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[nguyenkhoang]

Dear all,

I've just begun the monumental task of ripping my large CLASSICAL music collection to WMA lossless for archival and convenience reasons, and I must say, I've reached an impasse of sorts regarding TAGGING.

As many of you know, classical music recordings do not tag as well as your everyday pop music recordings.  On your regular pop CDs/Albums, the CD has a definite name, definite artist, each track is a separate song, and you could care less about the composer (as least I dont anyway!).  This makes tagging very straightforward.

On classical recordings, there could be multiple performers for a given "song" or composition (say Perlman and Williams doing the Paganini duos), and each composition is essentially broken up into different "movements" which are separate tracks on the CD. In addition, many of the classical music CDs don't even have proper album names...example, the CD by Telarc feature Lang Lang playing at the Seiji Ozawa Hall in Massachusetts!

Now since I was lazy, I didn't bother inputting the "composer" field and instead just put the composer in the "Artist" field so I can find them the same way as for my pop artists.  So, here was my bright idea, but I'm finding out the pros and cons and it's bugging me:

Artist = Composer [Mahler, Gustav]
Album = Composition Name or Piece [Mahler Symphony No. 6 in A minor (M.T. Thomas, Cond)] or [Mozart Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major (Midori) K.364]
Name = Name of the Movement [I. Andante comodo]
Date (year) = year the CD was issued.
Genre = Classical

Pros --- I can always find a particular piece by clicking on Artist (Mahler) then looking at the album for the particular piece; Name of the track is kept much shorter than if I included the composition and movement name in the Name field. In short, very conveninent if I mainly interested in the Composer/Composition.

Cons -- Plenty of Cons...especially if I am interested in a particular person or "group" like the Borodin Quartet, since I've embedded the "player/player group/emsemble" in the Album name.  In addition, I've renamed all my track numbers to correspond with the individual composition, so my albums are essentially compositions.  This gets especially frustrating with multi-composer albums (ala Midori playing snippets from different composers).  And what if it was an "unnamed group" made of some famous players like perlman and ashkenazy, et al. I couldn't list all those guys/gals in my Album name.

Argh...
1. Should I put the names of the players and conductors in the Artist field...this would be a pain because there are no standards, like should I list the Cleveland Symphony or list the Conductor of the piece?
2. Should I not bother reconstructing the original album altogether since I've re-named Album = Composition, and instead use the playlist to re-create the album...like playlist would have "Midori playing Mozart" or "Richter playing Beethoven".  Then when I need to find the physical album again, it's so difficult because I don't really have the album name (sometimes you wanna re-read the liner notes!).

Anyway, this has gone on long enough...can any of you classical music afficionados suggest what would be a coherent classical music tagging strategy that you've used?

Nguyen

[Deivit]

There was a very interesting thread on this same issue 4 or 5 months ago... perhaps even more than that. I'm gonna try to find it. You may find useful tips there.
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Listening to: 'Was I Right or Wrong' from 'The Essential Lynyrd Skynyrd [Cd 1]' by 'Lynyrd Skynyrd' on Media Center 10

[Deivit]

Sorry, no luck with the search feature

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Listening to: 'No such luck' from 'Jennie' by 'Jennie Smith' on Media Center 10

[Nolonemo]

I think your approach is fundamentally sound - it's the same one I use.  I also treat each piece on a CD as a separate "album," which it sounds like you're doing.  On recital discs, I put the performer in the artitst filed and append the composer to the name of the piece, unless it's a multi-movement piece in which case it becomes its own album.  I have been dumping performer, orchestra, etc, and disk information in the comment field.

You can create any number of custom fields in MC9, you could have one for "composer" "ensemble" or whatever you want.

There was a thread about searching on fields containing multiple entries, within the last two months.

[Rands]

There are ton of tagging fields and ways to display, sort, and search them with MC10.  If you don't care about a release (and, with classical, you usally don't), then I would use the artist field to represent the key feature of that particular recording of a piece (such as a featured soloist), the name to represent the name of the piece, the album to represent the setting, the composer field for the composer, date for the date of the recording, and maybe even a few custom fields for conductor, date of composition, geographical region, style classification (early music, baroque, choral), etc.

If you keep the data in separate fields, then it is easier to create view schemes and searches.  

[Nolonemo]

I think your approach is fundamentally sound - it's the same one I use.  I also treat each piece on a CD as a separate "album," which it sounds like you're doing.  The naming is as you're doing, on multiple versiions, I append the conductor or performer -- [Symphony No. 5 (Furtwangler)] [Symphony No. 5 (von Karajan)].  On recital discs, I put the performer in the artist filed and append the composer to the name of the piece, unless it's a multi-movement piece in which case the piece becomes its own album.  I have been dumping performer, orchestra, etc, and disk information in the comment field.

You can create any number of custom fields in MC9 besides the advanced ones that are already there, you could have one for "composer" "ensemble" "extra artist" or disk id or whatever you want.

There was a thread about searching on fields containing multiple entries, within the last two months.

[DMC-A1]

I also use the "artist" field for composer for the same reasons.  But only with the last name for quick tagging.  Later I get all the works together an populate the "Composer" field all at once with the composer's last name, first and date he lived with data from AMG.

For the performer:  I populate the "Album Artist" field with the performing group name.  For example:

Artist = Beethoven
Album = Romantic Moments (Box Set)
Album Artist = Sofia Philharmonia Orchestra
Name = Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major, O. 58, Andante con moto
Composer = Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827)

[bvm]

I've wrestled with this a lot as well.  Like you, I treat each major multi-track composition as an "Album".  This works pretty well.  I don't generally do it, though, for little works that just happen to occupy two (or even three) tracks; for those I'll have the composition and movement name both in the name field, so that the album stays together.  Some of them I plan to re-rip when MC makes it easy to rip multiple tracks into one (all those 2-track Bach prelude & fugue pairs, for example).

Since there's a Composer tag, and both MC and the iPod support it, I've been putting the composer there.  Unfortunately, the iPod only partially supports it -- it lets you search by composer, but it doesn't display the composer when you're playing a piece.  So I find that when I play my iPod on shuffle (which I like much more than I ever thought I would), there's no way to find the composer for pieces I don't immediately recognize.  My current approach is to copy the Composer into the Album Artist field, then tell the iPod plugin to use that for the Artist field.  That way I get the composer displayed on the iPod, but in MC, where there's no limited field of view, I can see the full credits.

I'm also sticking the album label & # (Telarc 80202) in a separate field, so I can still get the whole album together if I want.

[Nolonemo]

bvm: Very cool!   I just select all my classical albums and copy the artist field to album artist (since I now have composers in "artist").  Then for all my classical tracks, I rename "artist" with the performer(s).  Now I can have columns for genre, album artist (auto), artist, and album.  So I can find by either composer or classical performer.  But the naming for my jazz and pop collection still works, since they will display under album artist (auto) including the compilations that will still display as "multiple artists" under album artist (auto).  And I can transfer to the Zen seeing the composer by selecting album artist auto for the artist field as I presently do.  Thanks!

[Jaguu]

My setting is:

Artist: Beethoven  (for searching convenience)
Composer: Beethoven, Ludvig Van
Album: Symphony 4+7 (usually I simplify this just to get the main content (good for searching)
Name: Symphony No.4 in B Flat Major,Op.60
Movement: 2. Adagio
Opus: Op.60 (repeated, so I can search for numbers on my library)
Conductor: Karajan, Herbert von
Orchestra: Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
Soloists: xyz (violin), abc (cello) (where appropriate) (list field)
Choir: Name of the choir
Subgenre: Symphony

I try to avoid classical mixes as they are very time consuming to tag (every track with another conductor, orchestra, soloists etc.). You can create the extra fields in MC9.  

In this way I can search for Karajan, all the orchestras he directed and what they performed, or search all works (opus) of a composer and find the missing ones.

It is still not perfect, the soloist  / performer / instrument area could be improved, on the other hand it is very time consuming to do and you have to make a decision how much time you want to spent on that.

[nguyenkhoang]

Dear all,

Thanks for the replies...these are all good suggestions.  I think I'm trying to find a happy medium between special tagging efforts and convenience, and as Jaguu mentioned, some of the mixes are very time consuming if you are anal about tagging all the CD contents' information.  

One thing I'm worried about is creating special new fields that are not default, as I'm afraid will they not transfer when I burn my WMA lossless onto the archival DVD.  I think I'll re-do my tagging as follows:

Artist: Beethoven

Composer: Beethoven, Ludwig Van (1770-1827)

Album Artist: San Francisco Symphony Orch. (T.A. Tilson, Cond.) or the name of the one or two famous soloists if the composition is for solos

Album: Beethoven Symphony No. 4 in B flat major, Op. 60 [having the composer's name on the Album makes me search for albums much easier!]

Content Distributor: Decca, etc. [BTW...I didn't even realized this field was there...I was looking for "record label" or "label", and I was putting "DECCA" after the album name!]
Date (yea): 1999

Genre: Classical

I'd like to add a subgenre too, but I'm rather lazy.  Anyhow, the subgenre is normally already in the name...Concerto No. 5, Symphony No. 3, etc.  However, I still don't have a great way to "recompile" a "mixed hits" album back to it's original album form, since I like separating out the different compositions in a "mixed hits" album for easier searching...or maybe this isn't necessary, as I can always create a playlist based on the same track order number as the original album!

Thanks guys for your posts!

[Nolonemo]

I created 4 classical genres -

Classical
Classical - chamber
Classical - solo (ie piano sonatas, guitar works)
Opera

This helps me zero in on what I want to listen to faster, and helps with list overload on my portable