I've been through ripping all my classical music already. First, I can tell you, it's a *bunch* of work, if you want to do it right. For me, I did the tagging several times over and over again, as new devices required new tagging structures. First, with older versions of Winamp, I didn't care much. Then cam ethe music library, then came covers. The real problem came, when I got an iPod, where you can actually use the "Composer" tag.
I have the SqueezeBox Radio now since a few days, and haven't played with the server at the moment, but if you're interested in my method of getting structure to the music collection: Let's beging with the programs I use (Windows system): EAC (Exact Audio Copy), because it simply has the nest ripping engine. Most accurate, and highly configurable. Can compress as MP3, Flac - whatever you choose. There is a highly detailed tutorial on the net. I take a look, if you're interested. For tagging, I take "Tag&Rename" and "Mp3Tag". Those two programs complete each other very well. "Tag&Rename" for the finer work, and "Mp3Tag" for all kind of mass-tagging activity, since this program features a very mighty scripting language, with regular expressions etc ... During this task, I found that there is absolutely no way around manual tagging my music. All queries from CDDB, Amazon Database etc. all get the tagging wrong. In some way or another. Each album had a different structure. Some times, the artist is in the album tag, sometimes not. Gave a complete mess. So I just get the titles right, and start from there. For the structure on the harddisk, I take the following scheme: Composer/Year - Album (Artist) for example: Chopin/1990 - 24 Préludes, Op. 28 (Argerich) and if there's not only a soloist, the the orchester and conducture follow the solist, like: Chopin/1990 - Piano Concertos Nr. 1 & 2 (Perahia, IPO, Mehta) I only give the past names, and the 3 digit code for each orchester, otherwise the folder would be too long, giving problems with the 255 character limitations in windows. The title structure on the harddisk is like: tracknumber-title Providing the more informations, like album name etc. would also end in filenames beeing too long. I never rip albums apart. Multiple CD's are like album/CD 1/ etc. Useful if you want to fetch informations from CDDB afterwards. The combining of those multi-CD's are dong completely in the tags. For the tags, I've chosen the following structure: Artist: Artist and/or orchester name Album: Composer:Album Name (Artist) Composer: Last Name or Full Name of the composer. But then, consistant througout the whole collection. For example, let's take a look the the Bach Piano Concertos 3,5,6,7 from Murray Perahia and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields: The Artist field: Murray Perahia, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields The Album Field: Bach: Piano Concertos No. 3, 5, 6, 7 (Perahia, ASF) The Composer field: Bach The Album Artist field: Murray Perahia, Academy of St. Martin in the Fields I hope you get a clue now. By providing the Artist and Orchester in the Album field, you can separate between multiple recordings of the same concert. The there are some special cases, like different concerts from different composers on the same CD. As I already said, I keep the CD structure intact, but did the seperation in the tags. For example, if you have a CD from Sviatoslav Richter, containing a concert from Beethoven and Bach, each one beeing recorded at a different time, with different orchestras and conductors. It's the album name tag, that's doing the separation. Basically it's treated as two different CD's here. If the first 3 tracks are a Beethoven concert, then album information is provided as above, the track numbers are from 1-3. Now, track 4-6 is concert from Bach, then these files get a different album name, with track numbers from 1-3. Then there are those recital CDs, for example live performances, with multiple composers. Separating them each with a different album tag doesn't make sense - it would split up into too many albums, each containing only one or two tracks. Those albums I treat as a whole. For example: Album Name: Martha Argerich - Live from the Concertgebouw 1978 & 1979 then the Title Names: Scherzo Nr. 3, Op. 39 The Composer Tag is doing the separation. The CD covers all came from the Amazon Database or Google Images. In each folder there's the same image in two variants called "folder.jpg" and "cover.jpg". Windows looks at "folder.jpg", some other tools want "cover.jpg". It's really a bunch of work, but for me, it was a lot harder, since I have to re-structure the tagging several times almost from scratch. If you start at the beginning, it's a little easier, if you are keeping the structure consistent. Let me point out again: I found absolutely no way for an automated tagging procedure. Something was always wrong, bringing chaos to the collection. But well, I'm a perfectionist, even like to have the "D-majors" in my own language, the "Op. Xx" all looking the name, and no "op.xx" ;-) Have fun! Michael -- Loom ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Loom's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=35285 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72923
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