How to organize and tag classical music

[DavidHB]

(09-05-2016 19:57)GregR Wrote:  Just my 2 cents but following DavidHB's suggestion and Simon's schema I reserve artist(s) and albumartist for what is commonly called "popular" music and I am using composer, orchestra, conductor and performer(s) for my "classical" branch, said branch not containing any entries for artist or albumartist. I can find things quickly and the results look great in the various control points I use. Simon's tag formatting feature even lets me lets me work around Kodi's minimally implemented UPNP support.

This is a very valid way of doing things. I think that there is a good case to argue that AlbumArtist is redundant for classical music (though I've always used it and habits die hard). Artist is, for me, a slightly different matter. Often, one is looking for a particular performance of the work, which may imply a particular group of artists (One example: Karajan's 1950s recordings of the Beethoven Symphonies with the Philharmonia, as distinct from his 1970s and 1980s sets with the Berlin Philharmonic). The Artist tag (perhaps in combination with the Album title) can be used to distinguish between these performances.

(09-05-2016 19:57)GregR Wrote:  Just my 3 cents worth but for now I'm not using the group feature, every work is it's own album. Since I am educating myself about classical music I like having different artists interpretations of the same work list next to each other.

I get to a list of different recordings of the same work via the Composition tag. If the title of the work is distinctive ("Alborado del Gracioso"), it may not even be necessary to browse via the composer selection. Grouping (and disc sub-titling where appropriate) is useful to isolate a complete work (or some other logical grouping of tracks) within an album, and provides a path to a recording of a particular work via an album selection. Composition and Grouping are well worth experimenting with, particularly as MP3Tag makes the process so easy.

(09-05-2016 19:57)GregR Wrote:  Just my 4 cents worth but if you can't leave well enough alone like me, Mp3Tag may be the way to go; serious batch processing and powerful macros. You can change thousands of tags at once. I had thousands of tracks with year tags like 1989;1989 and no consistent implementation of album artist vs. albumartist. Mp3Tag cleaned that up and eliminated the need to use Simon's aliasTags feature for fixes.

I absolutely agree. My main frustration with MP3Tag at present is that I can't persuade it to run under Wine in Linux.

David