Classical CD music & Best practices

[Rudj]

I use the Reference Pack R 15.1
I had a lot of classical CDs to rip, and I would like to know what is your advice to obtain the best tag results ?
Is PerfectTunes good to improve the results, especially for naming the tracks ?
Thank You

[garym]

Re: Classical CD music & Best practices

this might help.

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Beginners_Guide_To_Classical

Currently I don't believe that PerfectTunes does metadata tagging (other than artwork). But the PerfectMeta system built into dbpoweramp ripper has several sources and does the best job I've seen for locating metadata. This said, classical music is probably the hardest music to tag from online databases because there are many different approaches. It is best to clean up/edit/modify your tagging to suit your own tastes as you rip the CDs.

[Rudj]

Re: Classical CD music & Best practices

Hi Garym,

I'm late, but thank you very much for your answer; however I found relevant elements about classical music; Sonata is not always the best database to afford a good answer for album artwork;Is there a way to improve the selection ?
I know there's no common information beetween musics databases and Amazon or Ebay Databases, but I wonder whether some bridges will exist (ie: with EAN code and ISRC or CRC Tags) ?
Have you try to ripp a Classical Music CD with dBpoweramp Batch Ripper ? The results are no good; most of the time, I must ripp them one by one with CD Ripper to have accurate ripping; have you found a solution to solve the problem ?
Thank you for your feedback garym
Best regards

[garym]

Re: Classical CD music & Best practices

Hi Garym,

I'm late, but thank you very much for your answer; however I found relevant elements about classical music; Sonata is not always the best database to afford a good answer for album artwork;Is there a way to improve the selection ?
I know there's no common information beetween musics databases and Amazon or Ebay Databases, but I wonder whether some bridges will exist (ie: with EAN code and ISRC or CRC Tags) ?
Have you try to ripp a Classical Music CD with dBpoweramp Batch Ripper ? The results are no good; most of the time, I must ripp them one by one with CD Ripper to have accurate ripping; have you found a solution to solve the problem ?
Thank you for your feedback garym
Best regards

As you have found, the online databases for tagging music rips are only very good for pop music. They are typically terrible for classical music. I'm afraid the best approach to get good tagging for your classical CD rips is to do the CDs one at a time and to manually fix the tag data with each rip. The good news is that you only need to do this once. (Also note that the lack of good automatic tagging for classical from online databases is a problem for *all* rippers, not just dbpoweramp.)

[Darryl R]

Re: Classical CD music & Best practices

Sorry I didn't see this thread earlier, as my collection is entirely classical. The general approach I took is to define some standards, and then use, to the extent possible, what is provided from the online metadata sources. As Gary indicates, the quality varies, but I've been able to use much of what dBpa provides as at least a starting point. For concerti, symphonies, and sonatas, I use the following format for the track titles:

Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 - Hammerklavier - 1. Allegro
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 - Hammerklavier - 2. Scherzo. Assai vivace
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 - Hammerklavier - 3. Adagio sostenuto
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 - Hammerklavier - 4. Largo - Allegro risoluto

For compilation discs with multiple composers, I prepend the composer name to the title. The idea was to be able to identify as much as possible from the filename:

Mozart - Piano Quintet in E-flat major, K. 452 - I. Largo - Allegro moderato

One rule I adopted is to avoid using special characters in the titles, since they are dropped from the resulting filenames. For instance, I don't use quotes around the popular names for works like Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" (apost also works, but you may also want to conserve characters for long titles, esp. with long paths). Many times I was fortunate enough to only have to change the colon (invalid in filename) after the opus to a dash. The other tags I use are artist, album, composer, year, track, disk, label, source). I put the conductor and orchestra in the artist tag, preceded by one or two soloists for concerti. I added a soloists tag when there are several as in choral works.

In general, I've found the online metadata very helpful, particularly with French and German titles which needed characters with diacritical markings. I used the following link many times until I have the umlauts and accents alt codes memorized:

http://usefulshortcuts.com/alt-codes/accents-alt-codes.php

Hope this helps anyone as a starting point.

[Darryl R]

Re: Classical CD music & Best practices

it seems once you add a hyperlink to your post, it disappears for moderator approval. In the meantime my edit period expired before I could proof the sentence before the link in the above post.

There will be variations for things like vocal works:

Messiah, Part One - 12. Chorus. For unto us a child is born

and solo piano works:

Debussy - Préludes - Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l'air du soir

and suites:

Symphonic Dances from West Side Story - Cha-Cha (Maria). Andantino con grazia

For artwork, I occasionally used what dBpa came up with, but more often than not I had to Google around to find images, as I wanted at least a 500x500 jpeg for an album folder image (not imbedded in tracks). Amazon (Japan site for Japanese disks), Qobuz, and Allmusic were the favorite sites for downloading graphics. I used MS Paint to resize large ones to 500x500. They look great in the new Audirvana 2 library manager.