Most applications for controlling music replay from UPnP and MPD servers ignore collection-specific tags.
If you are interested in classical music, your music collection might contain, among others, tags like "Conductor", "Orchestra", "Soloist" and, perhaps, "1st violin".
But most MPD clients, Naim apps and the likes will bluntly ignore your collection's tags and force you to browse your data through Apple's low dimensional world of "Artist", "Album", "Genre" and, perhaps, "Composer": you will not be able to search your collection for all pieces in which Guy Braunstein is the first violin!
While this is mean and dumb, it should not prevent us from carefully tagging our collections according to our individual needs: control apps will improve and -- with Naim's will or with a little help from some friend -- I am pretty sure we soon will be able to browse our music collection in much the same way as we are used to browse our digital photographs: using our own tags.
But what are good tool for tagging our music files ? I have spent some time during the weekend testing a few popular applications and I have collected a few notes below.
And I would be interested in learning about the applications you use to tag your music collections, the reasons why you picked up these applications and the set of tags you use.
Thanks,
nbpf
* Notes on tagging software (verdict):
** lltag: most flexible, command line based tagging program. Support for user-defined tags, multi-
valued tag fields and much more. No GUI. (usable)
** Ex Falso: flexible GUI-base tagging program. Support for user-defined tags, multi-valued tag
fields and tags for classical music. Tagging whole directory trees and large sets of files is
cumbersome. User interface a bit awkward. (usable with limitations)
** EasyTag: GUI-base tagging program. Support for multi-valued tag fields. No support for
user-defined tags and tags for classical music. (not usable)
** Qoobar: flexible GUI-base tagging program. Support for user-defined tags and tags for classical
music. Apparently no support for multi-valued tag fields. (not usable)
** ?
Posted on: 03 February 2015 by Aleg
Originally Posted by Huge:
I personally find MP3Tag very clear, concise and simple to use. The only time it's not worked well for me was when I forgot to save the changes - and that's not the programme's fault. 
I agree, I think MP3Tag is still the best tag-editor out there, it just should support ID3 inside WAV as well.
Posted on: 03 February 2015 by Huge
Originally Posted by Aleg:
...
Hugh
I remember you saying that before, but looking at the "Multimedia Programming Interface and Data Specifications 1.0 Issued as a joint design by IBM Corporation and Microsoft Corporation August 1991", it clearly states on page 56 (my emphasis):
Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE)
This section describes the Waveform format, which is used to represent digitized sound. The WAVE form is defined as follows. Programs must expect (and ignore) any unknown chunks encountered, as with all RIFF forms.
Source: http://www-mmsp.ece.mcgill.ca/...AVE/Docs/riffmci.pdf
So I would say that any wave-renderer must comply with the wave-format specifications and thus be able to ignore chunks that are unknown to it?!
Cheers
aleg
Very interesting Aleg,
The earlier MS_DOS / IBM-PC spec didn't require it (extra embedded chunks actually caused 'clicks' in the audio stream). By the time Windows and OS/2 were around dedicated sound hardware was the norm.
In light of the change, for all practical purposes, I withdraw my comments about WAVE tags on the basis that this document can be interpreted as superseding the previous specification (since MS-DOS is out of support it's specs are no longer mandatory).
Of course, MS-DOS is now just a CLI system application on the Windows platform, hence this is now correct spec for that as well!
Posted on: 03 February 2015 by nbpf
Originally Posted by gert:
It was interesting to learn about multivalued tags. But I wonder how the UPnP servers and clients handle them? Will e.g. the track with two artists occur twice in the by-artist list?
I do not know much about UPnP-based systems. I have one MPD server running on my laptop and one running on my dedicated music server at home. I connect to the servers via mpc, ncmpcpp and GMPC clients.
These implement different search and browse engines but deliver a consistent view of my data. For instance, just to keep on with the example above, if I select "Beethoven For All, Symphonies 1-9" in GMPC album's browser, I get the two expected artist values.
On the other hand and mpc query
nicola@cirrus:~/bin$ mpc --format '%artist%'
Daniel Barenboim
[playing] #1/4 0:05/9:29 (0%)
volume: 0% repeat: off random: off single: off consume: off
nicola@cirrus:~/bin$
only returns the first value of the artist tag field. I guess this is fine: mpc is a very lightweight MPD client and has probably not been written to act as a query primitive for a search engine.
As I ponted out in another thread, I am not very satisfied with the MPD clients I have tested so far. I have written a very primitive script to display the content of the booklet (liner notes) associated to the currently playing file for lack of better alternatives. Another area that needs to be improved is, as argued in this thread, tag-based searching and browsing.
But, in contrast to most commercial applications (unfortunately Naim's app is no exception here) at least these clients are open source, reasonably well documented and, at this point, offer better searching and browsing functionalities.
Posted on: 03 February 2015 by simes_pep
mp3tag for tagging albums in folder structures e.g \\, \\ etc
dBPoweramp EditID on individual files, ripping CDs
Foobar2000 for ripping SACD ISOs, DFF, DSF files
eac3to for m2ts files from Blu-ray Discs.
Posted on: 03 February 2015 by J Saville
I use 'tag&rename' for Windows. Uses multiple sources in search, will find coverart and write to folder.jpg, can rename all tracks based on tags and will tag WAVE perfectly. Costs a little but well worth the money.
Posted on: 03 February 2015 by Simon-in-Suffolk
Huge, Aleg beat me to it.. I am glad we are in agreement now 
However at the end of the day, despite what the specification says, any software that trips up and doesn't handle an exception properly or proportionally is a poor piece of software.
Simon
Posted on: 04 February 2015 by MichaelSch
I just downloaded Metadatics and have used it only a day now, but it seems pretty advanced with a lot of functionality, but still easy to use.
Since I am a Mac user I got it from AppStore and it costs around $10. Don't know if it is available for Windows as well ...
Posted on: 04 February 2015 by nbpf
Originally Posted by MichaelSch:
I just downloaded Metadatics and have used it only a day now, but it seems pretty advanced with a lot of functionality, but still easy to use.
Since I am a Mac user I got it from AppStore and it costs around $10. Don't know if it is available for Windows as well ...
Interesting, but I cannot check it right at the moment. Does Metadatics support user-specific tags ? Can you add a "ThisIsMyTag" tag ? Can you strip out tags ? Best, nbpf
Posted on: 04 February 2015 by MichaelSch
Originally Posted by nbpf:
Originally Posted by MichaelSch:
I just downloaded Metadatics and have used it only a day now, but it seems pretty advanced with a lot of functionality, but still easy to use.
Since I am a Mac user I got it from AppStore and it costs around $10. Don't know if it is available for Windows as well ...
Interesting, but I cannot check it right at the moment. Does Metadatics support user-specific tags ? Can you add a "ThisIsMyTag" tag ? Can you strip out tags ? Best, nbpf
You definitely add your own tags like "ThisIsMyTag" and set your own value to the tag. You can fairly easy copy values from one tag to another or to multiple tags. By "strip out tags" you mean delete them? Yes, you can of course do that. And there are some fancy text manipulating features where you can manipulate text in tags (multiple or single) in a number of ways. It is really much more advanced than I thought. Have only used it a couple of days, but I really like it so far.
Posted on: 05 February 2015 by adca
Puddletag is a very flexible tag editor, using a spread sheet-like layout. Adding your own tags is easy. IME, it combines the pros of dbpoweramp and mp3tag, provided you are running a linux distro. adca
Posted on: 05 February 2015 by nbpf
Originally Posted by adca:
Puddletag is a very flexible tag editor, using a spread sheet-like layout. Adding your own tags is easy. IME, it combines the pros of dbpoweramp and mp3tag, provided you are running a linux distro. adca
Thanks a lot adca ! The Debian stable package was broken but 1.0.5-1 works very well. If we consider support for user-defined tags and multi-valued tags mandatory, it seems we can summarize what we have gathered so far as follows:
- Open source: lltag, puddletag, ex falso
- Open source OS X: puddletag
- Proprietary OS X: metadatics
- Proprietary Windows: dBpoweramp, mp3tag, JRiver?, MediaMonkey
Then there is the question of supported file formats, of course. Have I forgotten something ? Best, nbpf
