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[nwboater]

I have a growing collection of classical music that I have never done any tagging on. It is now equal to several hundred CDs and I know I'm missing out on enjoying much of it due to basically no really useful organization. As most people with large classical collections soon find the default organization nature of MC (and any other player) does not lend itself to a logical order for classical music. This is really the fault of the standard tagging systems, not MC.

There is an excellent series of posts by darichman, Listener, Frobozz and others in this MC12 thread  http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45824.msg314107#msg314107   They shared a lot of good concepts and suggestions for tagging Classical Music and finding it using various panes in Standard View. The last post was in 2008, other than one last year by someone asking for any updated information. I have not found any other threads with useful information on the subject. In fact a link to that thread is the only thing mentioned in the Wiki under 'Classical Tagging'.

With the huge improvements in Theater View in the past four years I would think that many classical music listeners have switched from playing in Standard View to Theater View. It might be helpful to many of us to have some sharing of the ways to set up Theater View to find classical music in large collections. And if any changes in field structure and tagging are needed to better suit Theater View.

Thanks for any ideas.

Rod

[221bBS]

I used that post to figure out how to organize my classical music. I've of course modified it to make it work for me. For example, his [Genre 1] is my [Date: Period] which is a calculated field that is shared with all my music.

For Classical Music the [Date: Period] will display one of the following:

(0476-1400) Medieval Period
(1400-1600) Renaissance Period
(1600-1760) Baroque Period
(1730-1820) Classical Period
(1815-1910) Romantic Period
(1900-present) Modern Period

All other music will display the decade of when the music was first released.

1990's
2000's
2010's

I use 3 genre fields
[Genre (Artist)] an artist relational field
[Genre (Album)] an album relational field
[Genre (Track)]
I use a calculated field to determine which genre field to use. Track > Album > Artist. This is how i have set up my entire music collection.

All my classical music has [Genre (Artist)] as Classical.
My [Genre (Track)] might be Classical\Concerto.
My calculated field would only display Classical\Concerto.

Name set up is:
[Name: Base] in [Key], [Category#]"[Name: Common]: [Name: Movement]

For other music:
[Name: Base] /[[Live Info]/] /[[Name: Version]/]
well it's a bit more complicated than this but this is the general idea.

I use a calculated field, [Name: Complete] to display the name of all my music

I use the following fields fro Artists
[Conductor]
[Composer]=[Artist]
[Orchestra]

and 3 custom fields
[Artist: Additional (Artist)] an artist relational field
[Artist: Additional (Album)] an album relational field
[Artist: Additional (Track)]
I don't use the artist with classical music but I do store performer info in the album/track.

I've never set up my theater view to have a classical music only section but I might try adding on later.

[Listener]

I have a growing collection of classical music that I have never done any tagging on. It is now equal to several hundred CDs and I know I'm missing out on enjoying much of it due to basically no really useful organization. As most people with large classical collections soon find the default organization nature of MC (and any other player) does not lend itself to a logical order for classical music. This is really the fault of the standard tagging systems, not MC.

I've participated in many discussions about improved online databases for tagging classical music.  Agreement that current databases comes quickly but people don't agree about the details of an improved database.  That kills any incentive for a vendor to make such an investment.  In practice, you just have to get on with tagging your files manually.  MC has great features to make that job as quick and painless as possible.

If your music files have a systematic pattern with composer, work and performer information in the filename, you can use the "Fill properties from filename" command to move that information into tags in bulk.  If composer and other information is in the folder and file names but not in a systematic pattern, you can use sorting and searching to isolate a group of files with the same or similar values for a field such as Composer or Artist.

I think that getting most files of you files tagged would be a 3-4 hour job for me.  It is mostly a question of

- knowing what you want
- understanding relevant features in MC
- developing your ability to use MC's features quickly and without a lot of mistakes
- most importantly, applying ingenuity to get a lot of tagging done with a few bulk operations

I've discussed manual tagging techniques in a number of threads on this forum and others many times.

With the huge improvements in Theater View in the past four years I would think that many classical music listeners have switched from playing in Standard View to Theater View.

Theater view fits if you are using a TV and a TV style remote control to browse and select music.  It is also a good choice if you use a touch screen device.  However, if you use a desktop PC or a laptop, Standard view still offers far more flexibility and power.  If you use a smartphone or a tablet, the WebRemote or JRemote or other software you use on that device provides its own interface.

It might be helpful to many of us to have some sharing of the ways to set up Theater View to find classical music in large collections. And if any changes in field structure and tagging are needed to better suit Theater View.

Keep in mind that in Standard View, a panes view shows you values of several tags at the same time.  In Theater View, you see values for one tag at a time.  In a panes view, I can use my Sub_genre pane when I need to narrow choices for works or not use that pane for a composer with few works.  In a Theater View, each field that you add to the categories list is an extra stage you have to go through every time.

If you enable bi-directional filtering, a single panes view can be used to browse by Composer first or Artist first (or Sub_genre first.)  In theater view, you would need to define views for each order you want to use in browsing your collection.

These differences drive you to use fewer tags in theater view.

Bill

[nwboater]

221bbs & Listener,

We are out of town right now so only have a little computer time and no access to our MC. But I do want to thank you both very much for your thoughtful posts. When we are back home I will be able to go through them more completlely and will probably have more questions.

Guess I should have been more clear about how we use MC and what we would like to do. The bulk of our usage is watching movies in our HT/Rec Room from our HTPC/Server, but I also very much enjoy just sitting back and listening to classical music. This is all done on our large screen TV using a Harmony Remote Control. In the same room we also have a small LCD monitor that I use for PC and MC 'housekeeping' chores.

Sandra and I each have a desktop in our office and these are clients of our HTPC in the rec room. Any of these could be used for tagging duties - I just need to be sure that MC will save tag changes on the server (our HTPC) that are done on the Clients including deletions (it didn't use to save these from a client).

So the bottom line is that I need to get a stucture set up for tagging Classical using Standard View. Then we need to make whatever changes are needed to the default Theater View presententation that we currently use so the 'improved' classical tagging system will be easy to use and useful in finding our music to play. Hope that makes sense!

Any further ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Rod

[Vincent Kars]

I never use Theater view but triggered by this post I had a look at it.
Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings #5 BWV 1056 in F minor
This is typical for classical, a plain description of the composition.
Looking at Theater the first thing that struck me is the very limited length of the title.
You probably see only Concerto for Harpsichord…

You probably need some tagging like Concerto #5 for Harpsichord to have meaningfull names in theater

[Listener]

Sandra and I each have a desktop in our office and these are clients of our HTPC in the rec room. Any of these could be used for tagging duties - I just need to be sure that MC will save tag changes on the server (our HTPC) that are done on the Clients including deletions (it didn't use to save these from a client).

So the bottom line is that I need to get a stucture set up for tagging Classical using Standard View.... Hope that makes sense!

I don't know whether you want

- ideas for what tags to use and what they should contain,
- ways to manually enter tag info efficiently or
- a process to get tags from the client PC back to the server.  (Tools/Options/Media Network/Client Options/auto sync with server might be relevant.)

You have seen other peoples' ideas about tags and contents.  You'll have to mix in your own preferences and needs to get the right solution for you.  Tag some files, create a view or two and see what fits you.

Then we need to make whatever changes are needed to the default Theater View presententation that we currently use so the 'improved' classical tagging system will be easy to use and useful in finding our music to play. Hope that makes sense!

You can use views defined in Standard view for theater view. (Tools/Options/Theater view/Add and choose Library item from Standard view.)

Bill

[nwboater]

I never use Theater view but triggered by this post I had a look at it.
Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings #5 BWV 1056 in F minor
This is typical for classical, a plain description of the composition.
Looking at Theater the first thing that struck me is the very limited length of the title.
You probably see only Concerto for Harpsichord…

You probably need some tagging like Concerto #5 for Harpsichord to have meaningfull names in theater

Thanks Vincent.

I have done no tagging of my Classical music. When I look at it using the default View in Theater View it is basically a mess. For instance if I go to 'Genre' 'Classical' the listing I get is alphabetical. For some albums it show Composer,  others conductor and yet others a particular performer such as a pianist. Totally useless unless I just want to randomly see what I have.

I don't know whether you want

- ideas for what tags to use and what they should contain,
- ways to manually enter tag info efficiently or
- a process to get tags from the client PC back to the server.  (Tools/Options/Media Network/Client Options/auto sync with server might be relevant.)

You have seen other peoples' ideas about tags and contents.  You'll have to mix in your own preferences and needs to get the right solution for you.  Tag some files, create a view or two and see what fits you.

You can use views defined in Standard view for theater view. (Tools/Options/Theater view/Add and choose Library item from Standard view.)

Bill

Thanks Bill for trying to figure out what I want. I guess it's becoming plain that I'm not sure what it is. Here's what I was hoping would happen in this thread that might lead me to a good end result: I was hoping that people using Theater View for Classical music would put forth how they are using it. As I wrote to Vincent above Theater View with it's default settings is a non-starter for me, and I would think it also would be for anyone that has much of a collection. So I was hoping some discussion might ensue from people that are actually using Theater View for Classical Music. Something similar to what took place in the old thread based on Standard View.

I'm sure that the various tagging methods discussed in that thread will be applicable and some variation of it will be appropriate for me in Theater View. I think at this point I can work that part out. And of course the proper tagging must be done before trying any views in theater View.

What would be really helpful would be if people using Theater View for Classical music would share how they set up their Views in Theater View. Is there anyone here using Theater View for the playing of Classical Music that has a setup that works well for finding what they want?

Perhaps I'm making more out of this than is necessary? This weekend I'll be able to spend some time experimenting and maybe I'll find it real simple to make MC do what I want, once I determine what that is. MC is of course incredibly powerful.

Thanks also Bill for pointing out how to implement a Standard View in Theater View.

Rod

[Vincent Kars]

I have done no tagging of my Classical music. When I look at it using the default View in Theater View it is basically a mess. For instance if I go to 'Genre' 'Classical' the listing I get is alphabetical. For some albums it show Composer,  others conductor and yet others a particular performer such as a pianist. Totally useless unless I just want to randomly see what I have.

I’m afraid this is inherent to tagging classical using internet databases.
In general it is a mess.
Unfortunately MC, in my opinion one of the best media players there is, is very much done on using internet databases for tagging.
The only thing one can do after the tracks are in the MC is a lookup using YADB.
In my case using classical the results are in general none.
A pretty poor job.

An option might be to use MP3Tag.
It supports Amazon, FreeDB, Discogs and MusicBrainz.
You can try a couple of albums and check if this yields a more consistent result.

The best result I got was using WMP simply because it uses AMG (All Music Guide).
One of the very few databases with a reasonably well structured and large collection of classical.
http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/TG/database.html

There is a tagger called musiCHI
It is targeted at tagging classical.
I had decent  results using it to clean up my tags
http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MusiCHI.htm

Another option is to use the expressions in MC.
I structured my tags using expressions in combination with the inevitable manual editing
A couple of examples: http://www.thewelltemperedcomputer.com/SW/Players/MC14/MC_Tagging.htm

[JimH]

MC uses YADB first.  If no information is found, then it uses FreeDB.

[Vincent Kars]

MC uses YADB first.  If no information is found, then it uses FreeDB.

I understand that this is the case when ripping a CD.

If the user selects an album in the library and choose "Lookup information in online database" as far as I know only YADB is used, not FreeDB
Can you confirm that in the latter case FreeDB is also used.

[JohnT]

I understand that this is the case when ripping a CD.

If the user selects an album in the library and choose "Lookup information in online database" as far as I know only YADB is used, not FreeDB
Can you confirm that in the latter case FreeDB is also used.

Yes, it uses Freedb whenever a lookup is done (if it's not found in YADB).

[Vincent Kars]

Thanks for the confirmation.
Will start a separate post about it

[Vincent Kars]

Yes, it uses Freedb whenever a lookup is done (if it's not found in YADB).

I do think Matt is right
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=71944.0

[struct]

If you haven't done your tagging yet, you may like to consider musicbrainz picard.  I am not that into tagging, but it seems to give a much more consistent result for classical than freedb.  With a clever regex or the existing plugins you should be able to get data where you want (e.g. orchestra, soloists, etc)  The lastfm plugin will also do a bit of genre classificiation for you.

Craig

[nwboater]

Vincent & Struct,

Thanks very much for the names of various online databases. And Vincent thanks for the links to your online help files at The Well Tempered computer.

It is now obvious that I have to get everything tagged properly before I can at all think about selecting our music in Theater View. I think I really need to spend some time figuring out what online database I want to use and then just how I want to structure things. But I guess that latter is very much a function of the former.

And there is of course the hope that JRiver may make some changes to which online database(s) is used for look-up. If they integrate something more useful for Classical music I would certainly try to use that. I can always hope, eh!

I guess I may also end up doing all my tagging manually which it appears Listener and 221bbs do. I sure hope it doesn't come to that though.

Thanks again for everyone's ideas here.

Rod

[rjm]

Here is an approach from someone who likes to keep things simple.
Regular music is tagged with Artist, Album, Date, Track #, Name, Genre.
Classical music is tagged the same as regular music except we add the tag Composer.

[Vincent Kars]

I guess I may also end up doing all my tagging manually

Don’t forget Expressions and the Library tool Find&Replace.

Although the tags contains text and are therefore unstructured by design often you can see some patterns.
If there is a pattern there is an Expression or a Find&Replace to make it more structured.

My personal preference is having all classical not grouped by album but by composition.
I made a tag “Work”.
Copied Album to it
Applied a bunch of expression to structure it a little.
In the final stage manual correcting is inevitable.
But I rather spend half an hour building expressions than doing a quarter of an hour manual editing.
But that’s me.

[Listener]

Vincent & Struct,
It is now obvious that I have to get everything tagged properly before I can at all think about selecting our music in Theater View. I think I really need to spend some time figuring out what online database I want to use and then just how I want to structure things. But I guess that latter is very much a function of the former.

You need to think about what tags you want to use and what you want in them before you decide on an online tag database.

Do you want to select music by Mozart (under "M") or by "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (under "W")?

What form do you want work names to be in?  (I use "Concerto, Piano" and "Trio, Piano" so that works of a type are grouped together.)

What information do you need in the work name to let you find and identify it?

Do you want to select soloist, conductor and orchestra in separate steps or will a single concatenated value such as "Fleisher_Szell_Cleveland Orchestra"?

What extra information beyond what you use to locate music do you want to store in the MC database?

You might start by thinking about how you ordered CDs in your storage area.  The you might look at the way ArkivMusic.com lets you browse in different ways.  Tag some music files, build a classical music view (for standard view) and start getting your own base of experience.

> And there is of course the hope that JRiver may make some changes to which online database(s) is used for look-up.
> If they integrate something more useful for Classical music I would certainly try to use that. I can always hope, eh!

I started 6 years ago and it hasn't happened yet.


----
> I guess I may also end up doing all my tagging manually which it appears Listener and 221bbs do.
> I sure hope it doesn't come to that though.

The more you brood on the difficulty, the worse it seems.  In your OP, you said that you already had some classical music on your PC.  Adding a composer tag to most of the files from 200-300 CDs might take me an hour of less.  Finishing the job for the obscure composers might take another 2-3 hours max.  You would have to learn a bit about MC's tagging features and gain some skills but it isn't that hard and you get to use the skills from that point on.

About manual tagging:

Filling in  the Composer tag is usually very easy.  Select all the tracks for the CD and fill in the composer value in the tag window once.  The performer (Artist) may be the same for all the tracks as well.  If so, you'll only have to type that name once for the CD.

Many classical CDs have a few multi-movement works.  Select the tracks from one work, and enter the work name once.  Select the tracks for another work and set that

Once MC has a tag value in the database, it can offer suggestions.  So once I have entered "Mozart" once, I only have to type "Moz" to specify that value for other files.  That works for the Composer, Artist and Album tags but not for the (Track) Name tag.

The most time consuming part of tagging a CD is getting the (track) name tag contents right., The tag value that MC returns for the (track) name field usually has the information I want along with some extra stuff I don't want.  The Find & Replace command is  handy for that.

Bill

[nwboater]

I finally got a good chunk of time yesterday to devote to this. With the aid of many of the great ideas and suggestions in this thread here's how I went about it:

1. Decided I did not want to try anything real complex initially. As Listener suggested - stop brooding and just get on with it (paraphrased).

2. For our usage and keeping in mind we only play in Theater View, we will most likely select our Classical music by Composer or Genre (the way I will set-up Classical Genres) and occasionally Album.

3. Since we will often select our music by Composer I certainly did not want the composers full name in all it's variations to deal with. Only want Mozart, Beethoven, etc.

4. After a possibly too brief look at the various online tagging systems it appeared that to get something going for our rather limited initial requirements would require a fair bit of work. And after setting it up I would probably still have to do some manual tagging work. So I decided for now to just do everything manually. In the process I'm getting a better feel for what I want and how best to go about it.

5. The two fields I'm focusing on are Composer and Genre. For Composer I'm changing any that are already there to just the last name. And adding the last name for those that aren't there which is the bulk of the music. For Genre I have set up a list that will work for us in Theater View. All Classical music will have the Genre of Classical. In addition many will have a second Genre such as Classical Piano, or Classical Piano & Orchestra, Classical Vocal, Classical Cello, etc.

6. No new fields need be added or changes to the default Theater View layout.


This is certainly not a very sophisticated system but will meet our present requirements as outlined in 1-3 above. And it will be a vast improvement over what is existing from Defaults. Later as our collection grows I may look into adding Work, Period and possibly another field or two. And I'll look further into online tagging systems. But for now I just wanted to get something usable going.

For the albums that are only one Composer the tagging has gone very quickly. We have many compilation albums with multiple Composers, some of whom are obscure (at least to me), and they are taking the bulk of my time. For some of them some online research has been required.

I want to really thank everyone that has posted in this thread. There is a wealth of knowledge and well thought through techniques. Hopefully the information will be helpful to others as well.

Rod

[Vincent Kars]

Not to meddle with your work flow but sometimes it is convenient to have more than just a last name.

Bach comes in a couple of flavors

Bach, Johann Sebastian
Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel
etc

If you stick to this convention you won’t have them mixed up and they still display nicely in Theater view.

If you are in need of the last name only (I in general prefix my albums with the composer to have the works grouped in album view) a simple expression will do

ListItem([Composer],0,/,)

[nwboater]

An hour ago I ran into this with the 3 Strauss's. So in that case I did Strauss I (For Johann SR.), Strauss II (For Jr.) & Strauss, Richard.

This process is becoming educational!

Thanks for the tips and for your continued offers of help. They are appreciated.

Rod

[Vincent Kars]

It is time to start a new section in this forum: Classical and JRiver
Moderated by our musicologist Rod 

[nwboater]

It is time to start a new section in this forum: Classical and JRiver
Moderated by our musicologist Rod 

Yesterday I couldn't spell Clasikl Musik and today I'm an expert!

And to be totally honest, up until a few hours ago I didn't know there were the three Strauss's.

Rod

[nwboater]

I'm done with tagging our classical music - for now - and thought I should give a report.

I just worked with the Composer and Genre fields, unless I spotted something else that was goofy. A few of the albums had the Composer listed in the Composer field, but most did not. And when Composer was listed it usually had the first and last names. We only want the last name, ie Mozart, not Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Since we have a lot of compilation albums the composer field took quite a bit of time. And several times I had to look up the Composer as it was not listed anywhere in the metadata and I didn't know the music well enough. Genre went quickly for the most part.

Although I spent quite a few hours over a few days doing this tagging it was well worth it. No changes were required in Theater View. Using Theater View I can now look for our Classical Music by Composer, Genre using our somewhat simple system, or Album Name. It's great! I have re-discovered a lot of music I long ago forgot about. And it's way easier to find something to satisfy a particular mood. Also if we should have friends over who would like to hear something by Schumann, or some music with piano and cello, I can very quickly and easily give them several choices. Actually I will probably just hand them our Harmony One remote and let them sift through.

I did have some difficulties doing this work from a Client that I posted in this thread:  http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=72125.0

At a later date I may add more fields but for now this has made a huge improvement. So thanks again to all in this thread who offered their help.

Rod

[Vincent Kars]

Nice to hear

Vincent

[Listener]

I'm glad you are off and running.

Bill

[aussie1]

What is the Expression you use to calculate [Date: Period]?

[Audiogalore]

I have a growing collection of classical music that I have never done any tagging on. It is now equal to several hundred CDs and I know I'm missing out on enjoying much of it due to basically no really useful organization. As most people with large classical collections soon find the default organization nature of MC (and any other player) does not lend itself to a logical order for classical music. This is really the fault of the standard tagging systems, not MC.

There is an excellent series of posts by darichman, Listener, Frobozz and others in this MC12 thread  http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=45824.msg314107#msg314107   They shared a lot of good concepts and suggestions for tagging Classical Music and finding it using various panes in Standard View. The last post was in 2008, other than one last year by someone asking for any updated information. I have not found any other threads with useful information on the subject. In fact a link to that thread is the only thing mentioned in the Wiki under 'Classical Tagging'.

With the huge improvements in Theater View in the past four years I would think that many classical music listeners have switched from playing in Standard View to Theater View. It might be helpful to many of us to have some sharing of the ways to set up Theater View to find classical music in large collections. And if any changes in field structure and tagging are needed to better suit Theater View.

Thanks for any ideas.

Rod

[MrC]

See my reply to your other post.  It wasn't clear to me what you were asking by quoting another post here, so I followed your postings to see what you might be asking...