Style Guide/Best Practices For Music Tags?

[RetroBurner]

Good morning! I have spent a great deal of time ripping all of my old CDs, but now it's time to sit down and actually start tagging them. What are the best practices for tagging music files? Can anyone here recommend a comprehensive, standardized style guide for creating music tags? Whenever I pull metadata during ripping, it doesn't seem like there are any set standards for music tags, even when pulling metadata from a single site (like MusicBrainz, etc.). I'd look towards Apple for guidance on this matter, but they don't seem like they have a set standard either, or if they do, they frequently ignore it. There are Genre and Style tags, but how should those be used, and what music players support them?

[schmidj]

Hi,

Since no-one else has provided any help:

First, it would probably have been better if you had properly tagged the tracks when you ripped them, not after-the-fact. Particularly since the naming string in the ripper typically uses some of the tags to assemble the directory (folder) and file names. I assume you actually let dBpa use its default tagging information, since with most naming strings, it wouldn't be able to generate filenames without any tags at all. The issue now is that once-in-a-while the algorithm that the various metadata providers use totally fails and provides metadata for the wrong CD. In that case, if you didn't correct it, the track files have the totally wrong album information and if your collection is of any size, good luck in finding the tracks.

But there are no real "standards" or correct "practices" that have ever been published (AFAIK) concerning general metadata, above and beyond some data type restrictions for the metadata formats used by certain codecs (one that comes to mind is I seem to recall that some codecs will only accept numeric entries for track numbers - I wanted to use A-1, A-2, B-1, B-2 on tracks transferred from 45 EPs and it failed??--)

But those of us who have been at this a while have come up with our personal standards which meet our needs and don't bollix up the works with the filenames created by the naming string. (not an issue if you are correcting tags after ripping) The important thing you need to watch with filenames, are first, that you don't end up with two directory/filenames that are the same. The second one will overwrite the first one, which is then gone, you'll have to re-rip it with a different name. You also can end up with a mess if for some reason two CDs end up in the same folder. Most common cause I've seen is with "best of" CDs where more than one record label has made a "best of" CD of the same artist.

But, since there are few rules, you need to make some of your own rules for consistency. The whole purpose is to make it easy to find the tracks you want to play. And a good part of that is how the particular player(s) you are using deal with some issues. Do you want Bob Dylan to show up under the "B"s or the "D"s? Presumably under the "D"s. Three ways to do that. First is to put the artist (and album artist) in as Dylan, Bob. But that is not only where it appears in the sort list but also how it will appear on the screen when playing, which many people don't like. The second way is to use a second set of tags, called artist sort and album artist sort. The artist is Bob Dylan, the sort tags say Dylan, Bob. But now twice as much data entry. However there are two solutions to that: The ripper (and also I think Perfect Tunes) have options to automatically create the sort tags for you (except thy may well mess up on artists like Blue Ventures which will automatically be Ventures, Blue in the sort tags unless you correct it. And finally, some players deal with it, they will list Bob Dylan both in the "B"s and the "D"s.

Then the issue of groups like The Beatles Under T? Under B? Under B, with out The at all? Presumably under B, and again, the dBpa ripper and Perfecttunes offer to do that automatically for you, but if you have a bunch of their albums, I'll bet you that some have "Beatles, The" and some just have "Beatles". Perfecttunes will I think flag that for you, or you can open them all up in mp3tag and change them all to the way you want with one click.

Genres, personal taste. For instance, I collect Soca music and steelband music from the Caribbean. Some genre lists call it Reggae and Instrumental, Discogs calls it something like Folk, several other lumped genres. But I use Steelband as the genre for a real steelband, Steelpan as a pan soloist or a soloist with a non-steelpan backing track, and Pan Jazz for Jazz with a pannist. But you probably don't want to get too narrow, as otherwise you will not get many selections when sorting a particular genre and won't remember what you used for some of the most esoteric genres. Most players for some codecs will let you use more than one genre for a track (or album). To enter them in the ripper and I think Perfecttunes you enter the first genre, then a semicolon and a space, then the second genre. To do it in mp3tag, you enter a double backslash "\" between the genres, no spaces. Both programs will automatically enter the correct format for the multiple genres (or artists, or composers) for the tag rules for each different codec.

So for my pan jazz tracks, I have both the genres Jazz and Pan Jazz for them. If I sort for Jazz, they show up in the thousands of jazz tracks. If I sort for Pan Jazz, only the hundreds of Pan Jazz tracks show up.

I've given up on Style. I don't write it when ripping. Most of the metadata sources either leave it empty or fill it up with a dozen slightly related "genres", to fool the listener into listening to the track. Would have been a good idea, but never implemented correctly. Also few players allow you to sort by style, from what I''ve seen

Most of the metadata sources are either crowd sourced, by people ripping CDs (each with their own personal rules) and/or entered by the record companies, often by a clerk who doesn't know much about the music or the consequences of what they enter, and all of it is full of typos, misunderstandings, errors.

You'll never get your metadata 100% accurate, but if you get it close, you will do reasonably OK. I do wish that players like Foobar2000 had a plug-in to allow you to update the metadata as you are playing a track, so you could fix obvious typos when listening.

Artwork, I look to see that the on-line artwork is for the right CD and of reasonable quality. If not, I have my scanner right next to my ripping (or editing) computer, and scan the jewel box insert. I only use the front photo except in rare instances. I do wish there were on-line copies of the booklets with box sets etc., the information is good reading, but I'm not going to take the time to scan 30 pages of booklet.

Just my views, I'm sure others have different views.

Good luck!

[schmidj]

So a bit of weirdness with the forum software, I type a double backslash, two\in a row and it automatically deletes one of the backslashes... Tried to edit it, same results!

[garym]

Agree. No real standards, but you should create an internal consistency for yourself. I use GENRE tag but not STYLE. Some folks use STYLE as a "sub-genre" approach, but you should insure that your server/player can use the STYLE tag. I try to keep it simple. I used to have a 100+ GENREs. Now I keep it at about 15 (broad, like Jazz, Country, Classical, Pop/Rock). I don't bother with sort tags (Nelson, Willie). Long ago I just lived with the idea that "Willie Nelson" would be sorted under "W" for my library. I even rearranged my physical library to use the same ordering. Fortunately, all my music server/players have an option to ignore certain words in sorting the library, such as "the". With this, "The Beatles" shows up under "B" in my library sorting. I do use ALBUM ARTIST tag to manage artists that have different names. For example, my ARTIST tag might be "Miles Davis Quintet" but my ALBUM ARTIST tag is "Miles Davis" so that all of his work shows up under "Miles Davis".

I used PerfectTunes at some point to find artists in my library that had similar names but were really the same artist. A lot of this was simple capitalization or using "&" versus "and". When I find these things I edit to make them exactly the same.

For artwork, I store the art (front cover only) in a single file in each album directory as a "cover.jpg" file, rather than embedding the cover art in each track. (Some use "folder.jpg"). Most modern servers/players will recognize this.

[RetroBurner]

Good morning! I did some research of my own and found two industry style guides that may be useful:

1) The Music Business Association's Music Metadata Style Guide
2) The Apple Music Style Guide

More importantly, I discovered that Apple has an Addendum to their Style Guide with a list of Genre Codes for Music, Music Videos, and Ringtones which is precisely what I was looking for!

I sent an e-mail to the Music Business Association to see if they have an updated version of their Style Guide, but if they do not, I am inclined to use the Apple Music Style Guide as the basis for formatting my tags and assigning Genres/Styles to it moving forward. I am also inclined to try and use their standards for Cover Art, but given that their standard is currently a 4000 x 4000 graphic, that may be a difficult benchmark to achieve at this time.

Which leads me to ask another question: PerfectTunes currently tries to pull cover art from iTunes, correct? Is it able to pull the latest and greatest artwork from Apple Music as well? Or do they use the same cover art database/assets?

[simbun]

Whenever I pull metadata during ripping, it doesn't seem like there are any set standards for music tags, even when pulling metadata from a single site (like MusicBrainz, etc.).

I use the MusicBrainz standard and haven't had an issue.

A good starting point would be:

releasetype (album, single, broadcast, soundtrack etc)
compilation
albumartist (multi-value)
albumartistsort (multi-value)
album
date
originaldate
discnumber
tracknumber
title
artist (multi-value)
artistsort (multi-value)


The most compatible approach to store album and track artists is to use the tags albumartist and artist, but if you want to see the type of artist collaboration (see screenshot below) then you'd need to use:
artist: Surfaces feat. Elton John
artists: Surfaces
artists: Elton John
artistssort: Surfaces
artistssort: John, Elton




If your solution supports them it's also a good idea to store some of the musicbrainz identifiers e.g. in order to group an artist's albums across a name change it's best to store musicbrainz_albumartistid and musicbrainz_artistid.

For reference:

https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/variables/tags_basic.html

https://picard-docs.musicbrainz.org/en/appendices/tag_mapping.html

[RetroBurner]

What do I need to do to get a post approved? My previous post is still hidden, presumably because it has links to The Music Business Association's Music Metadata Style Guide, the Apple Style Guide, and Apple's list of Genre Codes for Music, Music Videos, and Ringtones.

[schmidj]

They review all posts with links to reduce the amount of spam that makes it onto the forum. Be patient, but be aware that at least Apple's guides/lists make little sense for most of us. Given history, I'd have little use for the Music Business Association, but I might find it interesting to read what they have to say.

[RetroBurner]

They review all posts with links to reduce the amount of spam that makes it onto the forum. Be patient, but be aware that at least Apple's guides/lists make little sense for most of us. Given history, I'd have little use for the Music Business Association, but I might find it interesting to read what they have to say.

Why don’t Apple’s guides/lists make sense for most people?

[schmidj]

Why don’t Apple’s guides/lists make sense for most people?

I can only really answer for myself.

For the genres, as I said originally, genres are a very personal thing. A lot has to do with your collection and how you listen to music. As I said above, I have a large collection of music performed on steelpans. Thousands of tracks. The genre list that Apple uses doesn't even have anything to identify, let alone subdivide them. For instance, there is a well known genre (among at least people following Caribbean music called "pan jazz", jazz music with one or more pannists. There are even live concerts that are exclusively pan jazz and some fairly well known pan jazz artists who have released music (yes on Apple among other distributors) and travel doing live concerts. Nothing among the subcategories of jazz for pan jazz.

Other areas all too many sub categories. I have a moderate number of classical CDs. I only use Classical. Opera, and Choral as categories, essentially exclusive, not sub categories, because it works for me. Why Choral? Because I've done quite a bit of live recording of a couple of classical choral groups, and so I put all of that (and the purchased classical choral CDs) under choral. I have a moderate amount of some other categories, like African, and have come up with my own genres that work for me.

Their listing of primary genres and sub genres seems to relate to the genre tag (but with only one genre per track or even possibly album) and what the style tag was aimed at, but there are few library systems that allow sorting by genre then style and I've never seen a player that displays style. They may exist but...

You may notice that the Apple list never talks about multiple Genre tags, which are very valuable to me and I think others. It really seems to be aimed at allowing an indexed (therefore rapid) search of the (probably millions) of tracks for sale on the Apple store, not for tags on downloaded or streamed tracks. Not having bought any downloaded tracks from them in ages, the last I remember, in fact the downloaded tracks from them weren't tagged at all.

The Music Metadta Style Guide seems to have died an early death, 2014, about the time CDs plummeted. Again, aimed at webpage consistency, not tags on downloaded/ripped files, nor as tags appear on the various inconsistent online tag databases. One serious issue is that it ignores that tags are only stored as a part of the track music files, not at all at the album level, therefore requiring album information to be entered repetitively in each track.

The Apple style guide does have some useful information but also sends you off on a wild goose chase. It is directed towards the people submitting material for download or streaming on the Apple Music website, not for tags for use by the library systems or players (possibly other than Itunes) used by home (or commercial) playout systems. For instance, it spends much time talking about primary and non-primary artists. I've never seen a consumer library that supports non primary artists, nor a player that will display a tag named like that. And the tagging standards that exist for some codecs don't want "featuring" or such in tags, since otherwise your library system will give you a long list of artists named featuring! So at least the dB ripper and I suspect Perfecttunes have options to detect the word "featuring" or variations and put the following name as a second artist, allowing your library system to sort for either.

For those of us in the A/V business, Apple always seems to have its own quirky and sometimes annoying "rules" intending you to be forced to stay in the Apple universe, as opposed to using standards, either "official" or informal standards used by most others. For instance, all the oddball charging/interface connectors on handheld devices, until the EU put their foot down and said, use USB C. And Itunes, the default install, is well known for rearranging and changing your metadata without asking to what someone at Apple likes. (Microsoft's players have had similar issues).

Gary's suggestion to read the MusicBrainz guides is probably closer to what you want for tagging but is very much in the MusicBrainz world and may not work well with various library and display on most players. The Tag Mapping appendix is a good introduction to how the various tagging formats used by the different codecs actually store the tag data Be thankful that the dBpa tagger (and mp3tag and most other good tag editors) do the necessary translations to edit the correct tags, and that most library systems and players are programmed to work with a variety of codecs and tag formats. As you can see, the different formats are in fact very different and some are quite limited in what they can store.

The real take-home from this: Look at the capabilities of the tagging format used by the codec(s) (FLAC, mp3, etc) that have encoded your rips. Look at the capabilities of your server/library system (and pick a different one or possibly customize the one you are using if you find it too limiting.) And look at what your player(s) displays when playing a track. My experience is that just about none of the "free" or low cost open ones do a very good job at this. For instance, the player in my android phone that plays well with my Bluetooth connected car radio doesn't display composers, which is a problem when playing classical pieces. My solution was to edit the track tags on the classical music to put a shortened composer name followed by a colon and space at the beginning of the title of each classical track like "Beethoven: Fifth Symphony" so the composer is displayed on the screen of my car radio.

Good luck, just decide on your own rules and try your best to be consistent. You'll be correcting mistakes for the rest of your life, I speak from experience.