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[TRex]

newbie here — apologies if this is in the wrong place, but it seems all discussion about Classical Music is under 'for Windows' category (am Arch Linux user and really don't care for Win-doze).

On Day 1 of trial and can see this will be steep learning curve. I want music files organised so to be able to create collections of all symphonies, all string quartets, etc. Hoping JR MC will enable this. Obviously, I'll have to do a more thorough job of tagging and expect I'll need custom tags.

My basic structure for my music files is Composer > Composition > Performer

I know many will disagree, but I duplicate contents of Composer tag in the Artist tag because so many players rely on Artist and ignore Composer. What would 'properly' belong in Artist I place in Performer tag. Because of the sheer number of my music files (approx. 30k), I want to do this once. 

To begin with, I'm looking for a way to create a view for Classical Music similar to this. Are there simple, straight-forward instructions for achieving this?

Next, are there simple instructions for creating custom tags?

Thanks for any help!

[JimH]

You should find some help on the wiki.  Topics on Tagging and Classical Music. 

If your directories have some of that information, you can automate some of the tagging you want to do.  Look at Library Tools on the wiki.

[dtc]

Here are some quick instructions to get started. Once you get a feel for how this works you can delve into the huge topic of how to tag classical music files.  You can keep it simple or get as complicated as you want.

To create a custom tag, Tools - Options - Library and Folders - Manage Library Fields and add the new field, probably as a string. Probably start with Sub Genre as your first example.  Then populate that field with the Tag Editor. Start with a small number of albums.

To create a custom view using the Sub Genre, right click on Audio and Add a new view. Select a view like Albums. Set Files for File Display with allow you to pick just the files with a particular Sub Genre.  At the top of the view click on the view name and you can Sort the tracks (e.g. by Genre, Sub Genre, Composer).  Thumbnails lets you set the fields to display as text under the thumbnail in category view.

The views you show use a Panes view. You can also use a Category View to show the albums with album covers.

Try a few and get it working. Then you can get into all the details.

[marko]

You might find this old, but still current, 'create a view walk-through' helpful...
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=68960.0

[EnglishTiger]

Hi TRex and welcome to the confusing world of finding a suitable approach to handling Classical Music in Media Center, or any other media player

After reading about Tagging Classical Music in MC that is  provided in the Wiki - https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Tagging_Classical_Music you will probably, like me, realise that some of them Do Not Pay Due Respect To Classical Music and it's Composers. Plus some of them involve adding tags/fields that are badly named and could end up causing even more confusion than not using them could create.

However there is one which successfully manages to avoid misleading Tag Names, instead of using things like "Sub-Genre", "Classical: Title" or "[Classical: Opus]"
Instead it starts from the premise the Composers wrote "Compositions" in various types/musical styles "CompositionType" over multiple Classical Music Era's "Period"  and that some of them may, probably most, contain "Movements" that have a "Movement Number" and "Movement Name".
It's the one outlined in this thread started by Wer - https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,128860.msg894607.html#msg894607

Unfortunately you will find that the vast majority of Media Players and Web Sites that provide Meta-Data were initially designed to only handle Non-Classical Music, with the inevitable result that Tagging and Organising Classical Music involves a lot of Time and Manual Effort.

So the first thing you should do is sit down with Pencil and Paper and decide/list just what information it is that you need/want MC to know/display to make selecting what to play as simple/easy as possible.
But don't be too pedantic about the fact that Operas and Ballets tend to use Acts and Scenes, or that Oratorios tend to use Parts, whilst Symphonies tend to use Movements; trying to provide ways of handling those apparently different category structures can appear to involve a lot of work, time and effort. Thankfully there is a way of simplifying that task by considering all of them to consist of "Movements".

Incidentally Wikepedia is a very useful source of information about what tags you may need to be able to identify what tags you may need and when you need to use them. Often it will have a page for each individual Composition listing things like it's Tempo and what "Performers" and/or "Instruments" are normally used for each Movement, Act,  Scene, Part, etc. making up that composition.
For example the Album/CD Cover, Insert or Track List may state that the Orchestra, Chorus and Soloists are the "Performers/Artists" for every Movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which is false/wrong because the Chorus and Soloists are only heard/performing part of the 4th Movement.
Unfortunately Wikepedia, along with a lot of the other web-sites that provide good, accurate and correct meta-data, only allow it's users to use cut and paste to transfer the relevant data/information to their Chosen Media Player.

Next you need to take a good look at what MC already has in respect of handling and tagging Classical Music to determine what additional tags/fields you need to add along with those views you may need to adjust/modify to suite your own requirements. You should also look at what other ways MC provides to allow you to organise and play you Classical Music Collection the way you would like to, a lot of users do it using Views, which tend to have a rigid structure but sometimes Smartlists with their Dynamic Structures are easier to set-up and use.

Then and only then should you embark on the task of restructuring your Classical Music Collection, by using things like re-naming and tagging, to get it to match your requirements.

In respect of basic tagging I do the the following:-
I always  put the "Composer's Name" in both the [Composer] and [Album Artist] fields/tags - I place the Composer's Surname, plus suffix when needed, in the [Album Artist] field/tag and their full name in the [Composer] field/tag
For Box Sets I always use the Box Set Name for the [Album] tag/tag and place each CD's "Name" in the [Disk Title] tag/field.
By using information that is readily available on WikiPedia I use a combination of the "Artist", "Conductor", "Orchestra", "Chorus" and "Soloists" fields/tags to restrict the List of "Performers" to those who are "heard" on that track; i.e for Beethoven's 9th Symphony the Conductor & Orchestra's names are placed in the "Artist", "Conductor" and "Orchestra" fields for every track, whilst the names of the "Chorus", "Chorus Master" and "Soloists" are only present in the tags/fields for the 4th movement. I certainly don't need an Opera's  full cast list as the Artists/Performers for a Track/Act/Part/Scene when it's only the Orchestra playing while the scenery is being changed.

I then use a Classics/Composer/[Album Artist] [Name] structure to rename/store my Classical Collection.
But the nice thing about MC is that you can use any storage structure you like when organising your Music Collection since its database/library knows where every track in that Collection is located and will find/play it whenever you want it to, provided the Track is currently available and not stored on a disc/device that is not currently connected to the PC you are playing your music from.

[EnglishTiger]

One of the simplest ways of Creating a View that only displays Classical Music is to right click on the word Audio in the tree select the "Add library View...! and then select the one called "Panes (genre, artist, albums) and once it is loaded right click on its name and select "Customise View" and then under Included File click on "Set rules for file display..." and tell it to only list tracks whose genre is Classical.
Later on when you have started to use the tags you need you can go back and modify the view so that, where relevant it is using the Tags you have added in the top section of the view and not the default MC ones.

[TRex]

still trying to read and absorb ... hope to have some responses tomorrow. Especial thanks to EnglishTiger.

Any possibility of creating a forum specifically for Classical Music, maybe in the 'More' section, alongside forums such as 'Music, Movies, Politics, and Other Cheap Thrills'?

[TRex]

So the first thing you should do is sit down with Pencil and Paper and decide/list just what information it is that you need/want MC to know/display to make selecting what to play as simple/easy as possible.

I thought I already had things worked out, but your comment prompted me to think about what would be (for me) an ideal tagging system for classical music. And that turned out to be enlightening and has prompted me to re-think my previous thoughts. The biggest change in my thinking is that there should be a separation between tagging a particular composition and tagging a specific performance. In the library world (mostly books) there are records for each edition of each book, but a library's holdings have a particular volume 'attached' to one of those records. Similarly, specific performances should be attached to a particular composition's record with its tags.

As a rather extreme example, i have quite a few recordings of Shostakovich string quartets: for each of the fifteen compositions, I have the recordings of between six and eight different performers (counting some performers multiple times because they made multiple recordings/releases). But a particular opus number with its movements should be identical regardless of performer and regardless of what is written on the liner notes. This should also simplify adding a new performance because a lot of the information can be duplicated from previous items to the new item(s).

But don't be too pedantic about the fact that Operas and Ballets tend to use Acts and Scenes, or that Oratorios tend to use Parts, whilst Symphonies tend to use Movements; trying to provide ways of handling those apparently different category structures can appear to involve a lot of work, time and effort. Thankfully there is a way of simplifying that task by considering all of them to consist of "Movements".

Of course. I've been doing that. Incidentally, even though the standard in the numbering of movements is to use Roman numerals, I use Arabic numerals because I generate the filename from tags and no operating system properly sorts Roman numerals in filenames, but they all handle Arabic numerals just fine.

Incidentally Wikepedia is a very useful source of information about what tags you may need to be able to identify what tags you may need and when you need to use them. Often it will have a page for each individual Composition listing things like it's Tempo and what "Performers" and/or "Instruments" are normally used for each Movement, Act,  Scene, Part, etc. making up that composition.

Can you point me to an example of this, please? I searched Wikipedia but found no article on tagging classical music and didn't find such information in some randomly selected articles on particular compositions.

For example the Album/CD Cover, Insert or Track List may state that the Orchestra, Chorus and Soloists are the "Performers/Artists" for every Movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which is false/wrong because the Chorus and Soloists are only heard/performing part of the 4th Movement.

True, but this reminds me of one recording of Beethoven's 9th I own which separates the fourth movement into two tracks (lead-up to singing section, then singing section — which I think is rather brain-dead). Things like this add an additional difficulty in tagging.

You should also look at what other ways MC provides to allow you to organise and play you Classical Music Collection the way you would like to, a lot of users do it using Views, which tend to have a rigid structure but sometimes Smartlists with their Dynamic Structures are easier to set-up and use.

This is a bit of a problem because I do not yet understand Smartlists (and a lot of other things).

But the nice thing about MC is that you can use any storage structure you like when organising your Music Collection since its database/library knows where every track in that Collection is located and will find/play it whenever you want it to, provided the Track is currently available and not stored on a disc/device that is not currently connected to the PC you are playing your music from.

I'm a bit anal (but, alas, not entirely consistent) when it comes to storage structure. For example, foir Shostakovich's Seventh String Quartet, the directory is /home/trex/Music/MusicCollection/Shostakovich, Dmitry/String Quartets/String Quartet No. 7 in F♯ minor, op. 108 (1960)**
and there are directories within that, one for each performing string quartet.

** — the Win-doze OS doesn't handle characters such as ♭ ♯ (and some others which this forum software won't display) in filenames and directory names; Linux-based OSes have no problems with these so I use them; No OS of which I am aware allows colons or virgules, so I have some alternates which I use, especially ⠆ and ⟋ (the colon replacement because it is frequently used in movement names such as rondos, the virgule because it is needed to display time signatures)

[EnglishTiger]

TRex - This is an example of how informative WikiPedia can be - this is the "starting page" for obtaining Info for all of Beethoven's known Compositions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Ludwig_van_Beethovenhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Ludwig_van_Beethoven
in Opus # and Catalogue #, with sections for each of the catalogues listing His Compositions.
As you scroll down that page you should spot that a lot of the "Composition Names/Titles" are links to pages that give extensive info about that particular composition.

With regards to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, even Ludwig admitted he wasn't sure what it's true format is and over the years there have many theories about its actual format/type.
Most experts, mainly because of its length/duration, consider the 4th Movement to be a Choral Symphony within a Symphony and you will find some recordings that do split the 4th Movement into 4 Movements.
That recording you have which splits the 4th Movement into 2 Tracks, which appears to be an "unusual split" is not necessarily as odd as it looks; the second (Choral) of the 2 tracks contains what is probably the best known part of the 9th Symphony, which is usually named/titled "Ode To Joy" is the Music Played at the beginning of every Eurovision Broadcast.

Multiple Performances of the Same Work - judicial use of the Conductor, Orchestra and Soloists fields/tags can handle most of them. However for those where it's the Same Composition/Work and Performers the simplest way of identifying which one is which may by adding an additional field/tag - "Date (Performance or Orig Recorded)" to hold the date the work was recorded or that particular CD was released.

If you looked at the image I attached to an earlier posting you may have spotted tags/fields with "unfamiliar names", those Tag/Filed Names are part of a Classical Music Tagging Protocol that Wer and I developed along with MC's 1st TrackInfo Plugins that were designed for use with Classical Music" - https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,134776.0.html

[TRex]

One of the simplest ways of Creating a View that only displays Classical Music is to right click on the word Audio in the tree select the "Add library View...! and then select the one called "Panes (genre, artist, albums) and once it is loaded right click on its name and select "Customise View" and then under Included File click on "Set rules for file display..." and tell it to only list tracks whose genre is Classical.
Later on when you have started to use the tags you need you can go back and modify the view so that, where relevant it is using the Tags you have added in the top section of the view and not the default MC ones.

Thank you for this info.

This may be an ignorant question because of my lack of knowledge regarding MC, but is it possible to save a particular View to a file which can be shared with others?

[dtc]

Right click on the view in the tree and then select Customize View then Save This View.

[timwtheov]

EnglishTiger covered most of the basics in his posts above, but another thing you might consider using is MCUtils

https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,100449.0.html

to tag your files, given that tags + views based on those tags are the core of how MC's library works. With MCUtils, you can get classical (or any other music) metadata from various sources (see two of my views in the attachments, the first showing a Conductor view and the other a Composer/Composition view on the same composition). It can take a little time setting up, but once you do, it's great.

Edit: ignore the sequence of some of my fields in the Tagging Window, like [Publisher] between [Orchestra] and [Soloist(s)]. I set that up long ago, before I'd really thought out how I wanted the Tagging Window to look, and now I'm so used to it that it will slow down my tagging work flow to change it.