[Inkmo]

Hey guys. Just wondering if anyone has any good rules of thumb or unique ways for how they tag classical music. I'm finding it a little difficult to decide who gets the artist's tag: the composer or the musician playing the piece?

How do you guys like to organize classical on your sort-by-tag DAPs?

 

[NightOwl]

I'm a drag and drop guy. I use folders by artist then subfolders by album title. I use the composer and the work as the title and the performer as the artist. I use genre that works for me in my tags ( piano concerto, light opera, etc.).
I have a Sansa Fuze and keep all my classical on separate micro sdhc cards except for a few favourite works that I keep in the built-in flash memory.
I'm also anal about my tags in case you can't tell.

 

[Iron_Dreamer]

I use the composer as the artist, with relevant performers/conductors in the album title.

 

[Henry Flower]

Musician(s) in the artist field, composer in the composer field. Title of the piece in the album field, title of the movement in the title field.

Where I have multiple recordings of the same work by different artists (or the same artist from different dates), I put the distinguishing information in the album field (e.g. 'Symphony 3 (Kleiber 1964) in D flat').

Incidentally, do the sansa players use the composer field? It doesn't seem to exist on my friend's fuze, but is there any way to make it appear?

 

[zumaro]

Same here as Iron Dreamer. I more usually listen to music by thinking of a composer than a performing artist, but the ipod is set up to catalog mainly by artist, hence the use of this field to hold composer information. With the use of tags its an easy search to find the performers wherever you may place that information, but I also put it in the album field.

 

[lionel marechal]

Itunes Here :

Artist :
I use artist ... for the artist. For a concerto, the solist, for a symphony the director, in some other cases I need to pick. Rarely do I put 2 names, only in some casesfor exemple Menuhin, Kempff for the beethoven violin/piano sonatas.
Usually the full list of artists is in the comment field to help searches in Itunes.
Last name, Firsrt Name

Composer :
Composer, with his birth date to help me memorize them a bit

Album :
Composer - Album - Artists
For exemple
Vivaldi - 4 Seasons - Harnoncourt
Villa-Lobos - Préludes, Etudes - Julian Bream
Chopin - Nocturnes cd1 - Samson Francois
Chopin - Nocturnes cd2 - Samson Francois

I use redundancy there so that when I select a genre, or an artist, or any selection, my album list is still sorted properly.

The album title is as well the name of the folder they are stored ini, directly under a classical folder on an external usb hard drive.

Genre :
I use a non standard genre, so I kow if I assigned it myself or not.

I have :
Classical Instrumental
Classical Chamber
Classical Orchestra
Classical Opera
Classical Vocal
Classical Contemporary

I hope this helps,
I have around 2000 albums tagged that way and it works well.

Better being structured and stick to it is critical when you have a lot of albums.

Lionel

 

[progo]

Composer as artist, because that's what he is. And most apps are designed for pop so using artist creatively works here best.

 

[Rlynn]

Album: Composer: Work Title (Short form)
Title: Movement number and name/marking
Artist: Conductor; Orchestra; Soloist or
Ensemble or
First Soloist, Second Soloist
Composer: Composer (no dates- genre has the style/period)
Grouping: Complete work name
Conductor: Conductor
Performer: Soloist
Ensemble: Orchestra or Ensemble
Label: Label
Genre: Form/type Style (such as Symphony Romantic, Chamber Baroque)
Comment: Label:CD number; Album Title (if there is an actual title, there usually isn't

The newer iPods support Genre and Composer and also now have a two line display making unnecessary to add the performers to the "Album" title. I've been trying to get as many tags filled as possible. Even though iTunes presently doesn't use them, they may in the future and other database programs use them if I should decide to change. All names are Last Name, First Name or only last name for some conducters. (How many Toscaninis are there?) Putting the complete work title in Grouping has additional feature of letting me search or make a smart playlist for forms and instruments such as anything with "flute" or "d minor"

Recently I have been using dbPowerAmp to rip and getting most of the information from the AMG database. I find this information to be much more consistent and complete. I also use MP3Tag with the regular expressions to clean everything up and keep the data consistent.

 

[milkweg]

My classical collection is a mess because the online cd database sometimes tags with conductor and other times by composer. One day I will alter the tags to all be done by original composer but for now I just drop them all into a folder called 'classical' and make sure the tag for genre says classical too.

Some of the file names for classical recordings is extremely long too and I found out that this media player I have can't handle some of the really long names so had to shorten some of them before it could.

 

[LarryS]

It may be overkill, but I use a variant of the system outlined here:

Taming iTunes for Classical Music

 

[fatcat28037]

I'm not a classical music collictor, however I know that Music Collector software has recently made changes to help better ogranize classical music. You may want to see what they do.
http://www.collectorz.com/music/

 

[krmathis]

Its still a work in process for me...

 

[NightOwl]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Henry Flower /img/forum/go_quote.gif Musician(s) in the artist field, composer in the composer field. Title of the piece in the album field, title of the movement in the title field. Where I have multiple recordings of the same work by different artists (or the same artist from different dates), I put the distinguishing information in the album field (e.g. 'Symphony 3 (Kleiber 1964) in D flat'). Incidentally, do the sansa players use the composer field? It doesn't seem to exist on my friend's fuze, but is there any way to make it appear?

I haven't been able to find it.

 

[scompton]

Quote:

Originally Posted by lionel marechal /img/forum/go_quote.gif Itunes Here : Artist : I use artist ... for the artist. For a concerto, the solist, for a symphony the director, in some other cases I need to pick. Rarely do I put 2 names, only in some casesfor exemple Menuhin, Kempff for the beethoven violin/piano sonatas. Usually the full list of artists is in the comment field to help searches in Itunes. Last name, Firsrt Name Composer : Composer, with his birth date to help me memorize them a bit Album : Composer - Album - Artists For exemple Vivaldi - 4 Seasons - Harnoncourt Villa-Lobos - Préludes, Etudes - Julian Bream Chopin - Nocturnes cd1 - Samson Francois Chopin - Nocturnes cd2 - Samson Francois I use redundancy there so that when I select a genre, or an artist, or any selection, my album list is still sorted properly. The album title is as well the name of the folder they are stored ini, directly under a classical folder on an external usb hard drive. Genre : I use a non standard genre, so I kow if I assigned it myself or not. I have : Classical Instrumental Classical Chamber Classical Orchestra Classical Opera Classical Vocal Classical Contemporary I hope this helps, I have around 2000 albums tagged that way and it works well. Better being structured and stick to it is critical when you have a lot of albums. Lionel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Henry Flower /img/forum/go_quote.gif Musician(s) in the artist field, composer in the composer field. Title of the piece in the album field, title of the movement in the title field. Where I have multiple recordings of the same work by different artists (or the same artist from different dates), I put the distinguishing information in the album field (e.g. 'Symphony 3 (Kleiber 1964) in D flat'). Incidentally, do the sansa players use the composer field? It doesn't seem to exist on my friend's fuze, but is there any way to make it appear?

I pretty much use Lionel's scheme. For the track title I ususally put the composer, title of the piece and the movement. Like Henry, I'll put the year in the album title if I need to, to avoid ambiguity.

For operas, I put the conductor in the artist field, and the other artists at the end of the album name. Each track is tagged with the act, scene, aria title, and characters in the track. This is pretty time consuming because it never comes from a database like this, but it really gives a lot of information.

Henry, do any players display the composer? I have an old Rio and a couple of iPods and they don't. I really can't imaging using anything but the iPod for classical because of the gapless playback. Gapless playback isn't important for discs that have one track per movement, but there's enough discs that aren't like that (any opera) to drive me crazy when listening.

 

[Inkmo]

Hey again, guys. Thanks for all the responses. To the best of my knowledge, the Fuze makes no use of the composer tag. Also, while I have more 'classical' music than the average bear, I don't think it's enough to merit splitting it up further by genre. Basically, I want my genre tags in order so I can listen to a lot of one type of music on random. FWIW, I'm doing the same thing with my other genres. Hardcore, Crust, Rapcore, and some Rock (Patti Smith and Television) have all been compressed into 'Punk' for the sake of this player. Dunno if I'm gonna break New Wave up into Synthpop and Post-Punk, yet. It's gonna be about making things easily searchable on the player, with no one genre only having one or two groups in it, nor being so large that it's an honest pain to thumb through. Getting my tags consistent (especially genre, which is so subjective) is gonna be a work in progress, I can tell.

As for artist/composer/album tribulations: I haven't put it into effect yet, but I think I'm gonna set up a double standard for now. I might put composer as artist for albums that consist solely of that composer's music. I think for albums where one artist plays works by several composers, I might list the artist/conductor/soloist as the artist and put the composer in the album tag with the piece. The main problem is that I'm not such a classical enthusiast that I amass multiple copies of the same works by different people/on different labels, and also I'm less likely to remember who did what/what's on a different album.

Still feeling a little stuck, but I'm working through the links everyone posted. Thanks again.