How to organize a ripped classical library

Any tips?

I have about 60 CDs ripped (that's about one quarter).

Now I have a Squeezebox, and my period of first exploration is over, it's time to get serious and methodical.

I thought what I wanted was a much more refined use of "Genre" so my Squeezebox would separate Baroque from Classical and Romantic and Piano from Choral; but I have read that is not the way to go. I am told I must go deeper into learning about and editing tags.

What do the learned Classical (and Baroque) lovers on this forum do? Or perhaps it isn't worth the many hours work? Getting the back catalogue sorted will be a mighty effort, but it may pay off - adding new acquisitions will be relatively easy.

But wouldn't be so much easier if the classical recording companies would agree a standard and publish the tags in their catalogues?

What do you do, ladies and gentlemen?
Do you have a preferred indexing scheme?
Do you have a favourite tag editing software?

 

By composer. Easy to implement.

 

Its still a pain doing it by composer.... taking 1 example, you will get:

Brahms
Brahms, J
J. Brahms
Johannes Brahms
Brahms, Johannes
Brahms (1833-1897)
Brahms, J 1833-1897
etc etc with every variation of initials and dates you can think of.

So one composer mught give you a dozen different entries.

We need a smart indexer that recognizes certain values.

 

To answer my own question: This advice seems to be a good start

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/BeginnersGuideToClassical

 

My brahms are aching.....

Be careful would be my advice. Tagging stuff is going to take you ages and if you subsequently move to a different platform/player (Mac/iTunes?), you could find that none of it is readable by the new kit. Nothing wrong with LBR's suggestion and if you move to something else it will still work - nothing is going to mess up a straightforward folder structure!

 

Yoy can get round that one by using a ripping software that auto-completes when you start to fill in the field. If you start with the one variant it can only suggest the one completion. Mediamonkey, for example, does this.

 

I must admit that this is one of the main issues that is stopping from even considering going down the SB-type route. I've got over 2,500 classical CDs ... it would be a complete nightmare. Please correct me if I'm wrong, though!

 

I think this is a very very sensible query and have been puzzling over this for ages and have cobbled together a slightyl skakey solution.
I have about 500 cds ripped (which may mark me out as a mere neophyte). Whether it does or not, I apologise if the following is either naive or beside the point.
The only way i have found of sensibly arranging my collection is to arrange by Album with the composer's surname (with forename if Strauss Bach etc) as the first word(s).
In practice this works just fine and dandy as long as the there is only one composer on the CD. This accounts for most of the stuff I have. other I just make sure the composer's name is in the Album title, and let the alphabetical album list do the rest of the work.

You can usually search by keyword anyway, but I find that i am generally looking for works not tracks, and it isn't too much effort to standardise the format for each album when you rip it.

That said, it all seems to depend on which jukebox you use. Windows media player seems fine with it as is creative juke box, but iTunes doesn't really seem to have much time for album names and always seems to want to screw everything up by bringing up artist names.
I have had great difficulty persuading it that the First CD of Fidelio (Klemperer) is not in fact 7 different albums.
I used to find that the WMP interface was the best, but that it is not as good at automatically recognising and classifying clasical albums as gracenotes which comes with the creative juke box. So I used to rip with Cresative but play using WMP
I am currently trying to come to terms with Media Monkey as I now have an Iphone and can't get creative or WMP to recognise it; obviously I hate iTunes passionately not least because it won't let you move things from one computer to another through your phone. I hope against all hope and most experience that MM may combine the best of all worlds

I think the problem is that many jukeboxes are set up to analyse tracks rather than Albums.

 

Yes, I am presently new to the problem and with just a few discs ripped can take my time to decide what to do,

I keep returning to the advice here

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/BeginnersGuideToClassical

and yes, I have a squeezebox, but have played with a number of players - iTunes, the immature Songbird, Foobar, WMP, and others.

AS to the indexing scheme there seem to be two issues

1. Players are focussed on the needs of popular music which is organised according to Album and Song.

2. Classical users have to decide if they are going to index their collection of CDs or make a more radical conceptual leap and index the music itself. We have a well understood library method for "Classical" music: Composer/Work/Movement, where work includes a classification according to type- symphony, concerto, string quartet etc; and where genre means early,baroque,classical,romantic,modern and/or instrumental, string, brass, choral, operatic, chamber etc. There also seems to be way to index by conductor and/or principal artist.

If a disc contains two or three works, it is listed with three identities. How to catalogue compilations of short works by various composers presents a different challenge: how do you catalogue "My Favourite Piano Pieces" by "A. Pianist"?

If we are to have a robust indexing system these are the categories we need to be using according some clearly defined general rules. It guess we would need the cooperation the classical recording publishers to get this right. In the meantime all will be a muddle.

The iTunes simplicity of flicking through an attractive collection of album artworks is seductive, but I guess in the end is an approach that will fail.

And I am still scratching my head! Does Naim offer a sensible solution?

 

I am not certain whether I can offer anything really new to this discussion other than share my own (simple?) method. I use and love Squeezebox (the Classic model) and all my listening (headphone) and cataloging is of classical music. I have lately been converting (from CD to flac) and cataloging my fairly extensive collection of Bach cantatas. As you know, there are usually about three disparate cantatas on each CD, with generally no uniformity in cantata CD groupings among different performers. I use the excellent dBpoweramp CD Ripper for my ripping, which manages to collect the relevant data from each CD for cataloging purposes. I just change the "Artist" box at the top to the last name of the performer (i.e., conductor) and the "Album" box to the particular BWV number of the cantata being ripped. I save the ripped file to a temporary location on my hard drive, renaming the file to (for example) "Cantata 25 (year) - Gardiner." For the permanent location for my files, I utilize a small "pocket-sized" external drive (250GB), ultimately transferring the files from their temporary location on my pc's hard drive to the external drive (which connects to the pc via the usb port). On the external drive (which I can "carry" with me along with the Squeezebox to various locations where I have a pc and sound system), I create a master composer directory (i.e. Bach) where the individual cantata files reside. Locating all my music filed in this way is a snap with the Squeezebox. Again, I don't know whether this is of any help, but it sure works fine for me.

 

It's complicated! You need to recognise that you will end up spending a long time with MP3Tag. I have contributed to the Slim wiki on this, and think it's a good guide.

My ultimate advice would be to create a number of custom tags; you can have as many of these as you like, and all software will just ignore them. Were I starting out now I would have something like:

Composer, Conductor, Soloists, Orchestra, Opus, Piece, Key, Composition year, Original album details. These would add to the 'piece data' such as period, scale, type, instruments, say.

The advantage of keeping all these separate custom tags is twofold:

First, you can use MP3Tag's Actions to generate tags to suit how you want things to work. And you can change your mind! I have all the metadata I want but stored slightly inconsistently, and it will be such a pain to restructure it that I just can't face it!

Secondly, you can actually use the tags if you use a Squeezebox - there is a plugin for it (Custom Browse, Custom Scan and others by the same guy). This works very well.

If you do this custom tagging, you will keep all facility to change it for any changes to your replay system - nothing will touch the custom tags. The basic point is to keep the metadata all separate - but put it all in!

 

metadata, metadata - what's the meta for?

indexing on author (composer) is rarely sufficient when wanting to discover or locate something (book/album), and as its digital we dont have to conflate subjectTags with shelfmarks.

whatever you do will take effort - putting extensive metadata into a database is only really worthwhile if you will always use that database (v.rare) or if you can extract/export that metadata into another (all too rare).

Libraries assign a 'dumb' accession number to the item/work (ie album) and then use to search on a metadatabase (catalogue) for the discovery bit and a pointer to move to the location bit.

if you can leverage metadata from some other source all the better.

have I done this yet? no, too busy with other distractions but I will, its true, I really will get around to it ...

thanks, I'll have a look at MP3Tag

 

The big advantage of MP3Tag is that it makes it really easy to do batch actions on tags - these could easily include constructing a taxonomy for all your symphonies, for example, to be "Symphony No. 05 in C minor, Op. 067", if that's how you like it. And you can change your mind later.

All I can say from my own (extensive!) experience is that I wish I had built in this level of flexibility. Going back to do it still scares me!