How to do it - metadata

My collection is about 50/50 classical and jazz. I used sqeezecenter/LMS/iPeng for a fair few years. I used a consistent naming convention for all my classical cds: Composer Work (Artist) ie Beethoven Symphonies 5 & 7 (Gardiner) which at least brings a composer  together in the album view.  There are various plug-ins for LMS - notably the Custom Browse ones by Erland, which can help you make your own browse trees, but they are tricky to use. And there is  a Setting int the My Music tab to treat a composer as an artist in the artists view, but the result is not pleasing as you get all your non-classical composers turned into artists too. Some people cheat and put the composer into the Artist or more strictly AlbumArtist tag, but that is not right imo either. Loads of fiddling and struggling.

A while ago I switched to J RIver Media Centre with the the Whitebear plug in to allow it to drive my Touch and with JRemote as the iPad/phone remote control. Way, way ahead of LMS - now I can get exactly the views I want; Classical only by Composer, non-classical by AlbumArtist,  if I wanted Jazz by bass player I could get it in 2 minutes. 

You can get a free trial of JRMC - it's great for viewing and changing tags too.

Thanks for the info likesmusic - so does the J River product work in conjunction with LMS, or instead of it?  I ask because the LMS is on the Vortexbox, and I am not sure how I would integrate that on the physical hardware of VB, but it sounds like it does organization the way I would want it done!

I guess I am asking where does the JRMS software reside and how do you use it with your iPhone? (which is what I use now as a remote.)

DrMark - the J River Media Center is a separate product that needs a pc to run on, but will have no problem accessing and organising music from anywhere on you network so, presuming your Vortexbox sits on your network, you should be fine. An apple version is imminent. You still need to run LMS in the background in order to get the Touch visible to  JRMC, and you need an extra little piece of software called Whitebear to get the communications working. So the end result is that you can use either JRMC itself to organise, view, tag and play your music, or JRMC to organise and set up views, and a remote app like JRemote to run on your iThing. You're fairly early on in the learning curve, and aggravation curve, so this is all maybe a wee bit daunting. My suggestion would be to finish ripping your music, if possible standardising your classical tags as I suggested. See whether you are happy with LMS. If not, then you can download JRMC free, download whitebear free, download the MyRiver iPad app free or the (much better imo) JRemote app for a few dollars and customise your views till your hearts content. If nothing else, JRMC is a great way of viewing your music and editing tags, and you're bound to have a fair bit of that to do anyway. It is a hugely powerful product.

Classical music I tag as follows:

album artist: actual performer(s)

artist: main performer, e.g. Soloist in a concerto

album: composer - album name

composer: composer

this way I can select on:

- performer via ( album) artist

- composer via album or composer, depending on the support for composer tag by the control point

dBpoweramp via AMG library often comes quite close to this format so not much to change manually.

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Aleg

Slightly off topic but if you afford the storage space then make sure that you rip your FLAC completely uncompressed. It takes about 30% more room but improves the sound hugely. You'll be glad you did.

ATB,

Steve

Yep, I do it just like Aleg does.

Looking for a composer? Look in the albums. Cos there is Wagner - Lohengrin.

Additionally I have the Custom Browse plugin. I am not using any of the tree functions but merely te option to look for composers.

This method is 100 percent compatible wirh all the rock, pop and jazz stuff one has.

In the composer tag I put Wagner, Richard. In the album tag I abbreviate by just writing Wagner - xxxx.

Having the Custom Browse pluging I might just as well skip the album short cut. But I like to be compatible with other software as well, which may not provide such amenities as the composer search function.

That works fine if you're using Asset, but, alas, Twonky on my QNAP doesn't show Composer as a search option, so I put the composer name in Artist, Album Artist, and Composer.  I separate the various actual artists (LSO, Domingo etc) by putting them in square brackets as part of the album title.

Of course, to make life even more interesting (and in the long term easier, IMO) I also always put surname, first name(s) as in these fields, because I refuse to search for Beethoven under 'L', or Elvis Presley under 'E'.

Why do I sometimes use Twonky?  Well, as I am still in the process of copying my LPs to digital for use in my study, and I find that if I try to listen to the NDS using Asset while copying/backing up etc, then the system is prone to 'hiccups', so at those times I listen using Twonky.

Dungassin

that's why I start the album name with the composer, that way all albums from one composer appear together in the album view. 

It keeps your other tags artist and album artist free for what they were meant for, i.e. the performing artist.

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Aleg

So you mean you have recordings of Mozart Piano Concertos where Mozart is the Artist!!? If only!!

To get composers coming up by surname, you might want to investigate the ComposerSort tag - dBpoweramp will fill this out for you (if you have checked it in metadata options), so you have "Bach, Johan Sebastian", "Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus" and so on. There are also ArtistSort and Album Artist Sort tags which might be useful. Irritatingly dBpoweramp doesnt seem to show any of these tags in its tag editor, so you'd need to use another product to edit them. JRiver Media Center would do a pretty good job of that - you could easily select all the tracks with "Johann Sebastian Bach" as a composer and set the ComposerSort to "Bach, J.S." for all of them at once. fwiw it would also give you a UPnP server trees to browse by those tags too, including narrowing them down to just "Classical" - ie you could have a browse tree for just Classical music sorted in alphabetical order of composer surname.

Thanks. What I do works for me, and the thought of re-editing 3000 albums as suggested fills me with horror!  

If you used JRiver to edit tags, you'd only need to do one edit per classical composer. There aren't 3000 of those.  And, depending on how you set dBpoweramp up in the first place, the ComposerSort tag may well already be populated, in which case you wouldn't have anything to do except get a view by that tag in your browse tree. The ComposerSort tag is there to give you the option to see composers sorted by surname; seems a pity not to use it.

I'm still wishing I could get recordings of Mozart playing his piano concertos or Beethoven conducting his syphonies! The miracles of tagging!