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Topic: Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system (Read 4733 times) previous topic - next topic
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Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

I've just finished ripping and tagging my pop CDs. Thanks to these forums, it was straight-forward. I was making three copies of each album - FLAC, MP3 (V0) and MP3 (V5). Using EAC and REACT with an appropriate script, it was as simple as putting the CD in the drive and hitting F4. Wonderful.

Now for my classical CDs. However, as anyone with a sizeable classical CD collection knows, the world of tagging databases such as FreeDB is geared towards pop. With classical, if you want accurate, detailed, meaningful and consistent tags, you're on your own.

The first thought that occurred to me was that, although EAC's tagging options seem too simplistic to be of any use, maybe I could ignore the actual values (artist/title) and just pour all the info I need in those fields, divided by separators, and use those values to generate filenames that a decent, scriptable tagging program might later be able to process. I have no idea if this is possible. I may be talking nonsense.

If that's not possible, I must resign myself to manually tagging the files. What I cannot face is manually tagging three copies of each album (although it may only be two copies for classical). Would it be sensible, therefore, to just rip to FLAC, tag the FLAC, and then generate the MP3s from the finished FLAC? Or would it be that simple? Or can anyone suggest a more efficient approach? Any help appreciated.

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #1 –
Either use your approach (i.e. rip to FLAC, tag FLAC, and transcode), or encode simultaneously and use MP3Tag to copy the tags between the files.

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #2 –
Quote from: johnk on
Would it be sensible, therefore, to just rip to FLAC, tag the FLAC, and then generate the MP3s from the finished FLAC?
Yes, that would be my approach. With the help of foobar2000 you can keep the tags intact when 'transcoding' from FLAC to mp3.
For the files you already made, you can use foobar2000 and select each album (three at a time because you made three copies) and tag it as if they were only one.
portable: 128 kbps cbr AAC
local: -7 FLAC

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #3 –
pepoluan/darky,

Thanks for your responses. Yes, it does seems that FLAC -> manual tagging -> transcode is the logical way to go. Still interested in hearing from anyone who has managed to bring any automation to this process. I have hundreds of classical CDs to rip. The thought of all that manual tagging is not pleasant...

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #4 –
There's almost no way around typing in your own entries. Having said that, here's what I've been doing:

For classical discs, I prefer to rip using foobar2000. Prior to ripping, I add the CDDA tracks to the playlist, download the (yuck) freedb data, edit it (extensively), and add special tags such as CONDUCTOR, LABEL, COMPOSER etc.. Then I rip, usually just using 'Convert to' FLAC. This is still largely a manual process, but all the data is entered in one step prior to extraction. As a result, files are named as I like them upon ripping.

Call it manual tagging -> FLAC -> transcode if you want. Not very automated if you put it that way!

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #5 –
Here’s what I did (I like rich meta-data, too).

I ripped the batch with EAC to FLAC level 5 (I need fast decoding). In my experience FreeDB is not that bad for classical music (at least for the recordings that I usually rip). I think the people that upload classical discs to the database have 'some' awareness themselves and are quite accurate but we have to cope with the intrinsic limitations. Be aware of multi-artist discs and check the box so that you get <albumartist> and the track <artists> (you can split the field at the slash later on, however).

When it came to the details I just worked on the FLACs themselves in Foobar, which has particularly useful functions to deal with string stuff. If you have concatenation in the <tracktitle> field use the tagger in Foobar to dissect the string into the appropriate fields and add what you want. I deferred the very details to later, such that I entered all the performers and parts when I was interested in a certain group of music (e.g., tag all harpsichord stuff when you feel like harpsichord).
I’m extremely allergic towards concatenation in fields. Backwards compatibility with naive players is only a minor issue for me. I tag <artist> as composer and add all of <performer>, <composer> and <conductor>. A diffuse grouping person of a CD is <album artist>. If there are subworks on the CD I use the tag <part>. A tag that I saw in Itunes is <grouping>, which I find useful and use arbitrarily.

Getting the other formats done is just a matter of a few clicks with the Foobar converter. The tags (apart from ReplayGain) are all preserved.

BTW, nowadays on Linux I like Quod Libet and it’s tagging system. You can emulate the string functions of Foobar with the "pythonic tagging" plugin. It’s a bit arcane but you can use Python regexes and so on and so forth. Vorbisenc eats FLAC files as input and carries the tags over as well.

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #6 –
Since you can't tag Shorten files, is there a container that could be tagged or should I just transcode to WavPack for post tagging?

I've got some classical music in this format.

Classical music - looking for an efficient tagging system

Reply #7 –
Quote from: johnk on
I've just finished ripping and tagging my pop CDs. Thanks to these forums, it was straight-forward. I was making three copies of each album - FLAC, MP3 (V0) and MP3 (V5). Using EAC and REACT with an appropriate script, it was as simple as putting the CD in the drive and hitting F4. Wonderful.

Now for my classical CDs. However, as anyone with a sizeable classical CD collection knows, the world of tagging databases such as FreeDB is geared towards pop. With classical, if you want accurate, detailed, meaningful and consistent tags, you're on your own.

The first thought that occurred to me was that, although EAC's tagging options seem too simplistic to be of any use, maybe I could ignore the actual values (artist/title) and just pour all the info I need in those fields, divided by separators, and use those values to generate filenames that a decent, scriptable tagging program might later be able to process. I have no idea if this is possible. I may be talking nonsense.

If that's not possible, I must resign myself to manually tagging the files. What I cannot face is manually tagging three copies of each album (although it may only be two copies for classical). Would it be sensible, therefore, to just rip to FLAC, tag the FLAC, and then generate the MP3s from the finished FLAC? Or would it be that simple? Or can anyone suggest a more efficient approach? Any help appreciated.


If you want your tags done right, you will need to do them yourself.

There are programs that will do batch conversion from FLAC to MP3.  No need to rip your classical Cds more than once.

I've ripped over 1000 classical Cds in a couple of months of work.  I experiemented with a number of player, ripper and tag editor PC programs for months before getting started.  I picked EAC as a ripper, MP3tag as a tag editor and J. River Media Center 11 as a player.  I found that rearranging the FreeDB tag values was no faster than typing everything myself.

I soon switched to using MC 11 for all three parts of the job.  (I compared the results of secure rips with MC 11 to test and Copy results with EAC.  No difference on files both ripped with 100% confidence.    MC 11 was a bit better in getting a good copy from problem CDs.)

With MC 11 I can fill out the tags I want before I rip a CD. So the tag values are represented in the file name as well as being embedded in the file.  MC 11 provides a "Recently Ripped" view that is very handy for checking for errors. 

MC 11 has a pick-from-a-list interface for selecting tag values so I don't have to type everything.  The values for existing files are used to populate the list. It does auto-completion on names as I enter them too. For multi-movement works, I use a single word as the track title preceded by the the movement number. (e.g. 1- Allegro.)  So I quickly get a nearly complete list of movement titles.  I rip CDs by Composer so I can just pick the composer name from a list.  I can often select the Artist name (e.g. Fleisher_Szell_Cleveland Orchestra) from that list too.

I have another ~50 classical CDs to rip and maybe 700 broadway, jazz and Rock and Roll Cds to rip.  Once I get everything ripped, I'll look at adding extra tags (Conductor, Soloist, Band/orchestra) and custom database fields.  FLAC allows custom tags and MC 11 has great support for custom tags and database-only fields.

I assign the Work name to the Album tag. With most rippers, it is not convenient to assign a different album value to different tracks on a CD.  You can do it by ripping just the tracks in a single work in one operation and repeating the process for each work on the disk.

MC 11 has built-in utility commands for batch conversions and file copies.

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What I found was that the process of editing tags and file names after EAC had mangled them was very tedious and error prone.  Importing things into MC 11 after usiing EAC to rip files and MP3Tag to edit them was also tedious and error prone.

You might be able to make Foobar2000 do what you need.  I wasn't interested in learning to configure it.  Paying $ 40 for MC 11 was very worthwhile for me.

So my advice is to look for the right tools before you settle for ripping classical music the wrong way.

Bill