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Pop albums are easy as the artist is the prime focus but Classical albums are more challenging as the composer is usually the main focus.
On that basis it is fairly straightforward to do albums alphabetically in order of composer, or is it? Not really as some albums have more than one composer (and some pop albums have multiple artists although this is not as frequent as it is in classical).
If there are more than one composer I just use "Various" but if only two, classify or tag under both composers.
So what about the artists? Fairly straightforward for orchestral items - conductor first, orchestra second, but what to do with a concerto? Surely the artist is then the main focus. But is he/she really the focus? In most cases yes but not always but to be consistent artist should head the list.
And for duos, should both artists be listed, for trios.... it starts to get involved. If the chamber group has a name, no problem, but what about the 5th artist in a quintet?
I guess what one does depends on the program being used. The Meridian Sooloos system (I refuse to use the new name) has quite a good program to classify albums and gives a lot of options. The one I concentrate on is "Tags" with some albums having multiple tags.
Anyway, what do you do?
John
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying 13,000+ albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
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Meta-data for me is -
Each track: composer by surname
Each track: name
Each track: soloist by first name; duo 1, duo 2; soloist, ensemble; ensemble - I'indifferent to conductors and make up my own ensemble names if necessary
Album name (not terribly useful to me)
Genres: by century written, in piano, classical, vocal - a limited number that sufficiently reflects my interests to enable me to find things in a collection of under 35,000 tracks
That is an interesting approach and I understand its usefulness.
If there is more than one composer involved in an album I do what you do and put the composer as the header in each track but do not do this if the album is of the music of one composer only.
The room for data in each track is limited with the Meridian system so I rely on the header for artist info, but again, with limited room, not all artists can be featured there. Sooloos does have a special tab for detailed artist listing but with over 215,000 tracks on the system here it has not been high on my agenda and has only been filled in for a few albums.
One tab I had not mentioned before in the Meridian system is "Review" and I'm now hunting up net reviews and pasting them into this section. NAXOS is generous in the detail it offers on its discs but there is sparse or no data on others. The only problem with the review data is using the iPad as a control, all spaces are eliminated with "review" so formatting is destroyed making it less easy to read. For the same reason pasting in a libretto does not work if relying on the iPad.
Use of servers/PCs for music has grown like Topsy and as a result can be a bit chaotic with a lot of mistakes on net databases. Editing it all is a hobby in itself!!
John
What can be more subjective than music? It reflects our individual tastes, says he enjoying 13,000+ albums on a Meridian Sooloos Server.
Yes, well, I'd not enjoy having to write up or edit meta-data for a collection 7-10 times the size of my own, as yours is, John.
LOL! - If that isn't the truth! And I'm a bit player compared to k-k-kenny and you (only slightly over 20,000 tracks uploaded so far).
You've got better things to do than waste your life on this sorta nonsense.
If I had my indexing time over again I'd probly be through page 2 AT LEAST of Franck's P, C & F - maybe even up to bar 24 or 5.
But no, all this data entry has made my fingers all short and stubby so I can't hardly reach a fifth any more.
I guess pop music has warped my thinking enough so that I've now become fairly comfortable with the listing of my albums by artist (by their first names!), rather than by composer/work, etc. I prefer the album view of my collection, rather than the "song" view. You're right that the question of soloists can be very tough, and, for the most part, I'm not about to edit individual tracks as the soloists change (if iTunes' default listing isn't already correct - I just ripped the Westminster Scherchen Messiah yesterday, and the default track listings that came up were too general - all soloists listed for EVERY track - useless!). It's a losing battle, and I'm not going to fight it on every last track.I also use Signalyst's "HQ Player" for playback sometimes. It doesn't work with iTunes as Audirvana does, and it's generally more of a hassle - but it has certain other advantages which I like sometimes.
I'm still slaving away editing the metadata as I rip CD's and DVD-A's to my external RAID drive (1553 and counting!). HQ Player has now influenced what kind of graphic I download for the various album covers, since it allows for a gigantic showing on the screen of the album cover in one of its views as you listen. So now I always try to download the largest, clearest graphic of a given album cover I can find. I've also "rolled my own" for certain albums where I didn't like any of the original incarnations of the album cover, e.g.:
As you can see, I don't necessarily keep to the dimensions of a CD booklet.
EDIT: One other interesting wrinkle is that I sometimes find myself dividing up a CD into its component parts as they were originally issued on LP. Certainly I can understand CD companies' desire to give customers "value for the money" on their purchases, but what often results is a hodge-podge of performers and repertoire all jammed together on a single CD album. I previously posted about the Mercury CD issue of the Dorati/LSO Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. That same CD also includes the Dorati/Philharmonia Hungarica Dance Suite, Mikrokosmos, and Two Portraits. That's just too much on one album (as far as manageability is concerned!), so, as I mentioned, I divided it up as the performances were originally issued on two individual LP's (with two individual album covers). This procedure has the added advantage of giving me more of a "nostalgia fix" as I recover my view of the Concerto for Orchestra LP album cover which never made it to CD!
Edits: 07/16/15 07/16/15 07/16/15
I use JRiver Media Center. I define the tags I need for classical music and create views that allow me to browse classical music as I choose.
Both composer and performer aqre important for classical music (and for broadway shows, moveie musicals and Great American Songbook music.) The standard set of tags (Genre, Artist, Album, Track Name) just isn't adequate nor are the views most players provide to browse with just those tags.
The screenshot shows a view that I use for classical music. Each composer is listed in the Composer pane (once per composer), each work name is listed in the Work name pane, each performer is listed in the Arttist pane.
I can narrow the files that are shown in the lower part of the window by clicking on one or one values in a column. The lists in other columns then reflect the values consistent with the selection I made.
For example, I might click on "orchestra", then "Haydn", then "Symphony No. 100" then "Klemperer_Philharmonia Orchestra".
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
I use composers in alphabetical order, if not possible I use the title of the cd, and/or the name of the main artist.
I never have a problem finding the file as with JRiver I see the cover of the cd, so to me it is pretty simple.
You just may need to modify the metadata to your suit your choices.
Obviously you do need a decent memory especially when using the cd title.
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