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[keithhodges66]

Yes, I know this general issue has been addressed ad nauseum, but I can't figure out why nothing is working for me. My situation is this: I have several classical albums with the same artist name (I list the composer as the artist) and the same album name. The only differentiation between them is that they are all by different conductors and different orchestras. Even though I added tagging fields for Conductor and Orchestra and updated the tags, JRiver still lumps everything with the same artist and album names together. For example, for Ludwig van Beethoven/Symphony No. 3, there are several versions of this symphony by conductors Bernstein, Furtwängler, Harnoncourt, Solti, Szell, Walter, et al and with several orchestras. How can I fix this, other than making each album name distinctive in some way, which I would prefer not to do.

Thanks for any help!

[RD James]

You could add a new field to the library and group by that.
Tools > Options > Library & Folders > Manage Library Fields. Add a new field that uses calculated data.

One example that you could use would be:

Code: [Select]

ListBuild(
            1,
            / -/ ,
            Delimit([Year, 0], /], /[),
            [Album],
            FirstNotEmpty([Conductor], [Album Artist (auto)]),
            [Orchestra]
        )

This would group by: [Year] - Album - Conductor/Album Artist - Orchestra

[AndyU]

I’ve a large number of classical rips and I found it made life a lot easier to standardise Album names as Composer Surname + Work (Artist ) so..

Beethoven Symphony 5 (Abbado)
Mozart Piano Concerto 21,23 (Brendel)

It’s a good first pass solution that solves some of the issues with classical.  But there’s nothing stopping you having tags for Composer Surname, Work, Conductor, Orchestra, Soloists, Ensemble .. just depends on how fussy you are .. some people probably want to track the changes in members of a quartet.  Have a look in the classical section of the tag window.

But I would absolutely disagree with you making the Composer an Artist. They aren’t! (usually). That sort of kludge was necessary years ago with inferior products to MC, but MCs support for custom tags makes it unnecessary.

If you insist on leaving the album name as is, then you will have to construct your own views for classical based on your tags. Not a bad idea either. And exclude Classical from the other standard views.

[swiv3d]

Surely the artist for a classical piece is the Orchestra and Conductor - not the composer (for which there is already a tag - best used as Surname ,Firstnames). If all of your audio is already tagged with artist as the composer and all of them have the orchestra and conductor tags filled in it would be easiest to select the files you want to change and then put =[artist] into the composer field to transfer that information and then put =[Orchestra] - [Composer] into the artists field. MC would then have the ability to distinguish between the different versions of the albums.

[keithhodges66]

Thanks for all the replies. I stubbornly maintain that the composer is the artist. One doesn't say, for instance, "I want to hear some Berliner Philharmoniker."

[carlismysecondname]

It becomes an issue when you have multiple albums of the same piece/composition played by different artists. Example is Bach's Goldberg Variations. I have over a dozen different versions of this work played by different pianists (and sometimes varying recording dates as well). How do you distinguish between said albums? You could name the albums: Goldberg Var. (performer n) etc. But this just lengthens the overall album name unecessarily when you already have a standard artist and composer field available. Moreover, you may have more than one artist performing for any given album, say, one artist plays half of the tracks and another plays the remaining -- sure, the composer is the same and also its from the same work, but the performers change for each track. I mean, you could put the composer as the overall 'album artist' and 'composer' but you still have to differentiate between which performers are actually playing for each track of the album. Tag editing is tedious, but doing it right from the beginning saves you from future frustration.

[carlismysecondname]

Also, it's best to always fill-in the 'album artist' field with a singular entry for each album. I used to skip this one for years, but realized how important this field is after all when it comes to grouping and separating albums with the same album names.

[swiv3d]

Thanks for all the replies. I stubbornly maintain that the composer is the artist. One doesn't say, for instance, "I want to hear some Berliner Philharmoniker."

Show me an album track in which Beethoven is the performer and I would agree. I did add the composer in the artists field, you could reverse the components to get composer  - orchestra which might suit you better.

[AndyU]

Thanks for all the replies. I stubbornly maintain that the composer is the artist. One doesn't say, for instance, "I want to hear some Berliner Philharmoniker."

Oh if only the Composer was the Artist! I could listen to Beethoven playing one of his piano concertos! How good would that be?!

But .. Artist in the context of tagging and cds really means Performer, and is quite distinct from Composer. Beethoven is a Composer. Murray Perahiah is an Artist. Whether the Berlin Phil is an Artist or an Orchestra is another debate. And sure you rarely say “I want to hear some Berlin Phil”, but you should have a view of Classical Music that splits it at the first level by Composer so you can easily go straight to the Composer you are interested in when you want to listen to some Beethoven. Have you got such a view? It is very easy in MC.  You can create whatever views you wish. Classical x Composer x Sub Genre x Work, Jazz x Bass Player, Hip Hop x BPM ..   Or use a Panes View with Composer as a Pane.

[timwtheov]

AndyU is right: what you want are to create/manipulate different views so that a recording of Beethoven's 5th by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic is distinguished in some way from a version of the same symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic. Of course, doing so will probably require you to more neatly tag your files, e.g., "Ludwig van Beethoven" (or just "Beethoven," though what are you going to do when you get to "Strauss?") in [Composer], "Herbert von Karajan" in [Conductor], "Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra" in [Orchestra], and so forth. And, yes, [Artist] should be performers; I myself do a semi-colon delimited list in a predefined order using an expression-based custom field that will build a list based on what performers are present: [Conductor]; [Orchestra] or [Soloist]; [Conductor]; [Orchestra] and so forth, including vocalists and choral or chamber groups.

If you really want to get into the weeds with this stuff, you can set up MCUtils and get mostly standardized data from Allmusic and/or Discogs. Attached is a jpeg of my main classical view populated using the former site. Note particularly my custom field called [AMG Work Name]: that's really handy and can be gotten using MCUtils' amg.pl script for any recording on Allmusic, which has a great database of composers' works. And again, they're pretty standardized, with only occasional hiccups (they just updated their Ravel and Debussy entries, for example, which forced me to go back and change all of my work names, alas). MCUtils does take a little while to set up (and get used to), but once you do it, wow! You'll be swimming in relatively accurate metadata!

Anyway, back to the main point here, the view scheme: note in my view the ordering of the categories: period, composer (with a last name/first name swap), my own personal classical groupings and sub-groupings, the work name (note that I selected "Orchestral," and so whittled down the list of possible Beethoven works; I could have done it ever more finely had I chosen "Symphony" in my sub-group list), conductor, orchestra, and so forth. Such a view takes about 5 minutes or less in MC to set up. And I have others: a "Conductors" view, a "Label" view (so I can see which BIS recordings I have, for instance), "Orchestras" (maybe I DO want to listen to a little Berlin Philharmoniker tonight), and so forth. Really, you're only limited by your tags and by your imagination, which when you factor in the expression language capabilities of MC, can get you just about any view you want.

[timwtheov]

Attached is my "Conductors" view. If I want to quickly find out (if I've forgotten) what Gergiev-conducted Shostakovich I have, this is the way I do it.

[carlismysecondname]

Attached is my "Conductors" view. If I want to quickly find out (if I've forgotten) what Gergiev-conducted Shostakovich I have, this is the way I do it.

I think for most people filling out the album artist, artist, and album and year are enough. For the most part I just lump the all the performs, conductor/director, ensemble in the artist field -- occasionally I write the composer there as well for certain cheap album sets that do no list the performers etc. I try my best to fill in the composer field as well but occasionally just leave it in the album name and/or folder name. When I search for a name, JRiver also looks at the file path names and album names... Of course, it would help if you've memorized your go to composer(s) already.

[timwtheov]

Right, but if you want to have more sophisticated views without getting into complex expression language, you have to have more accurately tagged files, no? That's all I was getting at: neat/accurate tags opens up your view-scheme possibilities. Obviously, one doesn't need to go to my own anal lengths.