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How do you tag CLASSICAL CD rips?

uncl_nigel

uncl_nigel

pfm Member
I have used dbpoweramp to rip all my pop, rock and folk CDs (with tags for album artist, artist, album, track number and track title).
My version (14 something) is not as fast as I would like and my family license does not seem to include the MAC version. It would be more convenient (although not essential if the Win 7 software is better) to use the MAC (better faster computer and it is where Roon is). So I might have to buy something (dbpoweramp 16 or some other software).

So to the questions:
- dbpoweramp or something else on a MAC or a Win7 laptop

- how to tag CLASSICAL using DBP or the something else

dbpoweramp has a sort of command line that you have to re-write for classical.

I would like to have
title of work
composer
conductor
orchestra
soloists

in that order.
 
I don't bother to 'tag' classical music. The info required varies too much, etc. I just give the files (and the directories they're in) names that convey the main points. Add text files as required. (Fake this as jpeg 'cover' images that show the text for my DAP.)
 
Maybe I haven't got the right end of the stick here but you know you can use iTunes and have the track name used as the file name. That's what I do - rip to Apple Lossless, import to iTunes, do tags, then copy to music player hard drive and play from there.

I have a bunch of scripts that run in iTunes to make tagging in bulk easy. There are plenty on the web shared for free but I've made my versions of many to do the stuff I need. Happy to share them with you if, just pm me.
 
iTunes [which I believe uses Gracenote as a data-base] gets it mostly right. Of course you have to edit faulty entries, but it does save an awful lot of work typing in each track.

I used to have over 8000 tracks in iTunes, but this is down to slightly less than half that these days.

Best wishes from George
 
I used dBpoweramp to rip my entire, not small, classical collection. To some extent how you tag classical depends a bit on your playback software, and the tags it recognizes. There’s no point populating the composer tag if your player can’t use it. But my chosen music player for years was JRiver which lets you organise your music by any tags you care, so I could have great views of Classical music by composer, by artist, or whatever I fancied.

What I did was:
1. Standardise a naming convention for classical music of Composer Work (artist(s)) eg Beethoven Piano Concerto 3 (Brendel). This helps albums appear in sensible order in an Album view.
2. Decide on a single name for Composers, ie J.S. Bach or Johann Sebastian Bach.
3. Make sure Composer Sort and Artist Sort tags are set. Ie Bach, J.S., Perahiah, Murray
This means if your playback software is any good you can sort views by the Composer or Artist Sort Tags, yet show the Composer Tag so J.S. Bach sorts under “B”. DBpoweramp will rip ComposerSort and Artist Sort tags if you tell it to.
4. It didn’t remotely matter what folders I ripped music into as I never use folders to navigate or find music, That’s what tags are for.
5. Some people will tell you to make the Composer an Artist. They are wrong.
6. Decide how you want boxed sets and multi-cd works to appear. Some people make an opera one cd, others like it split. DBpoweramp has settings for either.
7. Beware that some Classical CDs can have enormously long tracknames which can upset some operating systems when it uses them to create a file name. 300 characters is quite easy to get to which will upset older versions of Windows.

Most people have found their own ways of making sense of classical music. If you use good tools like DBpoweramp and J River you can get it to behave nearly like you want.

You might want to look at Roon which attempts to understand the concept of a classical work, composers, artists, conductors etc. Or just add tags of your own and populate them yourself. Again, it depends on your playback software.
 
uncl_nigel said:
I have used dbpoweramp to rip all my pop, rock and folk CDs (with tags for album artist, artist, album, track number and track title).
My version (14 something) is not as fast as I would like and my family license does not seem to include the MAC version. It would be more convenient (although not essential if the Win 7 software is better) to use the MAC (better faster computer and it is where Roon is). So I might have to buy something (dbpoweramp 16 or some other software).

So to the questions:
- dbpoweramp or something else on a MAC or a Win7 laptop

- how to tag CLASSICAL using DBP or the something else

dbpoweramp has a sort of command line that you have to re-write for classical.

I would like to have
title of work
composer
conductor
orchestra
soloists

in that order.
Click to expand...

I have 117,768 classical tracks. 8,316 albums.

They are tagged with Artist Name, Track Title. Album Title and of course, Track Number. I also add an image where possible.

Soloists, conductor, orchestra and title of work all go in to Track Title.

Composer is often clear from Album Title, and if not it goes in Track Title.

In compilation Cds I tend to include all the artists in Artist Name for the whole album, even if they're not playing on every track. Normally the image of the back cover sorts out the problem in practice. Generally, the image tag is very useful for these details which may not be so important for searching.

If a tag is on freedb or another accessible database I tend to use it.

I tag with foobar. The database is in the Logitech Media Server.

This works perfectly well for the searches I want to do.
 
The folder system on my computer is like this:

Mahler
Das Lied von der Erde - Bernstein-Israel PO
Das Lied von der Erde - Kubelik-Bavarian RSO
Symphony 2 - Abbado-Lucerne FO
Symphony 2 - Mehta-Vienna PO
Symphony 3 - Abbado-Lucerne FO
etc
Vivaldi
The Four Seasons - Podger-Brecon Baroque
etc

I only have about 60 classical CDs and I only rip my absolute favourites so I don't have that much to manage. If I had hundreds and I wanted them all ripped I'd probably arrange it like this:

Mahler
Symphony 2 (contain all versions)
Symphony 3 (as above)
etc

But it does get a wee bit tricky when one release contains two pieces by different composers and the piece that matters isn't first on the disc. For example, the Living Stereo SACD that contains Beethoven's Vioin Concerto in D and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in Em goes under Beethoven even though the piece I'm really interested in the latter. The way I store that on my computer is like this:

Beethoven Mendelsshon
Violin Concerto in D + Violin Concerto in Em-Munch-Boston SO

Seeing as I only have a few doubles like this, it's not too much of a faff.

As for playback via PLEX or whatever, I always name the composer as artist and contributing artist and then add conducter and orchestra to album title so that it looks like this:
Track # Title Album Artist
04 Urlicht Symphony 2 Abbado-Lucerne FO Mahler

Fwiw, I rip using dBpoweramp but I make sure it's correct before I move on and rip something else. Rip right, rip once and all that.
 
You might want to consider a “Composition” tag - “Beethoven Symphony 4” etc. and implement a view in your playback software that uses Composition rather than album. Depends on how good your playback software is - easy peasy in J River, Roon does it for you, not so easy with LMS.

But whatever you do, don’t make composer an artist! (Unless he is of course - cf Benjamin Britten)
 
I don't stream any more (back to CDs), but when I did I would creat a folder for the album. eg: Mozart Piano Concerto 24 - Pires. If the DBPoweramp created a folder , then that would do. But whatever, it was useful to have a folder that I could find easily if I wanted to re-tag. When ripping, I would name the album as something like. 'Mozart: Piano concerto No 24 in C minor, K491 - Pires'. That would be how I found the album in the streamer software on the iPad. And then further tags such as composer = Mozart, Artist = Maria Joao Pires, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Abbado. (just made that up).
If I had another recording of Mozart K491, then Album = Mozart Piano concerto in C minor, K491 - Schiff. or something like that.
I had another windows software called Tagrename, which was useful if it didn't work out and needed to batch re-tag some files. remember to check the compilation box if ripping multiple CDs into one album and keep the album name consistent.
 
windhoek said:
But it does get a wee bit tricky when one release contains two pieces by different composers and the piece that matters isn't first on the disc. For example, the Living Stereo SACD that contains Beethoven's Vioin Concerto in D and Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in Em goes under Beethoven even though the piece I'm really interested in the latter. The way I store that on my computer is like this:

Beethoven Mendelsshon
Violin Concerto in D + Violin Concerto in Em-Munch-Boston SO
Click to expand...

That just has to be Heifetz, doesn't it?
 
uncl_nigel said:
Playback software is Roon
Click to expand...

Well Roon finds tags for you and organizes your music in its own way. It finds Composer and Composition tags itself using Rovi’s database. So you should be fine with any old reasonable rip. You can of course override Roons tags with your own, but it’s unlikely you will need to. Roon isn’t very good with big boxed sets so beware. It’s great software, I’m happy with it since I moved from J River, though Qobuz integration played a big part.
 
k90tour said:
That just has to be Heifetz, doesn't it?
Click to expand...

I don't normally mention lead players in my tagging. If I had a lot of versions of the same piece I might but because my classical collection is quite modest, listing conductor instead of the lead player is adequate - besides, I can just imagine Bernstein turning in his grave if his name was dropped to make way for a lead player
 
Tagging classical music is a time consuming pain but ultimately really valuable.

I now use JRiver to rip and tag which makes use of auto complete to ensure the very important standardisation as in do we list Beethoven as Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven Ludwig van etc etc. Consitency is key.

One of the most useful tags for me is genre but I have my own way of doing it so that classical is divided initially into Orchestral, Chamber, Instrumental, Vocal, and Stage with further sub divisions into, say Orchestral Piano, Orchestral Viola etc. This means that if I fancy listening to a piano concerto I can quickly drill down to all the composers in my collection who have written piano concertos, then down to the different concertos they have written and then to all the different performances of the same concerto.

The other main way I browse is by composer and than a list of all their works. In a similar way I can browse by nationality and than see all the composers of a particular nationality and than their works.

Surprisingly useful is to browse by time! F1 starting in 45 minutes on the telly and fancy listening to a piece of music lasting about forty minutes? Click on 40 minutes and see all the works that last that long, which can be a very good way of rediscovering all those recordings that I have forgotten about.

Another way of browsing I find handy is having listened to a piece of music is to be able to bring up other works composed in the same year, decade or century.

With good consistent tagging and a working knowledge of regular expressions one can come up with all sorts of ways of browsing. If one simply wants to think of a piece of music than play it, life is much simpler and using the folder based filing system could suffice, but the real power of a well tagged classical library is to find music, often forgotten, by various browsing criteria. Also, if, for example, you have 15 versions of Shostakovich's Fifteenth String Quartet it is handy to not only see which quartets you have playing it but quickly compare the recording dates and the length of their performance.

It needs a good choice of tags to concentrate on and a playback system that is versatile. One of the reasons that I have stuck with a PC based system as opposed to manufacturer (such as Sonos) is that one is less at the mercy of the manufacturer changing their software and leaving your library all but useless. This happened a few years ago with Sonos when software changes made the system hopeless for a classical library, particularly where one had multiple versions of the same work. As a beta tester I, and many others, pointed out to Sonos the problem the changes would make for classical listeners but they completely ignored us and carried on regardless.

So, choose your tags with care, be consistent, and be careful in your choice of hardware and associated software.
 
Tags are chosen
composer - work - conductor - artists (orchestra, soloists)
but

how do I write the "naming" line in the DBpoweramp settings?
 
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