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.
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> 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