Tagging Classical Music

[Michael Peters]

I just bought a flac album from Magnatune -
Elizabeth Wolff - Moments Musicaux

Here is what the file listing looks like (magnatune had spaces which I
replaced with _ as I can't stand spaces in a file name):


01-Sergei_Rachmaninoff_-_6_Moments_Musicaux_Op._16_-_Andantino-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
02-Sergei_Rachmaninoff_-_6_Moments_Musicaux_Op._16_-_Allegretto-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
03-Sergei_Rachmaninoff_-_6_Moments_Musicaux_Op._16_-_Andante_cantabile-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
04-Sergei_Rachmaninoff_-_6_Moments_Musicaux_Op._16_-_Presto-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
05-Sergei_Rachmaninoff_-_6_Moments_Musicaux_Op._16_-_Adagio_sostenuto-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
06-Sergei_Rachmaninoff_-_6_Moments_Musicaux_Op._16_-_Maestoso-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
07-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_3_Moments_Musicaux_Op._7_-_Allegramente-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
08-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_3_Moments_Musicaux_Op._7_-_Con_moto-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
09-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_3_Moments_Musicaux_Op._7_-_Tranquillo_e_semplice-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
10-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_4_Moments_Musicaux_Op._84_-_Con_moto-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
11-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_4_Moments_Musicaux_Op._84_-_Moderato_e_grazioso-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
12-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_4_Moments_Musicaux_Op._84_-_Maestoso-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac
13-Moritz_Moszkowski_-_4_Moments_Musicaux_Op._84_-_Animato_ma_non_troppo-Elizabeth_Wolff.flac

1-6 all have the same title set in the title field (Sergei
Rachmaninoff - 6 Moments)
7-9 all have the same title set in the title field (Moritz Moszkowski
- 3 Moments)
10-13 all have the same title set in the title field (Moritz
Moszkowski - 4 Moments)

Other than the track numbers of the sets being different, from the
sets there is no way to tell the tracks apart via the tags. The track
names however contain information not in the vorbis comments.

What would be the proper vorbis comment field to add to contain the
additional data?


--
http://mpeters.us/

[Jason Voegele]

On Wednesday 23 March 2005 01:15 am, Michael Peters wrote:
[snip]
> What would be the proper vorbis comment field to add to contain the
> additional data?

I recommend you read the following. It has very good general tagging
recommendations.

http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html

--
Jason Voegele


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQBCRAo6He0AH0X+WAIRAiaNAJ92bun9K9iS2Vq5TJ168l jE5/PpkwCfbTJH
1KMogxL9FE4sOrjcHLn5YLM=
=+5W8
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[ceejay]

Apologies if I'm hijacking your thread but it had the closest match I could see...... I am right at the beginning of using this stuff, I'm starting to rip my music libary (with EAC, MAREO, FLAC and a bunch of other stuff) with the intention of building up a library to be served out by slimserver. For the pop/rock stuff, no problem.

But for my classical music (which is why I'm going lossless in the first place) I'm getting a real headache trying to work out how to organise, never mind tag, the music. Ok, so I use "artist" (really composer) as the top level... but then, what do you do with all those mixed composer CDs (a Ravel and a Rachmaninov piano concerto, perhaps)? How do you deal with the fact that you probably have multiple recordings of the more popular pieces? How do you persuade your library to deliver tracks 1-4 of that 8 track CD which correspond to what you really want, which is a particular symphony?

My head is spinning. Help much appreciated.

[jth]

You have to think outside the limitations of the CD to get the most benefit out of your slimserver, in my opinion.

I'll break up a classical CD into works (where a work is roughly any piece 10 minutes or longer) and split those into albums. The album tags look like this:

Piano Concerto No. 21 In C Major, K. 467 / Ashkenazy / Philharmonia O / London 443727

Piano Concerto No. 21 In C Major, K. 467 / Brendel / Marriner / ASMF / Philips 442269

Now all of the files from the CD(s) can go into one directory. So you have the benefits of browsing by tags for the individual works or browsing by directory for the original CD.

[ceejay]

Thanks, jth, I'm sure you're right. Its the contrast with the pop/rock world (for which most of these tools have been designed) which is important.

In that world, "album" is usually very important and mostly = "cd" (except for double albums and compilations!).

In the classical world, as you say, we need to break the link between album and cd for most tagging purposes. So, if I've got this right, I use the tags to map
artist = composer (eg mozart)
album = work (eg piano concerto 21 etc)
track = cd track, usually movement
... and then any other tags I can find for the rest. I'd be interested to know what other tags to use, and what tools people use to populate them. As I said earlier, my ripping process uses EAC/MAREO as the front end, and its working very well for the pop/rock stuff.

And, just to confirm my understanding, jth, you keep a CD together in a folder so you can get back to that structure should you need to?

Sounding good, just a few details to get hold of and I'll be off!

Thanks

[jth]

That's pretty much right, except I map TRACKNUMBER to the movement of the work, not the TRACKNUMBER of the CD. Although as long as the TRACKNUMBERs ascend properly, it's probably not an issue. Now there are quite a few tags available for classical music, but the slimserver doesn't support many of them. Here's the compromise I use for tagging classical:

id3v2:
TPE1 (Lead performer(s)/Soloist(s)): Marin Marais
TALB (Album/Movie/Show title): Suite In D Major (Pièces De Violes, 3me Livre 1711) / Spectre De La Rose / Naxos 553081
TIT2 (Title/songname/content description): Prélude
COMM (Comments): ()[]: uberstd 3.90.3 mp3gain
TCON (Content type): Classical (32)
TYER (Year): 1994
TRCK (Track number/Position in set): 1
TSSE (Software/Hardware and settings used for encoding): LAME v3.90.3
TCOM (Composer): Marin Marais
TPE2 (Band/orchestra/accompaniment): Spectre De La Rose

flac:
comments: 13
comment[0]: ARTIST=Marin Marais
comment[1]: TITLE=Prélude
comment[2]: ALBUM=Suite In D Major (Pièces De Violes, 3me Livre 1711) / Spectre De La Rose / Naxos 553081
comment[3]: DATE=1994
comment[4]: TRACKNUMBER=1
comment[5]: ENCODING=EAC 0.95pb5 / FLAC 1.1.2 -8
comment[6]: GENRE=Classical
comment[7]: COMPOSER=Marin Marais
comment[8]: BAND=Spectre De La Rose
comment[9]: REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_PEAK=0.25112915
comment[10]: REPLAYGAIN_TRACK_GAIN=+8.12 dB
comment[11]: REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK=0.42681885
comment[12]: REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_GAIN=+5.65 dB

I also use EAC for ripping, but I wrote a wrapper script around the command line tools id3v2 and metaflac for tagging by hand. freedb/cddb aren't up to par for classical music, I'm afraid.

My directory structure is "composer/CD(s)". If it is a multi-disc album it all goes into the same directory. I use ascending track numbers for these multi-disc sets (i.e. CD1 trackno 1-23, CD2 trackno 24-58, etc) because again, I don't think it makes sense sticking to the limitations of CDs for these.

Good luck! Tagging classical music is a pain, but hopefully you'll only have to do it once.

[pfarrell]

On Sun, 2005-04-17 at 13:20 -0700, ceejay wrote:
> Thanks, jth, I'm sure you're right. Its the contrast with the pop/rock
> world (for which most of these tools have been designed) which is
> important.
>
> In the classical world, as you say, we need to break the link between
> album and cd for most tagging purposes.

This quickly raises a question that pushes the discussion out of just
"ripping" and into library management. In the pop world,
the album/cd binding is important, probably more so than anything else,
and so it is natural that the file structure of the tunes is
usually in something like
/genre/artist/album/song

But Genres are pretty weak as an idea, and subjective, and
more importantly, subject to change over time.

In classical music, the "most important" characteristic
depends on who is looking and when.
Sometimes I want all my Beethoven together, and sometimes all
my Symphonies, and other times, instrumentation is important (full
orchestra, chamber group, orchestral work transcribed for piano, or
vice versa, etc.)

On of the major reason that SlimServer 6.0 uses a database
is to enable more rational library management. Using the
DBMS capabilities, you can segregate the physical storage
of the bit streams from the information about the songs
and look at it from lots of ways.

This is just begining. We will need tools
to manage the databases, add in data from
sources besides CDDB/freedb, etc.

It will probably take "forever" in internet time,
a year or two

Pat

--
Pat
http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimse...msoftware.html

[John Stimson]

What I am doing for now is treating multi-movement works as individual "albums" even though several concerti/symphonies come on a CD or set of CDs.

Artist: Composer ; Performer
Album: Work [catalog no.]
Title: Movement
Year: date of composition

For collections of similar 1-2 movement works (like The Well-Tempered Clavier) I keep them all together as one album.

I haven't really decided what to do with "best of" type collections, which are typically a mixture of individual pieces and multiple-movement works.

Ultimately I would like to use the proper full set of tags, so that Album and Artist can be used to file the collection of tracks, and the title of the work gets its own tag, and the composer gets its own tage.

I would like to see Slimserver support the "Work title" and "composer" tags...and not just by shuffling in the composers into the "browse by artist" list.

For "work title" support, I would like each multi-track piece of music to be treated as a single entity by the shuffle play routine. I'm sick of having "Sgt. Pepper" get cut off suddenly at the end rather than segueing into "With a Little Help From My Friends"...

[John Stimson]

I've researched this a bit more, and have come up with a tagging scheme that I think makes sense. I'd like to get a little discussion of this before I submit my ideas as feature requests.

From the ID3v4 specification, these are the tags that are needed or desired:

TALB: title of the CD/album the work is on
TIT1: opus/work title for multi-part compositions (optional)
TIT2: movement or song title

TRCK: should be the track position on the CD that the work is on (order within the opus is the same as order on the disc)

TCOM: Composer
TEXT: Lyricist

TPE1: soloist(s) or performer/band for popular music
TPE2: ensemble
TPE3: conductor
TPE4: remixing artist

TOPE: original artist when the song is a cover (not relevant to classical)

TKEY: key in which the music starts -- extremely optional

TSOA: Album sort key
TSOP: Performer sort key
TSOT: Title sort key


Behaviors I would like to see from slimserver:
When the TIT1 field is present, have the option to treat TIT1 instead of TIT2 as the "song title" when shuffling or browsing.

Thus, an album that contained a 3-movement sonata along with a few 1-track inventions, would shuffle as

1. sonata
2. invention #1
3. invention #2
4. invention #3

instead of

1. sonata movement 1
2. sonata movement 2
3. sonata movement 3
4. invention #1
5. invention #2
6. invention #3

The latter method results in getting the movements separately and out of order in a shuffled playlist. Perhaps add another shuffle mode:
Shuffle by track -> Shuffle by opus -> Shuffle by album -> Don't shuffle


I would also like to browse by composer (TCOM) or by soloist/ensemble (TPE1 + TPE2). For the composer search, use TPE1 where TCOM is not present so that the browse list still includes all available tracks.


I would like slimserver to recognize the sort key tags TSOA, TSOP, TSOT if present

[John Stimson]

By the way, what is the list of tags that are currently recognized by slimserver? My FLAC library currently sports the tags

ARTIST
ALBUM
TITLE
DATE
TRACKNUMBER
GENRE

rather than the ID3v2 equivalents of
TPE1 (ARTIST)
TALB (ALBUM)
TIT2 (TITLE)
TRCK (TRACKNUMBER)

GENRE does not seem to be covered in the ID3v4 spec, and DATE could be one of three options: TDRL (release date), TDOR (original release date), or TDRC (recording date).

It seems like a tag for the composition date would be useful as well, perhaps TDOR could be used for that.