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[Flea Bag]

Greetings!

This is my second trial of MC19 and I just started a new process of ripping but ran into some problems.

1st problem:
Is there an easy way to tell MC19 which files belong to the same album? I recently ripped and tagged (using EAC) a Notting Hill Soundtrack compilation CD to FLAC and imported those files to MC19.

I left the Album Artist tag empty in EAC and the Album name is "Notting Hill (OST)" for all the tracks. However, when I imported it to MC19, it did not recognise the tracks as being of the same album. I now have about 11 different "Notting Hill (OST)" albums, each with just one or two artists per album!

In iTunes, there is a simple step where you can just highlight a few tracks and checkbox an option named "part of a compilation" or something like that and that would automatically group those tracks into the same album. Is there such a function in MC19? I have A LOT of compilation CD still to be ripped and am hoping for a convenient soluton for this.

2nd problem:
Although I don't want coverart embedded into my files, MC19 seems to have downloaded it automatically and the strange thing is that most tracks of the same  Notting Hill album has different coverart!

I figured out how to delete the coverart, but how do I ensure that it does not download coverart ever again for any newly imported album/tracks. I also want to ensure that MC19 does not alter or add any new info, data, tags or whatever unless I manually do it myself.

Any help is appreciated!

[MrC]

Usually the split albums occurs because Album Artist varies for the album.  Confirm that in MC.  Select the tracks, check the Tag Action Window for Album Artist being empty, or saying [Varies].  If it Varies, change it to empty or a single value.  Also check Album while you're there.  And be sure the files are in a single folder.  This problem is so oft-repeated with users of EAC (and other tagger/rippers) , that it's probably time to write up a FAQ/How To article.

Cover Art downloads and tagging depend on how you import your files (manually vs. auto-import).  If auto-import is used, configure the option under Tools > Import > Configure Auto-Import.  There are tagging and cover art options there, as well as writing tags after audio analysis.  You can also disable tag writing via Edit > Update Tags When File Info Changes.

Cover Art is controlled in Tools > Options > File Location > Cover Art.  See the options there.  Use the Search box at the bottom of options, and enter "cover" (no quotes) to help narrow some more options.

[Flea Bag]

The auto-update of cover art have been solved. Thanks MrC!

However, the problem with the Notting Hill soundtrack album remain. It's still split into 12 different albums.

The "Album Artist" field is confirmed blank and the "Album" field are all confirmed identical as "Notting Hill (OST)". However, I noticed that the "Album Artist (Auto)" field is populated by the individual artist of each track. When I try to delete the "Album Artist (Auto)" field, all the individual artists' names are deleted from each track.

I tried keying in "(Multiple Artists)" into the "Album Artist (Auto)" field but that causes the field to change to "[Various]" again with "Album Artist (Auto)" going back to being populated by the individual artist of each track and the album splits into 12 different albums again. Is this normal behaviour?

If it helps, the Notting Hill album has 13 tracks but only 12 different artists. Two tracks belong to the same artist so it only gets split into 12 different albums instead of 13. Could this be what is causing the issue? Also, all of my music is in one large folder.

The only way to group all the tracks into the same album is to put the same value into the "Album Artist" field like "001" for example. However, I really don't want to do this because I only intend to use MC19 as a format converter and organiser. My music is acutally played back via Squeezebox Touch from Squeezebox Server and when browsing via Squeezebox, I don't want to have to a bunch of artists called 001, 002, 003 and so on or have artists called "Notting Hill (OST)" and "Greatest Hits of the 70s Disc 1" and so on... Lots more compilations to rip!

[MrC]

Don't edit Album Artist (auto), or you'll get these types of problems. Now that it has values, you need to clear it.  To retain your Artists, copy them to another field temporarily.   You can use the Move / Copy tool to duplicate the fields.  When Album Artist (auto) is clear, then copy back your artists.

[csimon]

See http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_%28Auto%29 and http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=68609.msg462218#msg462218

This question comes up several times every week - does anyone have any suggestions as to how to make it easier for people to understand or to find out the answer?

[MrC]

At some point, good articles should be moved to or at least linked by the Wiki.  Most of us who write How To's, etc. only remember our own and a few others. That post you referred above is very good, but I always forget that and dozens of others like it.

The other trouble with relying solely on a forum post, is others cannot contribute (outside of long thread chains that must be followed) and the main author must make the amendments, and this isn't always possible.

So my take:

  1. point a Wiki entry to a good forum post
  2. update simple Wiki referring links by incorporating the article
  3. routinely update the articles based on user feedback and questions
  4. repeat step 3 until the questions about the subject become rare

[6233638]

5. Convince regular users to actually check the wiki.

 
Perhaps updating the main page when you use the help option in the menus should be updated with a FAQ section.

[MrC]

Re: #5.  That's a fools errand, because the supply of humans is essentially infinite.

The reason I italicized "about the subject" is that questions about Where to Find information are not that same as asking about that found information.  #4 is about the latter.  And Where to Find information questions will never cease.

[JimH]

This is a case where an Internet search works:

https://www.google.com/search?q=jriver+tracks+single+album&oq=jriver+tracks+single+album

[MrC]

And that's yet another question: How to Ask How to Find Information.

This used to be one of Google's interview questions.  "How would you go about finding information about...?".

They were surprised to learn that it is much more difficult and uncommon than ever realized.

[Flea Bag]

Wow... So many administrators addressing this topic...

I know MC as a program is quite matured by now, but is it too late or too complicated to implement or change how the "Album Artist (Auto)" field operates? From what I've read around the place, it seems the rule for "Album Artist (Auto)" is that it must either be identical to the "Album Artist" field or identical to the Track Artist field.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, it would be much, much easier if one could just highlight a group of tracks, right click the selection and select "Group these tracks under one album". If for example the user has made a mistake and with one or more fields (eg. A few tracks had album name that was slightly different) then, a message will pop up saying "Unable to group tracks under a single album. Selected tracks must have: [insert criteria/rules here]". Then perhaps the "Album Artist (Auto)" field could operate independently from "Album Artist" and Track Artist field and assign a unique number to itself for all tracks belonging to that album. In this case, Perhaps the whole "Album Artist (Auto)" field could be completely internalised by MC so users don't get to see it and so confusion about the unique number is avoided.

As one administrator pointed out, you can never stop newer users or even regular users from asking about how to do ask the question or where to go on how to find the answer/solution, but at least the method above does not need a user to take the additional (and sometimes confusing) additional step of reading up and understanding about "Album Artist (auto)" rules and functions.

[MrC]

JimH is the Big Cheese; I and a couple of others are just helping out where and when we can.

You're not understanding the three fields:

   Artist
   Album Artist
   Album Artist (Auto)

You place whatever values you want in the first two Artist and Album Artist (and there are guidelines and recommendations).  But these two fields are used by MC to derive the last one, Album Artist (auto); it is calculated automatically.  Don't edit it (even though you can, and this is an implementation side effect).  It is probably worth your while to read, or re-read this:

    http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Album_Artist_and_Album_Artist_%28Auto%29

Album Artist (auto) solves an import problem for views and a few other places: How do you group by a single field when there are two different fields like Artist and Album Artist, and also allow users to affect how grouping occurs?  Album Artist (auto) is used by the stock views to essentially do the right thing regardless of how you've configured Artist and Album Artist (within the guidelines and recommendations as suggested above).

You're also not clear yet that MC is file and view based and not album based, and that the concept of albums is loose.  What is considered an album during the days of 8-track and vinyl is very different today.  So what you may consider a single album, I may consider two or three albums.   And the  views and their Group By settings define how lists of files are grouped into what you're thinking of as an Album, but more importantly, into arbitrary ways.  MC does have some concept of "album", and it is used in various ways, which I'm sure you'll discover.  But the view system is mostly album-agnostic.

I hope this provides a little insight and helps a little.

[Flea Bag]

You're also not clear yet that MC is file and view based and not album based, and that the concept of albums is loose.  What is considered an album during the days of 8-track and vinyl is very different today.  So what you may consider a single album, I may consider two or three albums.   And the  views and their Group By settings define how lists of files are grouped into what you're thinking of as an Album, but more importantly, into arbitrary ways.  MC does have some concept of "album", and it is used in various ways, which I'm sure you'll discover.  But the view system is mostly album-agnostic.

I hope this provides a little insight and helps a little.

Thank you for taking the time to reply MrC and for providing the explanations. Your typing fingers are workhorses!

Indeed I have understood for MC to file based, but I would disagree on the notion that what constitutes an album today is different from the earlier days of vinyl, at least when it comes to mass-market music where it's still more common than not to release music in CD-lengthed albums. However, I would agree that with the event of downloads, YouTube-born artists and so on, the use of 'albums' will decrease, but will still remain for as long as artists continue to write/perform songs in batches based on a central theme, an inspiration or event like a concert. Just like how racing or various sports have multipe events/compeititions to constitute a season, many artists will continue to have multipe songs and classify them into an album.

I guess I was coming across as being a bit self-centered earlier when I asked for more emphasis to be placed on how MC deals with music-albums, but I forgot that MC does also deal with videos and images, though I won't be using those functions. I was just hoping to help you guys out regarding how MC addresses music albums. I do hope for JRiver to one day be as widely-used as iTunes and other popular free music programmes, but I fear that some aspects of the programme (like the album classification issue) will persist and make it frustrating for such users who may not have the patience to read-up and understand explanations that are beyond the user-interface but in the product wiki pages. When a user has to read a product wiki page and understand about things like how files of an album must be placed in its own exclusive folder and so on, I think a change should be implemented. Of course the mass-market may not be MC's intended goal as being a pay-for-use-software, MC users (like me) will undoubtly already be different from the mass-market in that we're willing to pay for our music/video/image classification and so are probably more attentive to our music and will probably also invest some time too in understanding the SW. On the flip-side, some users are impatient and may buy MC with the assumption that paid SW should be 'better' than free SW only to find that there is a learning curve.

I still hope that MC will in future be able to add the option to "right click to classify the selected songs into a single album titled [name of album]" and let the software guide the user on what must be done or tell the user what it will do to classify the music into the desired album/ask their permission (like how it will have to shift files into a single folder or change various tags and so on.) That would address the issue of album classification where you mention that "what you consider a single album, I may consider two or three albms." -it's left to the user to decide while the SW will have built-in functions to guide/advise how it can be done.

Just my humble two cents... Hope I haven't offended anyone. I still like the programme, support like yours is excellent and I'll likely buy MC19 when the trial period ends. I think I've come up with a solution to my problem which I've separated into my next post.

[Flea Bag]

As an update to my problem about grouping music compilation albums together, I've decided to give up on automatic classification techniques and force a more 'robust' solution that will work across multiple SW platforms. I will assign either of the following labels to the "Album Arist" field. I've listed some examples here so others can use them:


For compilation albums/tracks ripped/downloaded from conventional/commericially available media and so on, Album Artist field will start with 00:
001 Multi-Artist Comp.
002 Soundtrack
003 Multi-Artist Tribute

or if you require more fields, you could split them across media type or whatever:

001A Multi-Artist CD
001B Soundtrack CD
001C Tribute CD
002A Multi-Artist DVD
002B Concert DVD
003 Audio Books
and so on...

For compilation albums/tracks downloaded from various sources, Album Artist will start with 01:
010-01 Dld. YouTube Concerts
010-02 Dld. YouTube Fragments
010-03 Dld. YouTube Amateurs
010-04 Dld. YouTube Lost Classics
010-05 Dld. YouTube Car Sounds
010-06 Dld. TouTube Sound FX.
010-10 Dld. Vimeo Concerts
010-11 Dld. Vimeo Car Sounds
012 Dld. Test Tones
013 Dld. Misc. Binaural Rec.

For tracks that I've recorded personally like from FM Radio or direct from a live recording session, they'll start with 02:
020A Rec. FM 95.0
020B Rec. FM 98.0
020C Rec. FM 103.6
021 Sessions 2013 Jan-June
021 Sessions 2013 July-Dec
and so on.

The reasons why I went with the above:
1. I wanted my music to be tagged and classified as robustly as possible across multipe platforms and interfaces. The album artist field should be understood by almost all popular SW and HW out there. I use iTunes, EAC, a Squeezebox Touch with SB Server SW and have two iPods.
2. By having album artist field starting with 0, browsing music should be easier with my iPod and Squeezebox Touch. Using "Category" like "Cat.01 Multi-Artist CD" would have sounded more proper, but then I would have to scroll through a whole buncy of "Catxxx" before I get to artists starting with Catalina and beyond. Similarly, just using the category name without an index number would be worse. I might also have forgot whether I classified them as "Multi-Artist CD" instead of "Various-Artists".
3. It has the additional benefit of separating/classifying and I can browse my compilaton/miscellaneous albums just by entering 0 into the Artist field on my iPod or SqueezeBox Touch, iTues or MC19 and other SW/HW.
4. I have analogue recording hardware and record in DSD from FM radio, occasionally direct from microphone also from DVD/BD-movie discs and so on so the classification benefits of this tagging scheme is obvious.
5. The naming nomenclature also allows adding future categories without upsetting the existing heirarchy. Some foresight and planning is needed though. For example, by using "010-0x" for YouTube downloads, I'm assuming that there will be no more than 9 different categories of music/audio that I'll get from YouTube or I'll intrude into Vimeo's index numbers. In that case, I should use triple digits or switch to letters.
6. My girlfriend is not very tech-savvy and anything that's in her iPod is placed there by myself, so I have to make sure the conventional ways of browsing for music in her iPod is still retained and easy enough for her to use.

Hope the above helps anyone who might be at pains to have their music classified properly across different media platforms and keep in mind that the above method should only be used where there isn't a clear "Album Artist". To me, a clear Album Artist label exists if the name of the artist and or collaborating partner is on the spine of the CD or main heading of the album.


Notes:
If there are people new to ripping CDs and organising/tagging their music, I can only advise them to follow a more source-oriented way of classifying their music with the following assumptions:

1. That you have a large enough music collection from various sources and compilations -Large enough that you will end up having two or more of the same track but from different sources,
2. That you care enough about sound quality to want to know which 'album' or source your track comes from,
3. That you want to keep dulicate tracks from different sources and or
4. You're anal enough (like me) to hate inconsistant music classification/tagging.
I don't think my tagging method applies well to people who only download/rip individual tracks (instead of entire albums or discs), who don't have the time and not concerned about where their music's original source was or who are just not concerned about having two or mroe of the same track or who will just delete all duplicated tracks even if they come from different sources.

To explain further my preferences: I have lots of compilation albums and am bothered by the differences between songs that are supposedly written from the same album but end up sounding different, again due to soruce differences.

Another example: I enjoy the song "Amore e Musica", sang by Russel Watson. I first heard the song after recording it from my FM radio. It's quite a nice and overbuilt vintage radio (Accuphase T-100) and my recorder was a DSD enabled Korg MR1000. Still, the song was quite obviously compressed, but nicely musical and emotionally engaging. I liked it so much that I went and bought the CD. I was horribly disappointed. The CD version, while more transparent and less compressed, was sterile, a bit lean and un-involving. I very much preffered my radio-sourced verison and so that version will be under my album of "Rec. Radio FM92.4" along with other songs I recorded from that station for example.

Now if you've just downloaded the song from some miscellaneous website on the internet and just want to know which album it comes from, then you're not going to be bothered about the source and this naming system is not going to be userful to you. On the other hand, if you're like me and have four versions of "Turn Back the Clock" by Johnny Hates Jazz and plenty more examples like that, then you might want to classify them by the physical CD album in which it came from or the downloaded source or like me the analogue recorded source. One observation I've made is that songs sourced from their originally-released albums (espeically in the early 90s and a bit earlier) tend to sound 'better' to me than ones that come from a multi-artist compilation like "Best hits of the 90s" or something like that. In any case, proper compilation albums will have tracks that are tweaked to equal loudness levels among other processing techniques (some of which can make the songs sharp or lacking body or smoother and more plesant) and so you might want to keep track of which source-album/compilation that song came from.

Yet, you might not want to just keep the version that you like and delete the rest. If you're like me (who came from the days of playing music by disc) and who will listen to music by progressing through the album rather than jumping to songs from all over your music collection, then you may appreciate how songs of the same physical album-CD have reasonably compatible loudness levels. Even if you play music back using volume normalising techniques, consdier too that artists and even the people in charge or arranging the songs in a multi-artist compilation album have arranged their songs with a certain flow or order. Quoting from the book High Fidelity (on how to arrange songs in a mix-tape) "A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch…" and so on... I personally feel more complete listening to songs by the album and so will stick to the above naming methods.

[csimon]

I suppose, at the end of the day, tagging is a purely personal thing and it's up to you how you want to browse and categorise your collection.  As you say, the big problem is tryng to make the tagging work across multiple players. I've found that there are a suprising number of players that don't recognise Album Artist, for example. So trying to get them to recognise an arbitrary category is fruitless.

I've made Soundtracks into a Genre.

Compilations are recognised by the Album Artist being "Various Artists".  In MC, I separate them out into a separate view called "Compilations" using a filter, and in players that can't do this then they are listed under the artist called "Various Artists".

I've got a category field that I use for Albums, Live Albums, Compilation (i.e. an artist's Greatest Hits), Single etc which MC can use but obviously I have a problem with this in other media players.

It sounds to me like you're using Album Artist to denote the source of the album rather than its artist, which will indeed have a greater chance of succeeding across multiple players if that's the main way you like to categorise yuor collection.

[Flea Bag]

Thanks for the feedback... I definitely agree that album classification is a personal thing. Like you, I have considered using the genre field to classify compilations/soundtracks but then I wanted to be able to use Genre for other future classification purposes.

About the statement of using the "Album Artist" to denote the source of Album rather than the artist, well keep in mind that the naming system I proposed above will only be used when there isn't really a clear reason to place an Artist's name in the field. The Notting Hill OST album mentioned at the start of this thread, definitely fails the test as being an album of a single artist and is most defintiely a compilation, so I will probably label as "001B Soundtrack CD". But for albums where an artist has a few collaboration tracks, the album artist will still be the artist whose name is on the spine of the CD.

The most confusing example I have with me now is the 1995 Bon Jovi album "These Days". Besides the normal release of that album CD, which I have, I also have a "These Days Special Edition 2 CD Set" in which the first disc is the same as their 1995 studio album while the second disc has a bonus CD where the first 4 tracks are 'pure' or 'normal' Bon Jovi and the last 4 tracks are live and unusual. The first live track has Jon Bon Jovi inviting Bob Geldof to sing his "I Don't Like Monday's" song with the band, the second has Bon Jovi's drummer Tico Torres singing "Crazy" perviously performed by Patsy Cline, the third has the group's keyboarder David Bryan singing "Tumblin' Dice" by the Rolling Stones and the last has lead guitarist Richie Sambora singing his own hit "Heaven Help Us" from his solo album. Still, in this situation, the "Album Artist" field will be "Bon Jovi" rather than Multi or Various artists, so I won't be using my own naming convention here.

I'm surpirsed to hear that the "Album Artist" field is still not featured in some softwares, but I'm hoping that with popular programmes like iTunes, MC and others which are equipped with the field and which are probably standards to which other future SW will try to improve upon -that my new tagging system remains dependable enough. If a SW doesn't even have an "Album Artist" field, I'll probably never use it to organise my music.


Now I'm getting carried away, but I find the topic of Album classification by source an interesting one to discuss. If there are people new to ripping CDs and organising/tagging their music, I can only advise them to follow a more source-oriented way of classifying their music with the following assumptions:
1. That you have a large enough music collection from various sources and compilations -Large enough that you will end up having two or more of the same track but from different sources,
2. That you care enough about sound quality to want to know which 'album' or source your track comes from,
3. That you want to keep dulicate tracks from different sources and or
4. You're anal enough (like me) to hate inconsistant music classification/tagging.
I don't think my tagging method applies well to people who only download/rip individual tracks (instead of entire albums or discs), who don't have the time and not concerned about where their music's original source was or who are just not concerned about having two or mroe of the same track or who will just delete all duplicated tracks even if they come from different sources.

To explain further my preferences: I have lots of compilation albums and am bothered by the differences between songs that are supposedly written from the same album but end up sounding different, again due to soruce differences.

Another example: I enjoy the song "Amore e Musica", sang by Russel Watson. I first heard the song after recording it from my FM radio. It's quite a nice and overbuilt vintage radio (Accuphase T-100) and my recorder was a DSD enabled Korg MR1000. Still, the song was quite obviously compressed, but nicely musical and emotionally engaging. I liked it so much that I went and bought the CD. I was horribly disappointed. The CD version, while more transparent and less compressed, was sterile, a bit lean and un-involving. I very much preffered my radio-sourced verison and so that version will be under my album of "Rec. Radio FM92.4" along with other songs I recorded from that station for example.

Now if you've just downloaded the song from some miscellaneous website on the internet and just want to know which album it comes from, then you're not going to be bothered about the source and this naming system is not going to be userful to you. On the other hand, if you're like me and have four versions of "Turn Back the Clock" by Johnny Hates Jazz and plenty more examples like that, then you might want to classify them by the physical CD album in which it came from or the downloaded source or like me the analogue recorded source. One observation I've made is that songs sourced from their originally-released albums (espeically in the early 90s and a bit earlier) tend to sound 'better' to me than ones that come from a multi-artist compilation like "Best hits of the 90s" or something like that. In any case, proper compilation albums will have tracks that are tweaked to equal loudness levels among other processing techniques (some of which can make the songs sharp or lacking body or smoother and more plesant) and so you might want to keep track of which source-album/compilation that song came from.

Yet, you might not want to just keep the version that you like and delete the rest. If you're like me (who came from the days of playing music by disc) and who will listen to music by progressing through the album rather than jumping to songs from all over your music collection, then you may appreciate how songs of the same physical album-CD have reasonably compatible loudness levels. Even if you play music back using volume normalising techniques, consdier too that artists and even the people in charge or arranging the songs in a multi-artist compilation album have arranged their songs with a certain flow or order. Quoting from the book High Fidelity (on how to arrange songs in a mix-tape) "A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch…" and so on... I personally feel more complete listening to songs by the album  and so will stick to the above naming methods.

Perhaps I should just include the above explanation in my previous post too for easy reference.

[csimon]

LOL, I'm going to have to have a drink before digesting that!

[6233638]

About the statement of using the "Album Artist" to denote the source of Album rather than the artist, well keep in mind that the naming system I proposed above will only be used when there isn't really a clear reason to place an Artist's name in the field. The Notting Hill OST album mentioned at the start of this thread, definitely fails the test as being an album of a single artist and is most defintiely a compilation, so I will probably label as "001B Soundtrack CD". But for albums where an artist has a few collaboration tracks, the album artist will still be the artist whose name is on the spine of the CD.

Personally, I would have used "Trevor Jones" as the Album Artist for that disc - most places such as Amazon, iTunes etc. use the film's composer as the "Album Artist" for a soundtrack.
 
That way if you have the soundtrack from any other films he has worked on, they all get listed under the same "Artist".

Categories like "001B Soundtrack CD" belong in the Genre field rather than the Album Artist, in my opinion. (and I wouldn't have "001B" either)
 
For that Notting Hill disc, I would have the Genre set as "Soundtrack\Film Soundtrack" - I do this because I also have "Soundtrack\Game Soundtrack" as well. (and I suppose it also allows for things like "Soundtrack\TV Soundtrack")

The most confusing example I have with me now is the 1995 Bon Jovi album "These Days". Besides the normal release of that album CD, which I have, I also have a "These Days Special Edition 2 CD Set" in which the first disc is the same as their 1995 studio album while the second disc has a bonus CD where the first 4 tracks are 'pure' or 'normal' Bon Jovi and the last 4 tracks are live and unusual. The first live track has Jon Bon Jovi inviting Bob Geldof to sing his "I Don't Like Monday's" song with the band, the second has Bon Jovi's drummer Tico Torres singing "Crazy" perviously performed by Patsy Cline, the third has the group's keyboarder David Bryan singing "Tumblin' Dice" by the Rolling Stones and the last has lead guitarist Richie Sambora singing his own hit "Heaven Help Us" from his solo album. Still, in this situation, the "Album Artist" field will be "Bon Jovi" rather than Multi or Various artists, so I won't be using my own naming convention here.

As it's considered to be a "Bon Jovi" album, I would use Bon Jovi as the Album Artist. For the track with Bob Gelfof, Artist (not Album Artist) would be "Bon Jovi; Bob Geldof" (or possibly just Bob Geldof?)
 
Something I also do is use the Keywords field to include information like whether a track is live or not, if it's a bonus track, or a remix.
 
I do this because I often don't enjoy the live tracks on many discs, and the same thing applies to remixes. With the file tagged this way, I can then set up views which exclude them.
 

1. That you have a large enough music collection from various sources and compilations -Large enough that you will end up having two or more of the same track but from different sources,
2. That you care enough about sound quality to want to know which 'album' or source your track comes from,
3. That you want to keep dulicate tracks from different sources and or
4. You're anal enough (like me) to hate inconsistant music classification/tagging.

For this, I use the Description field.
 
For example, I would have "1991 Remaster" or "2012 SACD" as the description for albums where I have multiple versions.
 
I then use custom views that split up the albums by "Album (description)" rather than simply grouping by "Album".

Another example: I enjoy the song "Amore e Musica", sang by Russel Watson. I first heard the song after recording it from my FM radio. It's quite a nice and overbuilt vintage radio (Accuphase T-100) and my recorder was a DSD enabled Korg MR1000. Still, the song was quite obviously compressed, but nicely musical and emotionally engaging. I liked it so much that I went and bought the CD. I was horribly disappointed. The CD version, while more transparent and less compressed, was sterile, a bit lean and un-involving. I very much preffered my radio-sourced verison and so that version will be under my album of "Rec. Radio FM92.4" along with other songs I recorded from that station for example.

I would probably put this as either the Description, or use "Rec. Radio FM92.4" as a keyword. (or both)

Now if you've just downloaded the song from some miscellaneous website on the internet and just want to know which album it comes from, then you're not going to be bothered about the source and this naming system is not going to be userful to you. On the other hand, if you're like me and have four versions of "Turn Back the Clock" by Johnny Hates Jazz and plenty more examples like that, then you might want to classify them by the physical CD album in which it came from or the downloaded source or like me the analogue recorded source. One observation I've made is that songs sourced from their originally-released albums (espeically in the early 90s and a bit earlier) tend to sound 'better' to me than ones that come from a multi-artist compilation like "Best hits of the 90s" or something like that. In any case, proper compilation albums will have tracks that are tweaked to equal loudness levels among other processing techniques (some of which can make the songs sharp or lacking body or smoother and more plesant) and so you might want to keep track of which source-album/compilation that song came from.

Again; the description field is ideal for this. I also fill out the Catalog # and UPC for any of my albums.

[MrC]

Thanks for the feedback... I definitely agree that album classification is a personal thing. Like you, I have considered using the genre field to classify compilations/soundtracks but then I wanted to be able to use Genre for other future classification purposes.

...

Perhaps I should just include the above explanation in my previous post too for easy reference.

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gLMSf4afzo

[Flea Bag]

Personally, I would have used "Trevor Jones" as the Album Artist for that disc - most places such as Amazon, iTunes etc. use the film's composer as the "Album Artist" for a soundtrack.
 
That way if you have the soundtrack from any other films he has worked on, they all get listed under the same "Artist".

Categories like "001B Soundtrack CD" belong in the Genre field rather than the Album Artist, in my opinion. (and I wouldn't have "001B" either)
 
For that Notting Hill disc, I would have the Genre set as "Soundtrack\Film Soundtrack" - I do this because I also have "Soundtrack\Game Soundtrack" as well. (and I suppose it also allows for things like "Soundtrack\TV Soundtrack")
As it's considered to be a "Bon Jovi" album, I would use Bon Jovi as the Album Artist. For the track with Bob Gelfof, Artist (not Album Artist) would be "Bon Jovi; Bob Geldof" (or possibly just Bob Geldof?)
 
Something I also do is use the Keywords field to include information like whether a track is live or not, if it's a bonus track, or a remix.
 
I do this because I often don't enjoy the live tracks on many discs, and the same thing applies to remixes. With the file tagged this way, I can then set up views which exclude them.
 For this, I use the Description field.
 
For example, I would have "1991 Remaster" or "2012 SACD" as the description for albums where I have multiple versions.
 
I then use custom views that split up the albums by "Album (description)" rather than simply grouping by "Album".
I would probably put this as either the Description, or use "Rec. Radio FM92.4" as a keyword. (or both)
Again; the description field is ideal for this. I also fill out the Catalog # and UPC for any of my albums.

Always nice to hear how others organise their music. As mentioned earlier, I've got to make sure my music appears consistant across iTunes, my iPods and most importantly, my Squeezebox Touch which is my primary listening device. Because of that, I've decided to make do with as few tags as possible. I didn't even use the "composer" field for classical music. Instead I use the labels "[Pf], [Cp], [Cd] and [Ar]" behind the artists' name to denote Performer, Composer, Conductor and Arranger. I give priority to the Composer so if for example I have a few Tchaikovsky albums conducted by Fritz Reiner, the Artist Field will be "Tchaikovsky [Cp] -Fritz Reiner [Cd]". I do this because I'm bad at names and find it much easier browsing music by the Composer rather than the conductor.

As for different version of albums, I tend to put that in with the album name like a special Master Sound Gold 24K Super Bit Map editon of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" album which I've labelled as "Kind of Blue [Master Sound SBM]" to separate it from my more normal other "Kind of Blue" CD which is similar but has an additional bonus track.

Tracks which are live I tend to mark [Live] behind the title of the song or [12" version] or [Radio Edit] as examples. Meanwhile, the comments tag I reserve for the initial source like if it was from a CD ripped by EAC, then it would read "(02) EAC1.0B3 Ripped" as opposed to "(01) iTunes Ripped" or "(03A) MR1000 Recorded". Some songs I compress into 128kbps AAC for my iPod Nano, so then the comment for those songs would read "Suitable for iPod Nano 8GB" or for the 320kbps AAC, the comment would read "Suitable for iPod Classic 120GB".

I've not finalised how I'll be tagging my "Album Artist" field yet and will add the Film/TV/other soundtracks as they appear. Thanks for the reminder! I've got some audio that I've recorded from cable tv.

I guess that's it for now. So the only Tags I manually upkeep and edit are the Track title, Album, Album Artist, Genre (only for Jazz at the moment), Track numbers and Comments. All other information that I consider important will have to remain within those fields. I hope it stands the test of time.

I'm currently testing how my new "Album Artist" convention appears in my iPods and through my Squeezebox Touch.

[Flea Bag]

LOL, I'm going to have to have a drink before digesting that!

Please don't honour me with that! It is a long read! The lower portion of that post and others about how I'll classify my music are only intended for new users who may be looking for a way to organise their music! You sound like a pretty experienced one, so I don't see how such posts of mine can add any value.

Cheers!

[Flea Bag]

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gLMSf4afzo