Tagging Jazz CD's For Individual Performers

[billiam]

Is it possible to add each individual performer and instrument played via tags? And if so, is it possible to display this info for each track?

I realize that it would be a manual process, but for me it would be worth it, because when I'm listening to Jazz mp3's, I'll often wonder, "Who's playing that trumpet solo?" Also, it would be nice to be able to search a collection and be able to, for example, make a playlist of all tracks by a performer who might not be the main artist.

I've looked everywhere, and I can't seem to find an answer.

Thanks,

Bill

[ralphpnj]

Hi Bill,

First of all welcome to the forum. I hope that you will be able to find an answer to your very intriguing question.

As far as I know you can add just about any "tag" you want to a given mp3 file using a good tag editor such as mp3tag (http://www.mp3tag.de/en/). It's the other part of your question, the part about displaying and using all these custom tags that I'm not to sure about. There may be a plug-in that will allow you to use custom tags so you may need to cross post your question on the "3rd Party Plugins" section of the forum.

I think that the Sooloos interface does more of what you're looking for but SqueezeCenter's use of tags is fairly basic and very straight forward with regard to the music library that it build and search functions within the music library.

For example if one has several recordings by Mal Waldron where one is tagged as "Mal Waldron", the next one is tagged as "Mal Waldron Trio" and the third one is tagged as "Mal Waldron Quartet" here's how they get handled by SqueezeCenter:

A search on the term "Mal Waldron" will find all three recordings, which is good. However if one is playing the recording tagged as "Mal Waldron" and one wants to find other recordings by the same artist by using the file info dialogs, SqueezeCenter would not find the other two recordings since they are tagged as two different (and unique) artists.

Anyway, if you find a reasonable solution to this problem, by all means, please let us know.

[billiam]

Ralph,

Thanks for the welcome and the advice. I guess I'll mess around with mp3Tag and see what I come up with and report back.

Bill

[stevek1006]

Hi Bill - Just saw this thread. Unfortunately, SqueezeCenter does not handle this as gracefully as many would like. You can use the AlbumArtist tag to assign an artist for the album, and then to use the Artist tag for all of the featured artists. Then you can either have SqueezeCenter list all the artists in the browser (which becomes quite a mess with large libraries, or you can have it just list the albums by "Band" which is equivalent to AlbumArtist. When you setup SC to list by band, you will still see the individual artists under track artists when you view that track in the browser.

There is no way to link an artist to a table of instruments though, so you wanted to know who played a particular instrument you would have to include that as part of the artist track. In jazz that might not be a big problem, since there are relatively few musicians who play multiple instruments. So, you can just list "McCoy Tyner" and know he was playing keyboard. In bluegrass, where there are lots of musicians who play multiple instruments, that becomes more of a problem. There are music database programs like CATraxx, that can be used for serious collecting, but I don't think it can be integrated with SC.

My understanding is that there is work being done on the database end of SC that may make some of this easier in the future.

Hope that helps.

[wowo]

In contrary what above is sad by stevek1006, everything is possible.

You can make your on tags with the help of MP3tag. I suggest a tag called PERFORMER. In that tag you put for instance performer Chet Baker Trompet\\Lee Konitz Saxophone etc.
To put these tags in the Squeezebox database use the audioplugin Custom Scan.
To display the performertag use the audioplugin Custom Browse.

[billiam]

Thanks for all of the replies. It gives me much to ponder and a direction to wander. I really know nothing of the subtleties of tagging and I'll have to experiment a little bit to find out what works. I'm about to rip all of my cd's onto a 1TB drive, so I want to do it once the right way (for me).

Thanks again,

Bill