Using Metadata to Improve Your Browsing Experience

Posted by: Jack on 12 August 2012

I thought I would post something on using metadata (tags) to organise your music collection for streaming. It may (or may not) be of interest to others particularly those starting off and ripping a CD collection. I didn't plan it like this it just sort of happened along the way - I would be interested to hear of what others are doing and any comments on the approach I have adopted (good and bad). There are probably better ways and shortcomings but here goes!


In my particular case I am referring to the music I have tagged and that is being served up by Asset to my Naim streamer (also using n-Stream). I primarily use dBpoweramp now for ripping having moved from EAC some time ago. So all the msuic is tagged with the usual fields "artist", "track" "genre" that dBpoweramp retrieves. This allows me to view my collection as I'm sure many others do via "artist" and other standard fields.

 

I decided to make use of the following fields in a non-standard manner I guess; "composer", "style" and "mood". I choose these as personally I didn't plan to use them as intended.

 

Composer

 

Both my collection and my wife's collection has been ripped, we have different tastes and therefore I don't want to scroll through her music when using n-Stream and vice versa - I'm somewhere in the region of 14k tracks at present. I have used the "composer" field and tag it with either my name or my wifes, for music that we both like then it's tagged with both our names. I realise the "composer" field may be of interest to others but not myself so hence I have used it accordingly. The result; I can view either collection by selecting "composer" on the n-Stream app and choosing my name or my wifes.

 

Style

 

Next, I someties like to browse based on the quality of the music; what do I have that is hi-res, standard CD or perhaps even MP3! I use the "style" field and tag it as follows:


LQ - low quality (i.e. below standard CD)
MQ - standard quality (CD rips)
HQ - high resolution rip (e.g. 96/24)
VQ - vinyl rip (mostly 96/24)


The result; I can browse my collection in terms of quality by selecting "style" on the n-Stream app and choose any of the above categories.

 

Mood


This one is perhaps a bit off the wall but I have calculated the dynamic range of each album by using the "TT Dynamic Range" utility. I have only done this for music which is at least of MQ quality. I then use the "mood" tag and enter the DR for the album e.g. DR12. The result; I can browse my collection by selection a dynamic range - a bit of fun really but quite interesting.

 

Anyway enough of my ramblings, hope this is of some interest - what are others doing?

 

Interestingly, I don't bother with "genre" it seems that there are just too many categories and not too bothered about "year" but I will probably come back to that one in the future!

Posted on: 12 August 2012 by Iver van de Zand

Hi Jack,

 

Ditto here :-) .... I spend quite some time on meta data tagging and make use of it while playing the music. After testing various tagging tools in the past, I use MediaMonkey already for more than a year. Took some time to get really used to it, but nowadays I find my way around. As per default I tag on Artist, Album/Artist (makes a lot of sense), Genre (set up a picklist myself), Album, Year and Score. Furthermore I use a field to mark whetehr to performance is Live, Acoustic or Unplugged since Inprefer these types of recordings. Another field is used to mention quality of recording, ie. Hi-Res, mp3 (I have a small number of these) or Low Quality recording (based in my own impression). What I pick up from your input, is that I am going to re-shuffle the above and start using fields that I can control with the iPad nStream. The free fields that I often use now, are not nStream-controllable. Your approach using for example the composer field, is a very good idea !! i will steal it :-)

 

I also spend quite some energy in Asset creating alternative trees to more easily browse through my music. The library is becoming quite large now, and more and more I feel the need for alternative browsing paths or filters.

 

Iver

Posted on: 15 August 2012 by Jack

Iver,

 

I've not tried MediaMonkey for tagging, I might give it a try, does work well with WAV files? I have been using the dBpoweramp editor which is OK for single albums but not great for tagging lots of WAV files.

 

I like the idea of tagging "live" music.....I might use that one

 

ATB

Posted on: 15 August 2012 by Iver van de Zand

MediaMonkey works very well with any format whether itvis wav, flac, aiff, alac or mp3. If you can, pls give the tool a try