You’re going to hate this, I can tell! – but this is what I do in such cases (I have nearly 90,000 tracks in iTunes, so their consistent organization is crucial):
Album Title – ‘Composer: Main title of piece (in brief)’ (e.g. ‘Mahler: Symphony no. 5’)
Album Artist – either:
‘[Orchestra|Quartet|etc.]/[Conductor|Director]; Soloist(s)’
or: ‘Performer (instrument); Performer (instrument);’ etc.
Track titles can be shortened to the title of the individual movement – contrary to when you say “If this approach is not taken, then the composer’s name needs to be included in each track title” – the Album title is also displayed when any track is played, and the composer’s name is there. Thus the individual track titles can happily be reduced to e.g. ‘I. Trauermarsch’ (the ‘In gemessen…’ can be included if you like, but isn’t necessary).
So using your example…
Album ‘Mahler: Symphony no. 5’
Artist ‘Chicago SO (or in full Symphony Orchestra if you’d rather)/Georg Solti’
Track title ‘I. Trauermarsch’
You’re quite right, Rob, i could never cope with something like that – & if you were scrobbling your listens on Last.fm, it would be practically meaningless!
Still, each to their own…!
Rob
11 years ago
PS. I guess you’re leaving the minefield that is ‘Genre’ for another post?!
Ha! Genre is about as subjective as tags get, isn’t it? Personally, i tend to put a variety of things in the Genre tag, separated by commas, which i can then use in searches & playlists.
Robert
11 years ago
I have used the free program Mediamonkey to access and organise my audio and video files for several years. Entering and categorising tags (or to give it a more precise term, metadata) takes time and effort but I view it as an integral part of studying the music. Mediamonkey provides separate tags for composer, conductor and lyricist, several others, and you can add your own customised tags. It also allows you to add images and even complete lyrics.
Assuming that portable and other players show artist, album and title, I assume artist refers to performer (I use a different standard when tagging audio files and speech recordings but let’s leave that issue out). So –
Artist – key singers or soloists/ensemble or orchestra/conductor
Album – composer/piece or album title
Title – Movement or song name (as much detail as possible without getting ridiculous).
Where the album features more than one work, the composer’s name has to go in front of the title (but if the album features work by the same performer, the performer’s name can go at the front of the album tag and left off the title tag.
Genre is very subjective, and some of the tags provided by software or entered by providers can be very silly, although they sometimes make you think about how different people approach music. Some tracks I’ve bought from amazon I have tagged as avant-garde, have arrived tagged as dance/electronica.
I keep genre tags to a minimum. For instance, I have dropped using a tag for soul because only about 2 albums come under this category. I rather confusingly use acoustic to cover folk and country. I have separate genres for opera, musical, avant-garde, minimalist, modern (meaning roughly 20th Century to present day), Romantic, Baroque, Early, Recital, Song, soundtrack, choral. I have not bothered with tags such as symphony or quartet as these are usually obvious from the title.
You’re going to hate this, I can tell! – but this is what I do in such cases (I have nearly 90,000 tracks in iTunes, so their consistent organization is crucial):
Album Title – ‘Composer: Main title of piece (in brief)’ (e.g. ‘Mahler: Symphony no. 5’)
Album Artist – either:
‘[Orchestra|Quartet|etc.]/[Conductor|Director]; Soloist(s)’
or: ‘Performer (instrument); Performer (instrument);’ etc.
Track titles can be shortened to the title of the individual movement – contrary to when you say “If this approach is not taken, then the composer’s name needs to be included in each track title” – the Album title is also displayed when any track is played, and the composer’s name is there. Thus the individual track titles can happily be reduced to e.g. ‘I. Trauermarsch’ (the ‘In gemessen…’ can be included if you like, but isn’t necessary).
So using your example…
Album ‘Mahler: Symphony no. 5’
Artist ‘Chicago SO (or in full Symphony Orchestra if you’d rather)/Georg Solti’
Track title ‘I. Trauermarsch’
Told you you’d hate it…!
Best,
Rob
You’re quite right, Rob, i could never cope with something like that – & if you were scrobbling your listens on Last.fm, it would be practically meaningless!
Still, each to their own…!
PS. I guess you’re leaving the minefield that is ‘Genre’ for another post?!
Ha! Genre is about as subjective as tags get, isn’t it? Personally, i tend to put a variety of things in the Genre tag, separated by commas, which i can then use in searches & playlists.
I have used the free program Mediamonkey to access and organise my audio and video files for several years. Entering and categorising tags (or to give it a more precise term, metadata) takes time and effort but I view it as an integral part of studying the music. Mediamonkey provides separate tags for composer, conductor and lyricist, several others, and you can add your own customised tags. It also allows you to add images and even complete lyrics.
Assuming that portable and other players show artist, album and title, I assume artist refers to performer (I use a different standard when tagging audio files and speech recordings but let’s leave that issue out). So –
Artist – key singers or soloists/ensemble or orchestra/conductor
Album – composer/piece or album title
Title – Movement or song name (as much detail as possible without getting ridiculous).
Where the album features more than one work, the composer’s name has to go in front of the title (but if the album features work by the same performer, the performer’s name can go at the front of the album tag and left off the title tag.
Genre is very subjective, and some of the tags provided by software or entered by providers can be very silly, although they sometimes make you think about how different people approach music. Some tracks I’ve bought from amazon I have tagged as avant-garde, have arrived tagged as dance/electronica.
I keep genre tags to a minimum. For instance, I have dropped using a tag for soul because only about 2 albums come under this category. I rather confusingly use acoustic to cover folk and country. I have separate genres for opera, musical, avant-garde, minimalist, modern (meaning roughly 20th Century to present day), Romantic, Baroque, Early, Recital, Song, soundtrack, choral. I have not bothered with tags such as symphony or quartet as these are usually obvious from the title.