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Author Topic: Songwriter tags  (Read 714 times)

Noteworthy

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Songwriter tags
« on: December 06, 2018, 04:59:00 am »

I have a meticulously built database of my music that includes songwriters for all non-classical music tracks and composers for classical music tracks.

For classical music there are clearly composer / conductor tags in MC which are fine.

For pop music, I see the Lyricist tag but no songwriter(music) tag. Am I missing something?

Similarly how does MC recognise and handle multiple artists and multiple songwriters? My flac tags for this purpose use ";" as separator.

Any helpful comments would be much appreciated.
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ferday

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Re: Songwriter tags
« Reply #1 on: December 07, 2018, 05:14:59 am »

you can make any tag you want.  if the tag exists somewhere else, you can map it.  there are a lot of threads on this, if you want specific help, just ask a specific question.

the correct separator in MC is the ; however it only "works" on list type fields.  there are a few special ones, i can't seem to find my list but either i will or someone else will chime in soon enough

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MusicHawk

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Re: Songwriter tags
« Reply #2 on: December 07, 2018, 11:42:06 am »

Don't know if this is helpful, but...

Of course music cataloging needs differ and might not match standard MC. To the rescue rides the wonderful MC capability of custom fields, so you could have separate tags for Words and Music. But I just want to mention what a quagmire that might be.

I use MC's standard Composers field, entering the one or multiple people who are credited with the song, all in one field, delimited by semicolon.

I don't try to identify who wrote words and who wrote music, because so many songs either lack this degree of information, or they were collaborations with no identified separation of roles. For the songs where roles are known, to be precise would require multiple fields...just for those songs. It would be quite a challenge (and mess) to have composer info scattered among separate fields. I could find all the melodies composed by Larry Hart by looking in the Words field, but where would I find all the melodies composed by Freddie Hart, who wrote both parts of his songs (then performed them)?

Many songs in my library are cross-over efforts, two or more contributing to words and music -- sometimes including the performers, modifying the song in the studio. The Beatles music, for instance, ia all credited to Lennon & McCartney though they had various degrees of involvement, including songs known to have been composed by only one of them. Then there are the songs where the rest of the band and notably George Martin made key contributions, not credited anywhere but in books and album notes. For tracks where such detail matters to me, i put song (and recording) background info in a separate text field; MC has at least two, Comment and Notes, though custom fields could be used.

Even composing of the "standards" is messy. Some is well-known and cleanly defined, but many have mixed parentage. While Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin & Gershwin, and similar have known roles, many other songs of the same era just list multiple names, implying a true collaboration.

So, I put all the names in Composers. I rely on my separate knowledge of how Rodgers and Hammerstein divided up the work.

But when details about the song and/or recording might not be so obvious or easy to remember, I use MC's Notes field, which can hold a large amount of text.
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Noteworthy

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Re: Songwriter tags
« Reply #3 on: December 08, 2018, 11:49:26 am »

Thank you very much ferday and MusicHawk for so promptly replying.

My somewhat delayed response by comparison is because I was checking out what was possible based upon the suggestions you both made.

I concur with you MusicHawk on the use of the Composer tag.

I have discovered that I can cut and paste my text list of songwriters into the Composer tag box so that they form a ready drop down list to choose from.

However, I've also discovered that there is no option to select more than one name from the list.
For example if I select Lennon, John and then wish to add McCartney, Paul from the list, it's just not possible.
But if I manually type "Lennon, John; McCartney, Paul" then it's accepted. But this method would make the whole enterprise very time-consuming particularly given the thousands of tracks in my database.

On the other hand, on testing the Author tag, the same list has item check boxes that facilitate multiple selections which is very handy.

On the grounds that the Composer is universally recognised, I would really like to use it as MusicHawk does.

If I have missed something, any advice would be much appreciated.

Many thanks
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