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[Paul S.A. Renaud]

I am looking for a practical but consistent way to tag classical music by work, i.e. a group of tracks belonging to a certain piece (such as Bach's BWV or a symphony, etc.). Is there any convention about doing this. I know that iTunes has recently introduced certain tags for this ("work", etc.).

[Listener]

You won't find general agreement on how classical music should be tagged.

There have been a number of threads on tagging classical music and views for browsing such music on the forum. You can search for "classical" and  user="Listener" since I've been a part of many of those discussions. 

Here's one such thread

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,103370.msg718581.html#msg718581

The basic problem is the set of tags that most music players use aren't enough to allow you to put Composer, Work, Artist and Movement into separate tags.  There are two general ways to deal with the problem:

- stick with the basic set of tags that all players can use: Genre, Album, Artist, (Track) Name.  Go this way and you'll have to contort your metadata and yourself.

- use additional tags that allow you to separate the fields I listed above.  You can define views that use all those tags so that you can browse classical music in a natural way that handles large collections well.  JRiver allows me to populate and use tags that way I want to so I feel no need to contort myself.

The simplest way is

Genre = "Classical" so that you can use a special view for classical music.
Composer = the person who wrote the music.  What a concept.
Album = the name of the work  (I put the work name into a Work Name tag I defined as well.)
Artist = the set of performers (for example "Fleisher_Szell_Cleveland Orchestra")
(Track) Name = Movement name

In the thread I linked above, you'll see a view that I've used for classical music for years.

[DJLegba]

You won't find general agreement on how classical music should be tagged.
...

The simplest way is

Genre = "Classical" so that you can use a special view for classical music.

It's easy enough to include more than one genre in a view. Opera is not Classical. I use genres such as Oratorio, String Quartet, Symphonic, but I can see how one view to rule them all could be useful in some situations. Generally though, when I browse my collection I do it through the predefined Genre view and then zero in on what I'd like to listen to (eg a string quartet).

[BillT]

I use a custom field (Work, oddly enough) to organise pieces, but I use other custom fields; 2 additional genre fields, Orchestra, Chorus and Soloists. When I started doing this (about 14 years ago) conductor wasn't a standard tag, I don't think Composer was either. The ability to define custom fields and arrange views which used them is why I use JRiver and continue to do so; I haven't come across anything else that approaches the functionality that JRiver has.

Genre has very few options, for music it's basically Classical and Pop. The extra 2 genre fields are used to organise music with more granularity. In my case I use Chamber, Choral, Opera, Orchestral, Solo Instrumental and Vocal as the secondary subdivisions, then they are grouped by composer. (I have another sub genre for Collections for albums with multiple composers works.)

These view schemes let you find the original albums easily, but there are other view schemes which are organised by composer, conductor, orchestra and soloist which lets you find any piece very quickly and easily.

Unfortunately the non standardised tagging makes organising classical music a lot harder work than pop music is; the metadata that JRiver finds is hugely variable and most of the time needs a lot of editing. Genre is a case in point, a lot of CDs use Classical as the genre but there's an awful lot that use any random sort of variation you can think of. For instance, many of the Mozart 225 CD box have a genre of Mozart, which I find very silly.

[Paul S.A. Renaud]

I am totally ignorant on the way "general" rules for tagging are developed. Is there a standard body which tries to deal with this. Is it free for all? Or is it linked to the codecs of file container formats and the groups which maintain those standards.

At least I have tagged all my music with tags, such as Composer, Genres (42 in total, to be detailed, but no detail overload). I am using the tag "Grouping" for linking Classical Music Works. Primarily, I use it for categories such Bach Cantates. The tag "Grouping" contains the BWV number. It is certainly not my ambition to tag all works. That would be useless. The general search function usually lead to too many false positives and false negatives.

[BillT]

There are no rules and no standards body for tagging, it's a free for all especially in the classical music field.

The "standard" are called ID3 tags.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3 and http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/TagNames/ID3.html give you an outline of what the names of the tags are, but what you actually put in the tags is up to you. (As you can see from looking at the random values that you can collect from the internet databases.) JRiver of course allows you to define your own fields which are kept in the JRiver database rather than ID3 tags.

I wouldn't say that tagging all works is useless, unless you have a very small collection, or don't actually want to listen to most of it.

[DJLegba]

The general search function usually lead to too many false positives and false negatives.

Both JRemote and Gizmo have search functions that aren't very effective for classical music.

I created a Composer view that is very handy. However, I enter composer names as "surname, given name", and almost all new additions to my collection (whether purchased online or ripped from CD with info taken from an online database) need to be retagged, as the genre is always "Classical" and the composer is always "given name surname". Tagging a classical music library is indeed a lot of work, but I have come to appreciate that I now have a much better memory of the contents of my collection.

[druism]

In the end, I found the easiest solution was to have two libraries: one for popular music and one for "serious" music :0) I find it makes management much easier and live swapping of libraries is a doddle. Not everyone's solution though.