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[Mirko]

Hi,

I was just thinking about how to organize classical music.

I know there are tags for composer and so on. But the organization tree is not very practical per default for these type of files. Classical songs are typicall tags different than pop or rock songs. E.g.: The title is not so important. More important is conductor or orchestra. As far as I know, these fields are not supported by MJ (they will, however, be if the custom fields work). I think they are part of ID3v2.

I've got about 200 classical songs in my archive. But right now, they are tagged nearly useless (I tag everything, so even bad tagged files are more than no tags at all).

I was wondering, if this kind of problems are only considered by me or if there are other users who wish better support for classical songs. I know that the time is at this moment better used by debugging and improving MJ9, but at some time it should be considered supporting these songs.

Does anybody have an opionion on this?

Thanks a lot,
Mirko

[DocLotus]

Hi Mirko;

I'm having the same problem.  Classical music, no matter how you slice it, has to be handled differently from all other music due to the considerations of...

* Composer.
* Conductor.
* Orchestra.

I usually list the 'Artist' as the composer.  I list the conductor & orcherstra under 'Comments'.  This seems to work pretty well for classical  music (for me).

In all other types of music the person actually playing the music is more important then who wrote it.

EXAMPLE: Elvis Presley's 'Blue Swade Shoes".  Who wrote it?  Who knows? Who cares?  Once Elvis sang it, it became an Elvis song.  Similar situation with Patsy Cline & country music.  Once she sang it, it became hers.

But in classical music, I find the composer is the most important consideration.

EXAMPLE: I want to hear some Beethoven, or some Mozart.  I don't really care who is actually playing it as long as it is done fairly well.

Most classical is done fairly well as all the players, orchestras & conductors are professional (musically trained in schools)unlike other types of music  ie; Rap, Rock & etc where there is some really bad players out there.

[brasfild]

Mirko,

One thing that helped me was organizing my library by directory, so I could put my Fischer as.... Music\Bach\nameofsong.mp3 Edwin Fischer as 'artist'

In terms of orchestral music, I tend to put the most significant person down as artist -- be it soloist, or conductor, but still keeping the directory structure the same so that I can easily browse to what I want.

Seems to work for now! and it seems to work better than composer as artist, because I have over 15 versions of 'air on a 'g' string', for instance...

[Phydeaux]

Hi Guys,

In MJ9, I have created custom fields for Composer, Orchestra, Choir, Conductor and Soloist. Artist is a combination of Composer, Orchestra, Choir, Conductor and Soloist -- meant for pure reference purposes only.

Oh, and also a "Movement", "Op.", "Year Composed" etc. (since I use "Year" for the year the piece was recorded -- seems to be on a par with most other musical tracks I have).

I also keep a genre tag with things like "Concerto", "Symphony", "Mass", "Oratorio", "Suite" etc. and have a smartlist called "Classical" which groups all of these together.

THEN! I have a Media Library group which filters the music based on the Classical smartlist. Normal "Audio" ignores everything in the classical smartlist and then I have created a "Classical Music" Group which only includes stuff from the smartlist.

Under this "Classical Music" group, I have view schemes such as "Conductor/Orchestra/Composer/Genre/Name/Movement" and "Choir/Conductor/Composer/Name/Movement".

This helps me arrange all the classical music that I could ever hope to.

Your comments on my retentive scheme would be appreciated!!

[mcphzgig]

Readers of this thread might also wish to have a look at the following thread, with regard to database fields like Composer and ID3v2 tags:

http://www.musicex.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=beta;action=display;num=1037921287

[Jaguu]

Hi Phydeaux,

thanks for your great ideas in organizing classical music. I set up my library the way you described and it really looks good. Now, I have some work to do by retagging my classical albums.

Just one question for you: What kind of scheme do you use for the filenames?

Greetings