I change a lot of my CD to Ogg to be able to listen them easily from my
computer (I use foobar, I was used to WMP but it does not support library
for Ogg files and plug-ins I found for this where poor) without the need for
frequent CD changing.
I like my music to be richly tagged. But with classical music CD it is a
real pain to tag those files. Typical problems involve:
- single CD contains different works (like Tchaikovsky's CD "Piano
Concertos 1 & 2"),
- single CD contains different works performed by different artists,
- some works (usually operas) are contained on multiply CDs,
- it is interesting to have both date of publishing (the date the work
was finished, the date it was shown for the first time) and date of
recording.
I want to preserve in tags info about the album from which the piece was
taken but I want to have "album title" to be set to correct data. So
in case
of mentioned Tchaikovsky's CD I want halve of the tracks to have "album
title" set to "Piano Concerto 1" and the other half "Piano
Concerto 2" -
however somewhere in the tags I want to have data that they came CD named
"Piano Concertos 1 & 2".
I could use some tricks like having "album title" set to
"Piano
Concertos 1 & 2 - Piano Concerto 1" or something similar but this is
IMHO
just a workaround and not a very nice one. It makes title much to long it
does not give enough information since for any plug-in or something that for
example downloads album cover this title would be useless and so on.
After some thinking I came to position when it seemed obvious for me
that what is required is an explicit separation of tags on CD (its releases
date, publisher, title and so on) and tags on work (its title, composer and
so on). For typical modern single-artist albums those data would be the same
in many places. However classical CD (and compositions like "Hits of Summer
2008") could benefit much from this.
Is anything already done on this field? Or is anything in progress? What
are advised ways of dealing with this kind of problem?
Adam Badura
On 02/06/08 10:54:43, Adam Badura commented on the issues
taggingclassical music and suggested that there should be separate sets
oftags for the work the track forms part of, and for the CD it was
takenfrom. He also asked if any work had been done in this field.
I remembered that there have been some recommendations published and
asearch turned up the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis_comment
http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html
http://www.gophernet.org/articles/vorbiscomment.html
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html
The last of these articles was not available when I tried to click onit
but I don't know if it has gone away permenantly or if this is justa
temporary issue. I found a copy in the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061004152153/http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html
and also in the Google cache:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html
There is also a Wiki in which there seems to be some debate:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/VorbisComment
One difficulty, of course, is that whereas you can add any tag you like
to
your files you won't necessarily get any of the players to use it
either for
display or indexing.
My personal approach is a bit mixed but in summary:
1. For popular music stick to the artist, album and title as normally
used.
In the case of compilation albums the album tag is the name of the
compilation album but the artist tag is the artist name for the
track
(and not "Various Artists").
2. For classical music:
2a. Add composer, ensemble, performer and conductor tags and then
make the
artist tag whichever of those I would want the player to display
and
expect to use when searching for it.
2b. If the track is part of a complete work, for example it is one
movement
on a symphony and there are tracks for the other movements, make
the
album tag the name of the complete work and the title the name
of the
movement.
2c. If the track is an isolated piece of a complete work such as
would be
found on some of the classical compilation albums then make the
album tag the name of the compilation and the title tag contain
both
the name of the work and which movement.
I also have my CD ripper automatically add the CDDB id of the CD the
track
came from. In the case where the album tag has been used for the name
of
the work this 'cddb' tag is what would enable me to link the track with
others from the same physical CD.
HTH,
Steve.
On 02/06/08 10:54:43, Adam Badura commented on the issues tagging
classical music and suggested that there should be separate sets
of tags for the work the track forms part of, and for the CD it was
taken from. He also asked if any work had been done in this field.
I remembered that there have been some recommendations published
and a search turned up the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis_comment
http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html
http://www.gophernet.org/articles/vorbiscomment.html
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html
The last of these articles was not available when I tried to click
on it but I don't know if it has gone away permenantly or if this
is just a temporary issue. I found a copy in the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061004152153/http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html
and also in the Google cache:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html
There is also a Wiki in which there seems to be some debate:
http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/VorbisComment
One difficulty, of course, is that whereas you can add any tag you
like to your files you won't necessarily get any of the players to
use it either for display or indexing.
My personal approach is a bit mixed but in summary:
1. For popular music stick to the artist, album and title as
normally used. In the case of compilation albums the album tag
is the name of the compilation album but the artist tag is the
artist name for the track (and not "Various Artists").
2. For classical music:
2a. Add composer, ensemble, performer and conductor tags and then
make the artist tag whichever of those I would want the player
to display and expect to use when searching for it.
2b. If the track is part of a complete work, for example it is
one movement of a symphony and there are tracks for the other
movements, make the album tag the name of the complete work
and the title the name of the movement.
2c. If the track is an isolated piece of a complete work such as
would be found on some of the classical compilation albums
then make the album tag the name of the compilation and the
title tag contain both the name of the work and which
movement.
I also have my CD ripper automatically add the CDDB id of the CD
the track came from. In the case where the album tag has been used
for the name of the work this 'cddb' tag is what would enable me to
link the track with others from the same physical CD.
HTH,
Steve.
There has been recent work on an advanced metadata format for Ogg content (music and everything else) named M3F[1]. None of the Xiph tools currently support it, though, so I would say for now stick with Vorbis Comments, unless of course you (or someone else you may know) would like to expand applications in that direction. -Ivo [1] http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/M3F