Editing Tags in classical music

Look at Mp3tag. Free, and does a pretty nice job. I know also that if you dig, there are advanced features where you can get to more tags than it at first appears, but I only fettled with that once because the "out of the box" level did what I needed.

Chris G posted:

I realise this topic comes up regularly, but would be grateful for guidance from classical music listeners please.  I am wanting to edit the tags on a number of albums where they display and sort wrongly, or in which the individual tracks aren’t in the correct order.  I am using a windows pc with windows10 through which I download music and then transfer over my network to the Core.  What are the best programs currently to use please?

The best program for me is ExFalso.

Thanks NBPF - is this usable on windows?

Thanks DrMark - I am at present wrestling with this program with limited success.  I can't find any proper instructions so I am having to "wing it". 

Chris G posted:

Thanks NBPF - is this usable on windows?

Wikipedia says yes but I have tested it only on Debian / GNU Linux. It is a very simple program but supports arbitrary indexes, operations on file collections and multi-valued indexes. If you prefer to use the command line you can also check "lltag". It seems that we are not allowed to post links to these tools but if you google lltag it should be among the first results. Best, nbpf

Foobar works fine for me, it’s free as well. Tried MP3tag at first, but that was horrendously slow at editing files on the nas, unusable really. Editing on the pc before transferring files to nas it was ok. But Foobar is simple, does the job and is very quick both on nas and on pc. At least as long as I don’t copy large amounts of data to the nas at the same time. 

Claus 

I can’t vouch for it since I don’t (yet) use it, but I met a rep at Audio Show East recently who was pushing a product called SongKong which promises to solve exactly the issues you describe as well as add a lot of other useful features. Might be worth a look. 

Hi. I rip with dbPoweramp and find classical editing a breeze. Free to try. Once running on a PC you just edit like any other file. Easy. Then transfer to the Core.

I also use MP3 tag and it works perfectly.....

I use mp3tag mostly but occasionally Foobar as well. Foobar is faster and allows “bulk updates”, e.g. making all “Mozart” composer tags consistent to avoid having “W.A. Mozart” and “Mozart, Wolfgang” at the same time.

but what I am not sure is whether the NAIM proprietary CORE metadata system respects those changes ..

You might find SongKong to your liking. It costs £25 and I have seen it in action - it works once you get used to the interface and simplifies the entire process. Search for SongKong and have a look to see what you think.

The tagger Musichi is apparently well adapted to Classical Music, as a mac user I have not tried it however.

Thanks all for your further suggestions.

Bert: I am looking at mp3tag but although I have been able to make some edits, it's probably me, but I can't find a way to edit, for example, the conductor field?

SongKong has been mentioned in several places.  I may check that one out.  

Thanks again to everyone for your help.  Does anyone know how SongKong interacts with the Core?

SongKong's certainly a very good program, but you may find Jaikoz, by the same company, more flexible. It's not as user-friendly but you've got more editing options with the same level of automatic correction available.

Thanks TonyM.  Have you used it with music files on the Core?

What I have done in Mp3tag for the conductor (and many may see this as a very flawed solution) is put the conductor & orchestra in the "album artist" tag, and the composer in the "artist" tag. This means I can find the conductor/orchestra, or the composer. So for example, the artist tag would be "Mahler, Gustav" and the album artist would have "Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic."

This has also proved helpful for those inevitable discs where one composer/orchestra plays pieces from different composers; it allows me to access them either way. If I go by conductor/orchestra I get the entire CD contents, if I search by the artist I get the pieces from that particular composer, but separated by the various albums that have pieces from that composer.

Where it can get a bit wonky is if the CD has different combinations of conductors with an orchestra, say multiple conductors working with the Weiner Philharmonic (as with a "Best of New Years" collection) playing various composers...then it becomes best to search by album name if you want to hear the entire album.

An inelegant solution perhaps, but it works pretty well for me at present.

DrMark posted:

What I have done in Mp3tag for the conductor (and many may see this as a very flawed solution) is put the conductor & orchestra in the "album artist" tag, and the composer in the "artist" tag. This means I can find the conductor/orchestra, or the composer. So for example, the artist tag would be "Mahler, Gustav" and the album artist would have "Leonard Bernstein/New York Philharmonic."

This has also proved helpful for those inevitable discs where one composer/orchestra plays pieces from different composers; it allows me to access them either way. If I go by conductor/orchestra I get the entire CD contents, if I search by the artist I get the pieces from that particular composer, but separated by the various albums that have pieces from that composer.

Where it can get a bit wonky is if the CD has different combinations of conductors with an orchestra, say multiple conductors working with the Weiner Philharmonic (as with a "Best of New Years" collection) playing various composers...then it becomes best to search by album name if you want to hear the entire album.

An inelegant solution perhaps, but it works pretty well for me at present.

Choosing a set of indexes (Artist, Composer, Album Artist, Conductor, etc.) and associating specific values to those indexes (e.g. Artist = [Maria Callas, Richard Tucker]) are fundamental and time consuming tasks. They finally represent your way of looking at your music collection should be informed by your needs, not by what a given UPnP server or tagging program supports or does not support today.

If you think that Artist, Composer, Conductor, Orchestra, Genre, Period, ... are distinct notions, then introduce for them distinct indexes. If your tagging program does only supports associating values to certain predefined indexes, then use a better tagging program. If your UPnP server only supports certain predefined indexes, use a better UPnP server. MinimServer has been conceived to address the needs of classical music collectors, supports arbitrary indexes and what they call "intelligent" browsing. It is really smart.

Associating composer information to the Artist index makes little sense: associate composer information to the Composer index and artist information to the Artist index. Populate the Conductor index with values like "Bernstein, Leonard", "Abbado, Claudio", "Solti, Georg", populate Composer with values like "Mahler, Gustav", "Britten, Benjamin" and populate Artist with values like "[Maria Callas, Richard Tucker, Rina Cavallari]"! Do not allow a crap program to make you adopt a crap tagging practice!

A composer is NOT an artist!!!!!! What next?? If you had a cd of Beethoven playing one of his own piano concertos it would be worth a fortune! nbpf is right. Do not change the meaning of tags to suit crummy software. Change your software so it supports your view of music and in which tags retain their semantic integrity.

You might want to think about Album Artist as distinct from Artist. 

And you might want to think  about how the Composer associated with an Album (or a Performance of a Work) is not always the Composer of all the parts of the performance. For example one of Rinaldo Alessandrini's performances of the Monteverdi Vespers is interspersed with works from Anon, Buonamente and Usper.  If you select by Composer= Monteverdi etc. do you get the interspersed sonatas etc..? 

I have found J River Media Center to be an excellent tag editor for Windows. It has extremely powerful searching and tagging capabilities. 

.. and what do you do about an album like Steven Isserlis' recent wonderful disc of Haydn and Bach Cello concertos, interspersed with pieces from Mozart and Boccherini. Definitely conceived of as a concert, so in some contexts you want to see all the tracks  together .. how do you stop them being split across composers? 

likesmusic posted:

.. and what do you do about an album like Steven Isserlis' recent wonderful disc of Haydn and Bach Cello concertos, interspersed with pieces from Mozart and Boccherini.

My own approach (which I appreciate may not work for others) would be to split the album into the individual works, tagging each appropriately. I'd then create a play list for any combination of the works that I might want to play. I find that works well with the sort of combined work album you mention.

Stephen

On the MinimServer forum there is a whole section dedicated to music tagging. The MinimServer site, in particular the section "Your music library" of the user guide, also provides some guidelines and basic informations about tagging, customization options, sorting, etc. 

For me the basic idea is that, no matter what I do, at the end of the day my tagging scheme should allow me to browse, search, navigate, etc. my music collection at least as well as I could achieve with pencil and paper or by carefully ordering my CDs in shelves. In fact, a good tagging scheme should do much better. It should allow me to tag different tracks of an album with different Artist values (most common in opera) and, of course, indexes should accept multiple values. I like to be able to restric a search to only "modern", "classical" or "romantic" music. Thus, I need a Period index. I want to be able to pick up a Composer and have the control point display all Works of that composer for which I have one or more interpretations. Similarly, I want to be able to select an Orchestra or Ensemble and get a list of all the Albums that cointain tracks with that orchestra. And so on.

We should not be indulgent with programs that force us to misuse indexes, stop calling things by name, split albums, reconstruct albums as playlists, etc. There are a few very good programs for tagging and serving music. There are many programs that are acceptable and a few ones that are really bad. There is no excuse for lack of support for user-specific indexes, multi-valued indexes and basic sorting and customization options. These are the consequences of negligent software design and of programming errors.

Jesus F Christ, all I did was offer a simple solution that didn't require any modification using generic Mp3tag. And I did not tout it as the be all and end all by any means. Who whizzed in your cornflakes this morning? I didn't insult your mother for chrissakes. (I'm sure she is a lovely woman.) Nor did I say you had to do this with your music collection on your system.

Artist is the artist who wrote the content, and album artist is who is performing that content on the album. Since the OP said he was struggling with the program, it was an offered solution, that's all. It was not a war crime. I have about 1,200 CDs and only about 90-100 are in the classical category, not including about 30+ classical guitar CDs.

When a CD is burned into Vortexbox the album artist is blank, and it is a generically offered field without modification in the base setup, so it only takes moment on a new CD to set up the album artist on one track and mass copy it to the rest (easy peasy really), since composer is not easily accessed in the generic setup.

The point is to be able to find the music via indexing - I am not passing any judgments on who is what or not.

Walk up to Simon Rattle and tell him he's not an artist, and see what position that gets you on his Christmas card list.

@likesmusic - that is where I would access the album by the album name, as it would come up together as one, irrespective of the other tags.

Now everyone, go have a nice libation.

DrMark posted:

An inelegant solution perhaps, but it works pretty well for me at present.

I agree... what works for you is all that matters.  No one has to follow your suggestion, but no one should tell you you are doing things wrong either!

The thing is that index names are just labels: they do not carry by themselves any meaning. Instead of "Composer", "Artist", "Album", "Conductor", "Work", etc. one could use "Idx0", "Idx1", "Idx2", "Idx3", "Idx4", etc. or perhaps "Lala", "Lulu", "Gaga", "Gugu", "Gigu", etc.

As long as one takes care not to mix up things and populates "Lala" with conductor values, "Lulu" with album values, etc., everything is fine: names and order do not matter.

What in the end matters is how index names and their associated contents are displayed in the control point. This is determined by the UPnP server. Now comes the point: there are good and bad UPnP servers.

Some UPnP servers allow one to select which indexes get actually listed in the control point and how they are listed. Thus, for instance, I tend to give my indexes English names. But then I set MinimServer to list the values associated to "Composer" under "Komponist" and those associated to "Work" under "Werk". If I had named my indexes "Idx0", "Idx1", "Idx2", "Idx3", "Idx4", I would still see the same in my control point by setting MinimServer to display "Idx0" values under "Komponist", etc.

Unfortunately, many UPnP server make a number of implicit (and most often undocumented) assumptions about index names. For instance, they assume that users have populated an "Album" index or they ignore whatever values a user might have associated to an "Orchestra" or to a "Conductor" index. Finally, many programs for editing index names and their associated values (tagging programs) only allow editing the values of a fixed set of indexes.

The most sensible choice that we can do is to stop using UPnP servers and tagging programs that come with poor or no documentation, that do not support user-specific index naming and that do not fulfill minimal customizability requirements. One can use such programs, of course. But then one should not be surprised if it turns out that one has to use workarounds or that browsing and searching classical music collections is a nightmare.

Well a point of curiosity: in my (admittedly) limited exposure to the programs on remote devices that run the systems (LMS, Squeezer, and the Naim app) I have yet to see where any of these myriad tags are available as indexed item by which to search, which in my mind is the number one function they fill.  I can have all the meta tags I want with all the correct data in place, but what is the value if I cannot display nor see them on the device(s) I use to play and or control the play of the music?

This is a 100% honest question; nothing combative about it at all.