I have ripped hundreds of classical CDs but still have few answers for tagging classical music. It really does depend on how you like to listen to music. But then, having a Squeezebox really can change the way you listen to music. So the best advice is probably to rip a few CDs and play around with tagging them. That mp3tag program is good, if a bit overwhelming at first.
In my experience, all of the classical data bases are inconsistent, just because they are filled by many ordinary users like you and me. Individual Cds in a Multi-disk box often don't match one another, composers names are spelled differently, some titles use the composer, some use the performer, soloists with ensembles get tagged in all possible combinations, etc. There are two difficult steps to fix this for yourself: The second is that it is a LOT of work to go in and edit the tags on all your files to make them consistent. I gave up on this - I have over 11,000 tracks in my library, and I just accept that the tags are sometimes helpful and sometimes not. The first step, though, is even harder and that is deciding on a categorization scheme that you like and that is consistent. I had to give up on that too, just because there are so many different ways to look at the music. Just for example, take Beethoven piano sonatas. He wrote 32 of them. There are many different performers who have brought out CDs of them. Some have made complete sets of all 32, but each set divides them up differently among the CDs. Sometimes a performer only plays a few of them. Sometimes a performer has different performances of the same sonata on different CDs with different companion pieces each time, or even has produced the whole set again but divided them differently. Sometimes a sonata is on a CD with other Beethoven music, maybe a piano concerto with an orchestra, or maybe solo German dances. Sometimes a beethoven sonata is on a CD with sonatas by Schubert. Sometimes there is a different pianist on the same CD playing another Beethoven sonata or maybe a Mozart one. Now, even supposing you get through all of that, how do you generalize your scheme to handle all of Beethoven's music, and then all music by other composers and performers? Should 'piano' be the overarching category and include sonatas by all composers? Should it include concertos as well as sonatas? Is the composer less important than the fact that it is piano music and not orchestral music? Etc. Etc. Now, ask yourself if you choose what you want to listen to consistently. Sometimes I just really like a particular CD - the pairing of pieces on it and want to have it play through the Squeezebox. Sometimes I know I just want something by Beethoven; sometimes I want something played by Alfred Brendel and I don't care what composer he plays. Sometimes I want to hear the 32nd sonata by Beethoven but don't care who it is played by. Sometimes I want the 32nd sonata played by Pollini followed by Lupu playing a Schubert sonata. etc. I am a "toaster-mentality" person, meaning I think things should work like a toaster, just plug it in and it works. For the Squeezebox, I still haven't learned all the search functions. So rather than focusing on the tags, I decided to focus instead on a sub-folder scheme in the music folder that I could easily traverse and find what I wanted. So here is what I came up with, inconsistency and all. I generally ignore the CD structure where the music came from. E.g. I don't need to know what the 7th CD was in Brendels 1984 cycle of the Beethoven sonatas - I just need to have all of them as played by Brendel available. Similarly, even though I really like a particular CD that has cello music by Schubert and Debussy played by Rostropovich on cello and Britten on piano, I don't need to store it that way - I store the individual pieces by themselves, and I can easily 'create' the CD by making a playlist that includes those particular pieces in the same order as on the CD. At the top of my folder structure, I have one folder for each of my favorite composers whose music I have a lot of - Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Pärt, etc. plus some generic ones: Violinists (for a few special recitals and surveys), Pianists (same), Contemporary Composers, Jazz (a large subfolder!) and Various (where I keep all the minor composers [which means those whose music I only have a few recordings of]). At the bottom, I generally have one folder for each piece played by a particular performer or performers. E.g. I have 32 folders for the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas played by Brendel in 1984, and 7 for the only ones I have that he released in 1994. I have 32 more folders for these same sonatas played by Paul Lewis. I have one folder for Brahms second piano trio played by the Florestan trio. I have one folder for Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 22 played by Uchida with the English Chamber Orchestra, and another folder for the same piece played by Sviatislav Richter with the same orchestra. In between, for each composer folder I have different sub-categories that reflect the kinds of music they composed and my preferences. For example, under Bach, I have folders for Choral, Concertos, Keyboard, Solo Strings, Sonatas, and Other. Under Beethoven, I have Cello Sonatas, Concertos, Overtures, Piano Sonatas, Piano Other, String Quartets, Symphonies, Trios, and Violion Sonatas. I have so many complete cycles of Beethoven sonatas that I subcategorize them by performer, e.g Goode, Lewis, Rosen, Brendel 1984, Brendel 1994, etc., and in each of these there is one folder for each sonata. For Schubert, on the other hand, there tend to be a few favorite sonatas that many performers play but not many complete cycles. So under Schubert, I have a Piano Sonatas folder, with a subfolder for each sonata (e.g. D.960, D.959, D.958 etc.) and in each of those folders I have a separate subfolder for each performer (e.g in D.958 there are only folders for Brendel and Richter, which are the only two performances that I have, but in D.960 there are 11 subfolders for the eleven performances I have. It takes a fair amount of work to get from the raw rip, which has all the tracks from one CD in one folder, to these individual folders for each performance of one piece, but it is straightforward - just create the folder in Windows and drag/drop the tracks into it. your naming conventions need a bit of thinking too, if for no other reason than that the ultimate path name for a given track contains the names of all the folders it is contained in and can only have some 200+ characters in it. But, having done this, it is quite easy just to scroll through the music folder on the Squeezebox and select what I want to hear. It really has changed how I listen to music. Hope this helps! Swimmer -- Swimmerbird123 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Swimmerbird123's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=17285 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=60215
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