I think I am beginning to see a way forward - although I am probably going to have to re-tag all of my non-classical, because they are all over the place "genre"-wise.

Probably, the key thing is to ensure that all your classical tracks are tagged as 'Classical'. The only problem with all the other albums being "all over the place" is that you may then have a longer list of Genres to select from in the control point than you might find convenient.

Actually, MP3Tag makes it very straightforward to apply a single tag value to dozens or even hundreds of selected files at one go. If you are using MP3Tag and would like help, please ask again about this.

Quote:I still have one question though. For my classical music, what should I put in the AlbumArtist tag? I believe that if I leave it blank, then dbPoweramp will put the Album into a "Various Artists" subdirectory. By putting the composer name in AlbumArtist, I was forcing dbPoweramp to stick all of my Beethoven in a Beethoven directory, thus making it easy to find when I had to look for it to fix some tagging error.

I can only say what I do (and there are, as ever, alternatives). I set the dBpoweramp Path to the Composer folder (which in your example would be "Music\Classical\Beethoven" in my case). Naming is then set to "[album]\[track] [title]". I do not use either Artist or AlbumArtist in the path or the naming scheme, but all my classical albums are 'filed' by composer name, except for Recitals and Compilations, for which there are separate folders.

Of course, each track is tagged with the appropriate composer name (in both Composer and ComposerSort tags); there are cases, as for example with 'filler' tracks, where the odd piece is tagged with the correct composer name, but is not contained in that composer's folder. This is somewhat analogous to way the physical filing of CDs on shelves may work; a CD in which the main work is a Beethoven symphony will be filed under Beethoven, and that is where the Mozart overture on the same CD will of necessity also be. As noted by Dieter Stockert a few posts back, it is possible to split tracks from a single CD into two or more albums to overcome problems of this kind, but I do not find that this is worth the effort for the odd filler track. In any case, a tag-based index solves the problem completely, and will list the Mozart overture correctly under Mozart.

David