MusiCHI tagger - experiences

[Alpina_Lux]

(06-06-2014 21:37)simoncn Wrote:  Thanks for posting this review of MusiCHI. It is very helpful for understanding the capabilities and benefits of this software.

I agree that MusiCHI offers something that other tagging programs don't. For some people, this will be valuable, and for others, it won't.

My concern would be that MusiCHI pushes me towards tagging things in the same way as its built-in database. This isn't a problem if this database happens to match my own preferences for how things should be tagged. Is it possible to customize the database if my preferences are different?

You cannot customize their own database (= of how the composers are spelled and the compositions) as it resides on their servers. What you could do of course (but that is also something that any other tagger could do) is to first use their "clean" function to automatically replace any composer / composition tags with their own spelling, and then mass-replace these again with your own. I agree it would be cool to be able to customise this step yourself, or that the software is able to learn how you would like to have things spelled. To my (admittedly limited!) knowledge of the program this is not possible.

It should also be mentioned that one should differentiate between the tagger and the library which are two different programs. I believe (without having dug deeper whether that is correct) that you can use the information that you put into the library program (where you can of course use any spelling of your own device) also with the tagger. I would need to verify that, though.

What I haven't quite figured out in this context is how to tag the composer for transcriptions, e.g. the numerous Bach/Busoni piano pieces. I assume that I simply need to put two composers into the "composer" tag and separate them with a ";". Need to investigate that - as I said it's sometimes a bit frustrating for someone with very little time as myself to be obliged to do a rather time-consuming "learning by doing" process. But the program as such is quite useful from what I can see, at least when you're in a situation as I am that you're just starting the rip-and-tag procedure for an entire CD collection.