suggestions for improving multi cd inconsistent classical music meta?

[dtclarinet]

Hello, I want to first say again how generally happy I am w dbpoweramp. Now that I'm learning about its versatility and comprehensiveness, I'm convinced it's the best for me.

I have a lot of classical cds I'm ripping. And a lot of multiset collections. (These are mostly single artist sets, so not compilations as such) The problem I'm having is caused by incomplete and/or inconsistent meta info. Often one or two cds in a set will be tagged as separate albums. Others will have single tracks misnamed, or the "artist" is confused with the composer, or the movements of a single work are not grouped under the work title.

I now know how to review and edit the meta info, and this could be the solution. But I was wondering if there are any other users who have had experience particularly with single artist multi album classical sets (often made from much older recordings...), and who could offer some tips.

thanks,
dtclarinet

[BrodyBoy]

I've tagged a lot of classical music as well, and I'm sorry to say there's no easy solution to these issues. Here's the gist: Metadata "standards" and playback devices are all geared toward pop music, where the tags needed for navigation and information (during playback) are pretty straight-forward. (Album, artist, and track usually covers it....with album artist thrown in for better navigation.) Also, pop music is "album-centric" as a function of modern recording & media limitations, while classical music was not written with those conventions in mind.

First of all, don't expect good online metadata for classical music. I could speculate as to why, but whatever the reasons, the fact is that online classical tags are much less consistent, in usage and formatting, than pop tags. So just accept that you'll have to do a a lot of manual review and editing. There's no way around that.

As for single-artist multi-album sets, I rip the whole thing, load it into mp3tag, and apply my own consistent tagging system. The "disc" tag is seldom significant with classical music, so you can usually just strip that and focus on grouping the tracks by piece, or composer, or whatever makes sense for that set. On big sets, I suggest you actually abandon the given "album" tag as well. Sounds bold, but let me explain....

As an example, the complete set of Jacqueline duPre EMI recordings comes on something like 17 discs, but I ignore that and group them by composer. So rather than one humongous album called "Jacqueline duPre: The Complete EMI Recordings," I have albums such as Elgar (duPre) and Brahms (duPre) and so on, all derived from that collection. Organizing by composer is what makes sense for me, but others might prefer organizing by performer, so the albums would be Jacqueline duPre (Elgar), etc. In my scheme, other artists' recordings of the same works would look like Elgar (Ma), while the artist-centric approach would be Yo-Yo Ma (Elgar).

The bigger point I'm making is that there's nothing forcing you into whatever organization the album happens to have, since that was just a record company convenience . EMI has probably issued those same duPre recordings on well over a dozen different releases, but they're still the same recordings. This is very common with classical music. I make a note of which release I'm using (usually in the "Comment" tag), but I organize those recordings into albums that make sense are easy to navigate. In my experience, this makes a classical library much easier to use and navigate, because it's intuitive. Searching for a particular piece in a 17-disc "album" isn't.

It takes a little more effort, but I find the result to be infinitely more usable. And that's kind of the whole point of digitizing your music to begin with.....

[dtclarinet]

Thanks BrodyBoy, you confirmed a lot what I have since learned. Hopefully I'll get a swing going of systematically checking and editing as needed.

And as for your innovative suggestions for setting up the most versatile tagging system; you've saved me a LOT of time. (After ripping and "editing" a dozen CDs, I realized I needed to retag all to avoid the Yo-Yo Ma (Elgar) problem. So I started over, yet again. (first time around, ripping ALL my albums, I just let iTunes do it all, and the results were disappointing)

Thanks so much!

[dtclarinet]

BrodyBoy, do you know if there is a way to designate more than one genre? Such as "classical" as well as "chamber music" or "piano"? I have not explored what happens if you put "classical, Piano" in the ripping meta.

Also, do you suggest using the "dynamic" meta tags to help with the organization? Or?

[BrodyBoy]

BrodyBoy, do you know if there is a way to designate more than one genre? Such as "classical" as well as "chamber music" or "piano"? I have not explored what happens if you put "classical, Piano" in the ripping meta.

Also, do you suggest using the "dynamic" meta tags to help with the organization? Or?

Genres are entirely user-definable. I use my own, such as "Classical Chamber" and "Classical Orchestral" and "Classical Opera," etc. Another common approach is to use the "meta" music form in the Genre tag, with "sub-form" as a Style tag. That would apply a "Classical" genre tag to all classical music, and the "Chamber" or "Piano" or whatever in the Style tag. The problem with that is that the Style tag isn't universally used or recognized by all players.

So you can most definitely use "Classical, Piano" if you like. One tip: With experience, I found that I had a hard time staying consistent with commas and dashes in my genre categories, so I stopped using them altogether. Maybe I'm just getting old, but it's easier for me to remember! My basic "genre system," for classical and all other music, is to use a two-word, unpunctuated construction with the meta form first and the sub-type second. This stopped messing up my genre lists with stuff like "Classical, Chamber" and "Classical Chamber" and "Classical-Chamber." I use even more sub-genres in the pop part of my library, so that's where I discovered that this can get messy in a hurry.

Sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean by the dynamic tags question.....can you elaborate a little?

[BrodyBoy]

Oh, one more little "advanced" tip: If the existing genre list in dBpoweramp doesn't suit your needs very well, you can easily customize it. Create a list (in Notepad) of all the genres you actually use, including your custom constructions like "Classical, piano" or whatever. Order the list the way you want it to appear in the CD Ripper drop-down genre list. Save this as a simple text file called genres.txt, and put that file in dBp's AppData Roaming folder:

C:\Users\[your username]\AppData\Roaming\dBpoweramp

You can still type in any changes or custom genres you want before ripping, but you may find it more convenient to have your custom tags in the drop-down list, for quick selection. As you develop your tagging scheme over time, just go in and edit that list as needed.

[dtclarinet]

BrodyBoy thanks for the tips. I will start my own more detailed categories.

RE the "dynamic" question, I refer to the choices given in the "output folder" setup of the encoder. I tried it without specifying, and the tracks all ended up in one long list with no folder organization. So I guess I answered my own question. Unless you specify the folder structure when ripping, dbpoweramp will not maintain the current structure, which is too bad.

[BrodyBoy]

BrodyBoy thanks for the tips. I will start my own more detailed categories.

RE the "dynamic" question, I refer to the choices given in the "output folder" setup of the encoder. I tried it without specifying, and the tracks all ended up in one long list with no folder organization. So I guess I answered my own question. Unless you specify the folder structure when ripping, dbpoweramp will not maintain the current structure, which is too bad.

Oh, ok....dynamic naming and output. These are entirely about physically organizing your files on your computer, as filename elements & structure are separate from the metadata used by players. That's a very important distinction......players use path and filename to find your files, but they use metadata for navigation and display.

There are no "rules" for organization....just figure out where you want the files to go, how you want them organized into folders, and how you want to structure the filenames. As you discovered, you do have to put something in there or there'll be no organization whatsoever!

PATH:
Use "Path" to specify the part of the location that's common to all files. The default path is your computer's existing "Music" library. (I'm using the term "library" here in the Windows sense of the term.....default save locations for particular types of files. Windows comes with pre-set Documents, Pictures, and Music libraries.) To change from this default, you can either (1) change the Windows default "music library" location (in Windows Explorer), or (2) specify a different location in the Path option in dBp CD Ripper.

NAMING:
This is where you set the folder and filename structures you want. The most basic approach is to organize files within folders by artist, and then by album within the artist folder. The simplest version of this would be: [artist]/[album]/[track] [title]. But there's a lot of fine tuning that many dBp users like to use in organizing their files. Album artist is an especially useful tag for organizational purposes, particularly with classical music. I suggest you start by going to the help page within CD Ripper (by clicking on the red question mark button), scroll down to the section called "Path and Naming," and then click on the "naming convention" link. It's kind of annoyingly tucked away, but this is where you'll learn about the dynamic naming tools you can use to customize your scheme.

After you've figured out what you want in terms of naming & organization, let us know if you have questions on how to accomplish that with dynamic naming. Many of us have spent more time than we care to admit tweaking these things (:o) and will be happy to help you get it set up the way you want.

[Tommay]

I recently ripped a CD of Elgar's Enigma Variations and Holst's Planets Suite. I found the simplest way to separate the two was to first rip only the Elgar tracks with Elgar as 'artist' and then go back and rip The Planets with Holst as 'artist' second time round. This also allowed me to assign the correct orchestra to each rip. It is also worth looking at individual track artists as this can be a common source of inconsistency. I always review the metadata and am astonished by the high frequency of spelling mistakes and lazy track namings on mainstream pop/rock CDs, not just on classical recordings. I use the dynamic file naming as described above, so establishing artist and album is important. After that, I rework troublesome metadata in JRiver Media Centre.

[BrodyBoy]

I recently ripped a CD of Elgar's Enigma Variations and Holst's Planets Suite. I found the simplest way to separate the two was to first rip only the Elgar tracks with Elgar as 'artist' and then go back and rip The Planets with Holst as 'artist' second time round. This also allowed me to assign the correct orchestra to each rip. It is also worth looking at individual track artists as this can be a common source of inconsistency. I always review the metadata and am astonished by the high frequency of spelling mistakes and lazy track namings on mainstream pop/rock CDs, not just on classical recordings. I use the dynamic file naming as described above, so establishing artist and album is important. After that, I rework troublesome metadata in JRiver Media Centre.

Hi Tommay. Just wanted to point out that there's really no need to rip a CD in "tranches" like that. Since you edit metadata post-rip anyway, I think you'd find it easier and more efficient to rip the whole CD, load those files into a good tag editor like mp3tag, and do both the "bulk" editing (orchestra, artist, album artist groups, etc.) and fine-tuning all at once. Between dBp and a full-featured tag editor, digitizing music seldom requires more than this two-step process.