Dear all,
I've just begun the monumental task of ripping my large CLASSICAL music collection to WMA lossless for archival and convenience reasons, and I must say, I've reached an impasse of sorts regarding TAGGING.
As many of you know, classical music recordings do not tag as well as your everyday pop music recordings. On your regular pop CDs/Albums, the CD has a definite name, definite artist, each track is a separate song, and you could care less about the composer (as least I dont anyway!). This makes tagging very straightforward.
On classical recordings, there could be multiple performers for a given "song" or composition (say Perlman and Williams doing the Paganini duos), and each composition is essentially broken up into different "movements" which are separate tracks on the CD. In addition, many of the classical music CDs don't even have proper album names...example, the CD by Telarc feature Lang Lang playing at the Seiji Ozawa Hall in Massachusetts!
Now since I was lazy, I didn't bother inputting the "composer" field and instead just put the composer in the "Artist" field so I can find them the same way as for my pop artists. So, here was my bright idea, but I'm finding out the pros and cons and it's bugging me:
Artist = Composer [Mahler, Gustav]
Album = Composition Name or Piece [Mahler Symphony No. 6 in A minor (M.T. Thomas, Cond)] or [Mozart Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major (Midori) K.364]
Name = Name of the Movement [I. Andante comodo]
Date (year) = year the CD was issued.
Genre = Classical
Pros --- I can always find a particular piece by clicking on Artist (Mahler) then looking at the album for the particular piece; Name of the track is kept much shorter than if I included the composition and movement name in the Name field. In short, very conveninent if I mainly interested in the Composer/Composition.
Cons -- Plenty of Cons...especially if I am interested in a particular person or "group" like the Borodin Quartet, since I've embedded the "player/player group/emsemble" in the Album name. In addition, I've renamed all my track numbers to correspond with the individual composition, so my albums are essentially compositions. This gets especially frustrating with multi-composer albums (ala Midori playing snippets from different composers). And what if it was an "unnamed group" made of some famous players like perlman and ashkenazy, et al. I couldn't list all those guys/gals in my Album name.
Argh...
1. Should I put the names of the players and conductors in the Artist field...this would be a pain because there are no standards, like should I list the Cleveland Symphony or list the Conductor of the piece?
2. Should I not bother reconstructing the original album altogether since I've re-named Album = Composition, and instead use the playlist to re-create the album...like playlist would have "Midori playing Mozart" or "Richter playing Beethoven". Then when I need to find the physical album again, it's so difficult because I don't really have the album name (sometimes you wanna re-read the liner notes!).
Anyway, this has gone on long enough...can any of you classical music afficionados suggest what would be a coherent classical music tagging strategy that you've used?
Nguyen