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[richard-ec2]

Probably a silly question but you never know, there may be a workaround I haven't thought of.

This question arises from all these box sets like "The Decca Sound", containing 50 CDs by various composers and conductors. I would like to have these tagged two ways, while only having one rip of each CD on my hard drive.

First, I would like to have a straight rip of the box set that would just be all the CDs ripped as-is in a folder called The Decca Sound. Usually, the artist would be the conductor.

Second, and this is the tricky bit... well, let me give an example. CD1 in this box set contains Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat and Debussy's Images Pour Orchestre. If I have several works by Debussy on other CDs and they are all listed under the name "Debussy" with Debussy as the artist, is there any way I can also have a link to CD1 popping up when I view this composer's albums, without having to rip another copy of CD1 and re-tagging it with Debussy as the artist?

[AndrewFG]

Rip all the CDs so that all the tracks have a single Album name "The Decca Sound" and a single AlbumArtist (probably the conductor or the orchestra name). Tag each track with the respective Disk N of M numbers. That will ensure that all CDs appear as one Album.

Then tag each track individually with a) the respective Artist name(s), and Composer name; Artsists may have multi entries in a list delimited by semi colons. That will allow you to search on Composer or Artist in MC.

Note that AlbumArtist is used to group the CDs into one Album, whereas Artist or Composer is used for searching and filtering.

Finally, since the Album name "Decca Sound" is not transparent, you probably need to set each track's title to include both the piece name, and the movement name as Title "Three Cornered Hat - 1. Allegro" etc.

[richard-ec2]

Thank you very much, that's very interesting. To be a bit clearer about where I'm trying to get to, here are a couple of snips.

In this first one, I've got the contents of the first RCA Living Stereo box set, disc by disc:



The details pane shows that I'm looking at Hi-Fi Spectacular. As you can see, it contains three different works by three different composers. One of them is La Mer by Debussy.

Now let's leave my RCA Living Stereo collection and instead go to my classical music collection, where works are listed by composer. Here's my page for Debussy:



As you can see, I have an icon there for the same CD that's in the RCA Living Stereo Collection. That's what I want. But the only way I've been able to achieve that is by ripping the same CD a second time, discarding the non-relevant tracks, and re-tagging the relevant tracks so that they appears in the Debussy folder. That's a lot of extra work and it takes up a lot of extra hard drive space.

So what I'm asking is, can I have two different icons for the same CD in two different places, while only having one copy of the CD on my hard drive?

Probably not, but I was just wondering what other people did.

[DJLegba]

You can certainly achieve this with a single rip. Many tags accept more than one value, so you can set the genre to "Classical; RCA Living Stereo" if you'd like. I've created a composer view that shows all the discs featuring work by the composer, but only the relevant tracks.

[richard-ec2]

Thank you, that's a big step forward.

The problem for me is that, as AndrewFG points out, album artist is the key tag that determines whether tracks are grouped together into one album. In my RCA Living Stereo  collection, as you can see, my album artist for this particular album is Charles Munch. Now, if I add another Genre tag  - "Classical music"  - to get this album into my classical music collection, sure that will work, but it will appear under the artist Charles Munch, not under the artist Debussy. How do I get around that?

I have a bad feeling that the answer is going to lie somewhere in using the Composer tag which is something I've strongly resisted until now. In that second snip I showed you, the album artist is Debussy and I never use the composer tag. In my classical music collection, the album artist is always the composer.

[DJLegba]

Composer in the Artist field won't work at all for vocal collections. Cecilia Bartoli is the artist, but she may sing things from several different composers on a single CD.

I've been using the Composer field, but it's a constant battle. I use "Brahms, Johannes" instead of "Johannes Brahms", but 100% of downloads with composer info user firstname lastname. So I have to edit everything I download or rip. It can be a big chore. But, regardless of the format you use for composer, you will definitely be able to achieve your goal using the composer tag.

[~OHM~]

what about the "Grouping Tag" maybe this wouldn't work but it's worth a shot. may take some thinking. I'm too foggy today to give it any thought.

[richard-ec2]

My system at present is: for all CDs that are collections, the album artist is the performing artist - the soloist, the orchestra or the conductor, whoever is the most prominent. But for complete, full length, individual works by individual composers, the album artist is the composer. It works very well for me. As I've said, the only problem is what to do about collections which also contain complete individual works by individual composers, because I really want to list those twice - once as a collection and once as an individual composer's work - without having to duplicate the CD.

I'll have to think a bit more about this, particularly about whether using the composer tag will work for me. I suppose another option is just to write a catalogue of all the works I have in the box sets and have it in some easy reference format on the PC, but that seems like giving up too easily!

Edit: just seen the "grouping" post. Thank you - will look into this.

[kr4]

Thank you very much, that's very interesting. To be a bit clearer about where I'm trying to get to, here are a couple of snips.

FWIW, Munch never recorded for Mercury.

[ferday]

i'm not a classical guy, so it is as helpful as it is

but i collect boxsets, so what i do is fill the [series] tag with the boxset name (RCA Living Stereo) and tag the album name as, well, the album name

in the artists view i use an expression to view (simplified here)

if(isempty([series],[album],[album]-[series])

so in my boxsets view, i would have (again sorry, not classical) as per screenshot

In my artist view, i'll have as per second screencap

so it's getting close to what you are looking for (i actually use a bunch more tags to parse things out further).  i hope it makes sense, but the point is that if you are willing to change your ideas on what tags are and how to use them (and putting in the work), you can really do a lot more with your views (and not have multiple rips of your albums!)

[BillT]

My system at present is: for all CDs that are collections, the album artist is the performing artist - the soloist, the orchestra or the conductor, whoever is the most prominent. But for complete, full length, individual works by individual composers, the album artist is the composer. It works very well for me. As I've said, the only problem is what to do about collections which also contain complete individual works by individual composers, because I really want to list those twice - once as a collection and once as an individual composer's work - without having to duplicate the CD.

I'll have to think a bit more about this, particularly about whether using the composer tag will work for me. I suppose another option is just to write a catalogue of all the works I have in the box sets and have it in some easy reference format on the PC, but that seems like giving up too easily!

Assuming that you don't want tags to be usable by other, simplistic programs, you might want to think about using the database capabilities of JRiver more fully. That's its greatest strength, after all!

The slight problem is that you will need to put a bit of effort into tagging things, but it won't be as much effort as creating and maintaining a separate database. Publicly available tags for classical music are inconsistent and pretty much unusable anyway, so you generally have to do a lot of editing of downloaded tags.

I use the Composer (Last Name, First Names) and Conductor tags, but have a few custom tags. There are 2 extra genre tags, which are the key to control the album display. I also have Work, Orchestra, Chorus, and Soloist tags, which allow further display control and keep information easily available.

The first tag is Classical or Pop for music. The second tag I use to categorise the CD into type such as Chamber, Orchestral, Vocal etc, but there is also a Collection category for CDs which aren't single composer CDs. The 3rd tag is less clearly defined and used for further differentiating groups of CDs. You then need to create view schemes to display your CDs as you wish.

This is a view of CDs in the Mercury boxed set.

If you want to find a work by a particular composer I  have a Composer/Work view scheme which lets you do that.

Of course there will be plenty of other ways to do it. You could put all the genres in the Genre tag and have some sort of selection rules based on that, for example.

[richard-ec2]

FWIW, Munch never recorded for Mercury.

Oops! Quite right - you've picked up an error in my tagging. I have two different versions of La Mer and when tagging, I must have assumed that one was from an RCA Living Stereo box set and the other was from a Mercury Living Presence box set. But in fact, BOTH are RCA Living Stereo - one by Reiner and one by Munch!

[richard-ec2]

Ferday and BillT, many thanks for those suggestions and especially for doing the screenshots which I found very helpful. You both make a similar point which is that if I change my ideas about how to use the tags, there is enormous potential in MC and I can probably get to where I want to go, provided I'm prepared to put the effort into tagging appropriately in the first place.

BillT, I think my needs are simpler than yours so I probably wouldn't need quite so many different ways of sorting but thanks to the screenshots I can see how something along these lines could work very well. I've always been a bit put off by the idea of doing custom tags that wouldn't work in other media players but I don't know why because I never do use any other players. Also, if I were to keep these at a minimum, they might not seem quite so scarily irreversible.

Possible downsides: if you go to my snips at the top of this thread, you can see how the track names include the composer's name in the "Collection" view but not in the "Individual composer" view and I presume that would have to go - one track can only have one track name. And I worry about the wording of the album titles in that strap across the top of the detailed track information  - I like the way mine are worded at the moment and it's quite hard to customise that strap as far as I know. But I think these small losses are easily outweighed by the gains. 

[MikeO]

A very thorny subject !!

I always wonder , with no offence meant, why people shy away from using the composer tag for what it is !

Here's what I do ....

I set up Custom tags

Box Set
Disc Name
Disc Volume (eg Beethoven Edition has 20 volumes)

The Box Set is defined as a semi colon delimited collection of strings , so any CD can be a member of one or many box sets

The Disc Name can show many things depending on the Box Set in question, but mainly the individual context of the disc.

If we take the 104 CD set of Brendel , this is really a collection of "Box Sets" with a few solo cd's thrown in. So each CD has effectively 2 Box Set tags eg Complete Phillip .. ; Beethoven Piano Sonatas Analogue.

Similarly if you look at the big Yo Yo Ma or Glenn Gould boxes they are simply collections of single albums. So by appropriate naming of the Album Name and Disc Name you can organise a view that shows the glory of the original album covers , quite neat really. See the pic.


I use the Orchestra, Conductor, Composer tags as defined

If you now set up a view where Box Set is Not Empty , you will see some discs appear in 2 box sets . So you can have one set of files and show them in multiple ways. When you goto the Disc Name level it shows the "contents" of the Box Set as individual pseudo discs.

Equally the same CD's in the box set were originally an Album Box Set and can be named accordingly.

One of my Composer View goes Composer> Artists> Album . So in this example Beethoven Piano Sonatas will show as an album as well. You can even attach the original art work to the tags so yor Complete set will show the artwork of the orginal box Sets

You can slice and dice it as you wish .

I think the two takes are

• Don't fight shy of Custom Tags that's what they are there for
  Use the tags as close to definition as possible (eg why put Composer in the Artist tag like a lot of folk do )

Standardisation is key , and you example of Composers hold true. Have a look at a demo of Musichi Tagger. It allows you to Clean the Composer , work and Genre etc against a set of standards (all for 20 Euro should you like it). I am not keen on the rest of the suite but the tagger is a gem and it will populate even Custom Tags from MC as long as they are they to fill...

good luck

Mike

[richard-ec2]

I'm struggling with this. Let's keep it really simple and say I'm just going to add the Composer tag to my CD rips.

First, let's look at that CD I showed in my first screen shot right at the top of this thread. It's called A Hi-Fi Spectacular and includes three complete works by three different composers. So, I presume the first four tracks will be tagged with Saint-Saens as the Composer, the next three will be tagged with Debussy as Composer and the final three will be Ibert. Is that the idea?

Now, let's turn to my second screen shot where I'm looking at my little collection of works by Debussy. I want A Hi-Fi Spectacular to show up there - or at least, the three tracks by Debussy.  But how do I use the Composer tag to achieve that? I can't see an obvious way.

[DJLegba]

Now, let's turn to my second screen shot where I'm looking at my little collection of works by Debussy. I want A Hi-Fi Spectacular to show up there - or at least, the three tracks by Debussy.  But how do I use the Composer tag to achieve that? I can't see an obvious way.

The Composers view does that by default.

[MikeO]

Hi

Dead simple you need to set up a new library view

On the tree left , right click and add a view

Customize that view (I think there is a wiki entry to guide you)

You'll get to a empty list box where you add veils i.e. Tags

This should finish up with Composer then Album


As you open up you will see images for each composer. You probably best to pick a Category view this will show thumbnails

Try that then shout again

Mike

[richard-ec2]

OK, I think I understand. At the moment the composer is entered in the Album Artist tag and my thumbnails are displayed by Album Artist and then Album. So if I'm going enter the Composer in the Composer tag, then I have to change the view rule so that thumbnails are displayed by Composer then Album. Of course, that means I will have to re-tag all my existing albums with Composer as well. OK, I will try an experiment with that and see what it looks like.

[BillT]

You need to make a view scheme using the composer tag.

Mine is called Composer - work. Create a new view scheme, then customise it. Remove existing categories and add the composer category. That should give a simple composer based view. You can then modify it if you want.

[richard-ec2]

OK, thanks BillT, the screenshots are very helpful. There's no substitute for experimentation so I'll have a go and see what happens.

[richard-ec2]

OK, here's a composer view scheme and it works but if I had to be picky, there's something I don't like about it.

I've set up an experimental Debussy view scheme using Composer tags on two recordings of his work - one is from CD1 from The Decca Sound box set, where the primary work is Falla's The Three Cornered Hat, and the other is the same composition but from an RCA Living Stereo CD where I've re-ripped the Debussy tracks and tagged them as if they formed a completely separate Debussy CD.



The problem I find with the icon on the left is that it doesn't tell you which Debussy composition it is, so you can't find a given composition simply by scrolling through your icons. Also, the title underneath the icon looks very strange in a Debussy collection, especially next to the other one when both are describing the same composition.

In the details pane, it's a pity that the track numbers start at 10 but that's a very minor gripe.

In terms of playback, however, it works very well and it's an excellent way to avoid duplicating music files on your hard drive. So it's certainly a solution - it's only the cosmetics I'm quibbling with.

Incidentally, off topic but I discovered that all or most of my rock and pop CDs seem to have Composer tag information when viewed in JRiver even though none of them have any Composer tag information when viewed in MP3Tag. Any idea why that might be?