Classical music is over 60% of my ~1600 CD colection. After looking at many PC based music player programs, I've decided that MC 11 is by a wide margin the best player for managing a large collection of classical music.
Being able to use more tags than just genre, album, artist and song title is essential. I've read the help, the FAQ and searching this forum. I haven't found much about how MC 11 handles specific tags and maps tags to database fields. I ran a few experiments on classical genre files with Flac tags (comments not ID3 tags) and MP3 ID3v2 tags to see how tags are displayed in MC 11. Here are some results:
MP3 ID3v2 tags:
TCON - displays in MC 11 as Genre
TALB - displays as album
TPE1 - displays as Artist.
TPE2 - displays as Conductor
TPE3 - displays as Band (not as Ensemble)
TCOM tag - displays as Composer in MP3.
TIT2 - displays as Name
Flac comments:
Genre - displays in MC 11 as Genre
Album - displays as album
Artist - displays as Artist
Performer - displays as Performer (only one occurrence used by MC 11)
Ensemble - displays as Ensemble (not displayed as Band)
Band - displays as Band (not displayed as Ensemble)
Title - displays as Name
It seems to be possible to add columns to the file list display or the panes browser for any of these tags.
I was disappointed to find that MC 11 did not use more than one Performer tag. I then tried putting two values into a single tag separated by a semi-colon. (i.e. performer=Szell;Cleveland orchestra.) MC 11 did not separate the values as some players do.
I wanted to find a set of MP3 tags and a set of Flac tags that I could use in MC 11 for browsing on Composer, Work, Conductor, Soloist, Orchestra or other ensemble. The following use of would appear to allow me to tag and browse both MP3 and Flac files with a common set of display columns:
my info MP3 tag Flac comment MC 11 displays as
type of work - TCON - Genre - Genre
work - TALB - Album - Album
combined artist - TPE1 - Artist - Artist
(soloist first)
Band - TPE2 - Band - Band
conductor - TPE3 - Conductor - Conductor
soloist - DB only field - Performer - Performer
Composer - TCOM - Composer - Composer
song (track) title - TIT2 - Title - name
These uses follow the ID3v4 standard. I have a vague awareness of an alternate use of some tag (TPE2 I think) for album artist by Microsoft's players.
I found two different recommendations for OGG Vorbis Comments (which the Flac standard adopted.) The official one at
http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.htmlspecifies Artist as the composer for classical music and possibly multiple performer tags for the people or groups actually performing the work. Another recommendation at
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.htmldefines additional Composer, conductor and ensemble tags and specifies Artist as a summary tag for use on players with limited display capabilities. I used Band rather than ensemble to fit with the way MC 11 appears to map the ID3v4 tag TPE2.
A comparison table for tag use in different formats at
http://www.matroska.org/technical/specs/tagging/othertagsystems/comparetable.htmlwas also useful.
I understand that other players might not recognize all the tags I have specified. It seems more robust to store attributes as tags in music files in addition to having them in the MC 11 database rather than just defining a set of database only fields.
MC 11 is clearly very flexible and powerful in using tags in music files. Knowing the rules MC 11 uses to map between tags and library database fields would help users make use of that power.
I would appreciate knowledeable comments about mistakes I made or pitfalls I might face. I hope this discussion might help any other newbies trying to apply MC 11 to a classical music collection.
Bill