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[JoanRivers]

Have seen comments by people in on the web that they had to do a lot of redos because they had problems with their tagging.
So, before I start burning CDs for the first time, I thought I'd try and avoid such problems.
Does MC handle tagging adequately or do you need to 'tweak' settings to get to work properly?
Is there a tagging standard that works well across various products?
Can you set rules so that, e.g. the initial letter of every word is not cap?
What about Various Artists, compilation albums by an act, classical music with composers etc?
Basically, I'd like to know if this is something that I need to worry about.
Hopefully the defaults for MC mean I don't have to tinker with the settings etc.
If I do, link to relevant info appreciated.

[Spike1000]

My 2P on this as I've just ripped my CD collection for the seemingly 'obligatory' 2nd time 

I used DBPowerAmp to RIP to FLAC and store on a NAS box. I used many of the default settings within DBPowerAmp as I made an assumption that they know what they are doing better than me. One change I did make was to pad track/Disc numbers with leading zeros 01, 02, 03 etc as sorting can go awry with 1,2,3,10,11 etc etc. I only write the albums year to the tag rather than year and month.

I like the 'checksum' track verification within DBPowerAmp.
I like the error correction within DBPowerAmp.
I like the relative volume level tag added during ripping.
Perfect tunes helped me get large, quality artwork and almost automatically deal with typos and mistakes in the track listings databases by picking the best candidates from 4 separate sites. It was all quite painless.

Capitalisation seems to be reasonably consistent - 'big' words have a leading capital, little joining words (and, if, the of etc) don't, but is not a big thing for me if it's not 100%.

I've started with with artists A-Z, have have cut my teeth of them and now need to address the 'various' and compilation albums I have, which is about 20% of my collection. The 'various' albums does add a few challenges and I need to sit down and rip a few CDs and see what will work best for those - might get time this weekend.

The format has ended up like this:

Folders:
D:\Media\Music\Band Name\Album Name\

Filename:
xx Band Name - Track Name.flac
(where xx is the track number)

Tags set:
      Artist
      Album Artist
      Album
      Track (xx) (leading '0')
      Year (xxxx)
      Genre
      Disc Number (xx) (leading '0')

DPPoweramp puts a leading 'The' *after* the band name (eg "The Fall" is recorded as "Fall, The", I quite like this format)

I've also had some existing MP3 files to re-do the artwork and re-tag.
Perfect tunes re-did the artwork virtually automatically! Result!

I re-tagged and made corrections using the great MP3Tag http://www.mp3tag.de/en/ program that I've been using for years. It's easy to see and fix inconsistencies or missing tags/art with this great application.

Now here's how I work differently, MC mounts my NAS Read Only so it can never change any of my files/tags; I prefer to do this manually, but now it's done it's done and I don't expect to make any changes. When I rip new music I'll rip it to the standard I use and just add it to my NAS, job done

Now, if there's a feature in MC that I would ever like to apply to my files I can mount them Read Write, make the change and then make them Read Only again. (adding a relative volume level tag to my old MP3s might be an idea if this option is available. . .  not looked at that yet)

Will report back when I've worked out how to deal with 'various', 'compilations' and 'soundtracks' . . . as consistency across those is a bit more fiddly.

Hope my experience is of some use.

Spike

[CountryBumkin]

I suppose it depends on how anal you are about your music collection - and what you do with it.
 
I simply insert the CD, most of the time the album name, artists, track names, and cover art are automatically identified and I hit "rip". Sometimes the track info/names are not listed, so I manually type them in off the CD jacket.

I don't do anything more than that and I have no complaints. Everything displays fine, playlists work, and the music sounds great.

In full disclosure, I don't care as much about Audio - I'm into collecting Movies and TV Shows.  

[ferday]

MC is an extremely powerful tagging program, there isn't any need to use something else
It also uses secure rip which is a checksum for perfect ripping
The cover art tool in MC works great

What MC doesn't do well is get CD data during rip, the database (YADB?) isn't the greatest.  It never matters to me because I'm way too specific about my tagging so I do it all manually anyways.  It is nice when MC finds the track names at least ha ha

With expressions MC can fix your capitals, put your files into any folder structure you want, and an amazing amount of other things.  It's much much better than mp3tag but the learning curve is steeper, no doubt

[kstuart]

Ultimately, all of the tagging databases are crowd sourced.

This means that they are riddled with errors and inconsistencies.

If your CDs are all Top 40 with millions of sales, probably most errors are corrected by someone.

But if you have any more obscure CDs, you will likely have to do some manual editing anyway.  Some of them won't even be in the database, for example 1980s or early 1990s CD releases of albums that were then released as remasters with bonus tracks in 2000.  The databases won't even have your version.

A classic one is where you have two different albums by Fred Smith.  One of the albums' data is uploaded as "Fred Smith" and the other is uploaded as "Smith, Fred".

So ultimately you have to do some manual editing if you want to be able to find and play your albums.

[JoanRivers]

My 2P on this as I've just ripped my CD collection for the seemingly 'obligatory' 2nd time 

Spike

Thanks Spike! I'll copy your reply to a doc for when I finally get around to ripping my CDs
(and tagging them)!

It is depressing though that you need to rip your CDs again if you have tagging 'issues'. It's
not just that you need to spend all that time retagging your CDs?

My CD collection is a mixture of popular titles and also obscure stuff (I assume...I'm not a hipster though!).

This is probably off topic, but I do like the thought of being able to 'create' orginal release albums from the
albums that I have with "bonus" songs on them and a re-arranged track listing, which bugs me no end!

[Listener]

Thanks Spike! I'll copy your reply to a doc for when I finally get around to ripping my CDs
(and tagging them)!

It is depressing though that you need to rip your CDs again if you have tagging 'issues'. It's
not just that you need to spend all that time retagging your CDs?

My CD collection is a mixture of popular titles and also obscure stuff (I assume...I'm not a hipster though!).

This is probably off topic, but I do like the thought of being able to 'create' orginal release albums from the
albums that I have with "bonus" songs on them and a re-arranged track listing, which bugs me no end!

You don't necessarily have to rip your CDs again to fix tagging errors.  Some suggestions:

1. Look at the tag values your ripping software suggests before you start the actual ripping process. Make any corrections you think necessary before ripping starts.  If the ripping software has an auto-rip feature to start ripping as soon as a CD is inserted in the drive, turn off that feature.  No program has a perfect database for looking up CD tags.  If you don't look at the tags the program proposes, you wont know where the ripped files will be placed and what tags ar ein those files.

2. Pick a fairly small set of CDs to experiment with.  Rip those CDs and then use existing views to browse your files.  Once you understand how your software works and how you want to use it, then you are tready to start ripping your entire CD collection.

3. When you are browsing you collection and see that some tags aren't right, take a moment to fix the problem while you are aware of it.  MC's editing features make tag editing quick and easy.