What's the preferred / best method for tagging albums with multiple discs (musicals, live albums, ...) to them? I found a thread about directory structure but nothing conclusive about tagging.
I thought about posting this in the tag standard discussion thread, but I have a few special requirements which might make a good solution for me undesirable as a "standard". I try to keep my collection in .flac for lossless and .mp3 for lossy. Most probably foobar2000 uses native tags for the .flacs, for the .mp3s I use the ID3v2 plugin. Before you start flaming - neither my Squeezebox nor my portable read APEv2 tags, and ID3v1 garbles my Japanese unicode tags, on top of being unflexible.
There's DISC, there's PARTINSET, the Squeezebox even uses DISCC for the number of discs - is there any one way of tagging that will work with most/all players? (I'd be fine with a method that works for the iPod, the iAudio U2, the Squeezebox ond foobar2000, though )

The DISC-tag is the standard.

- Lyx

I thought it was DISCNUMBER, like TRACKNUMBER.

Xiph.org suggests DISCNUMBER in the Vorbis specs. Personally, I use DISCNUMBER to number the discs.

IMHO, a real standard cannot exist in this case.

I was just using (Disc X) after the album name, but I've just swtiched to the DISC tag.

Hmm. I can't find DISCNUMBER in the latest version of the spec. The Wayback Machine doesn't show any version which mentions DISCNUMBER either.

I might have picked it up from Jonathan Walter's tagging proposals or other similar proposals then.

For Mp3 with ID3v2 tags go for PARTINSET with x/x syntax. It gets recognized by itunes.

i just use DISC=1, DISC=2, etc etc

Wasn't there a VOLUME or something like that :S

This way you can tag Enya's A Box of Dreams boxed set like this:

ALBUM=A Box of Dreams
DISCNUMBER=1
DISC=Oceans

ALBUM=A Box of Dreams
DISCNUMBER=2
DISC=Clouds

ALBUM=A Box of Dreams
DISCNUMBER=3
DISC=Stars

I actually like that, works for James Morrison - Three Minds to.

ALBUM=Three Minds
DISCNUMBER=1
DISC=Hot

ALBUM=Three Minds
DISCNUMBER=2
DISC=Swing

ALBUM=Three Minds
DISCNUMBER=3
DISC=Cool

I've been using %DISC NAME% for that kind of tagging. Perhaps I should also convert to using DISCNUMBER and DISC.

Are there remappings (from/to DISC to something else) in place in fb2k? If yes, which ones?

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...ence#.25disc.25

%disc%

Defined as $num($meta(disc),1). Returns the discnumber without extra leading zeroes.

I am talking about something different. As far as i know, there are some remappings in place in fb2k, which are not visible "on the surface" and also not part of the tagz-fieldremappings.

For example, RGain is stored differently depending on the fileformat - but you dont notice that in tagz.

Do you mean, like APEv2 "TRACK" for Musepack being remapped to "TRACKNUMBER" for TAGZ with 0.8.3?

I'm not aware of anything concerning %disc%.

As a side note, IMHO %__replaygain_track_peak% etc are tech info fields, which IMHO don't necessarily need to match the physical descriptions.

Ok, so before I stored it i the album tag just as (Disc X) but now I've converted to DISC, but my playlist (Columns UI) is sorting it wierdly:
-track 1, disc 1
-track 1, disc 2
-track 2, disc 1
-track 2, disc 2
....
You get the picture. How do I solve this?

You want to add DISC somewhere in the sort string (Playlist->Sort->Sort by...) and probably also in the prefs Core->Sort incoming files by:
for example my string is:
$if2(%ALBUM ARTIST%,%ARTIST%) - %DATE% - %ALBUM% - %DISC% - $num(%TRACKNUMBER%,3) - %TITLE%

But that doesn't sort the tracks as soon as they are added to the playlist (by the albumlist panel)

I like this. It works with Ani's album Revelling/Reckoning well

Album=Revelling / Reckoning
Discnumber=01
Disc=Revelling

so id just use

$if3(%disc%,%album%,%location%)

for my album list.

ALBUM = In The Mix
DISC = 1
DISCNAME = Sundown

ALBUM = In The Mix
DISC = 2
DISCNAME = Sunrise

Is how I do it.

if you set it in the prefs (Core->Sort incoming files by:) it does

Thank you very much

Note that the different "parts" of an album do not always correspond with individual discs. As examples I could name lots of classical opera's, but I also recall Kyuss' album "Welcome to Sky Valley", 1 CD in 3 parts I, II, III covering a total of 10 tracks.

Hence I don't use DISC/DISCNAME to name these parts, I use PART, or rather ... I used to do that - my current, simple system is embedding all info in the title fields:



Nearly every classical CD has such "parts", and often they don't correspond with DISCS (e.g. 2 parts spread over 3 discs).

After switching my iPod's playlist from iTunes to foobar, and converting the iTunesDB tags into id3v1 so foobar could actually read them, I noticed that all of the albums I had previously sorted by disc number had the following two tags: DISCNUMBER and DISCCOUNT. I left them as-is, and I use them to display it in a [disc]/[out of] format.

I've just been adding (Disc X) to the end of the album field, like so:

ARTIST=Pink Floyd
ALBUM=The Wall (Disc 1)

But DISC seems a more semantically 'correct' way of doing things. Hmm...

If I use both foobar and iTunes, should I use DISCNUMBER for maximum compatibility? I have been using (CD X) at the end of the album name.

Would DISC=1 (Name) work aswell ?

You know what sucks?

Up until a couple of years ago, I wrote the disc number in the ALBUM tag (e.g. "The Wall - Disc 1"). Then, I discovered the DISC tag, with some nice formatting strings that made use of it, so I switched to that system (e.g. ALBUM="The Wall", DISC=1).

And now, after using that system for a couple of years, I will have to use the old system again, because my Rio Karma doesn't seem to support the DISC tag. Right now the Karma doesn't play my multi-disc albums correctly (i.e. it alternates between tracks from each of the discs).

Argh. Argh.

May I offer an alternative viewpoint? I personally don't see why the disc number is relevant after ripping. The content of a CD is constrained by the physical medium, but this needn't bear any relationship to how it should be tagged.

Sometimes old albums are reissued with two albums on one CD (eg. Jeff Beck: Truth + Beck-Ola). Presumably most people rip these as two separate albums. So why shouldn't a multi-disc set be ripped as a single album?

For example, someone mentioned The Wall. This is a single work that happens to be spread across 2 discs. But as far as I'm concerned, it's an album called "The Wall" with 26 tracks, and track 13 (Goodbye Cruel World) is followed by track 14 (Hey You).

Re: Poisondan's Rio Karma:

Good that you bring that up. Quite relevant for people trying to make a decision on the DISCs issue.

BTW I posted earlier that I didn't use the DISC tag (the only thing that matters to me is 'meaningful album parts', not 'discs'). In fact I simply disregard the discs and I 'autotagnumber' throughout the entire CDBOX.

Why? Cliveb just explained it, and I share his opinion.
www.allmusic.com seems to think similarly also

BTW there is nothing that prevents you from appending the DISC field to the ALBUM field.

One way to do it would be:
1. Separate the albums that do and don't need the appending. This only takes a suited foobar2000 albumlist string %if(disc, etcetera...)
2. For those which do need retagging, you format the ALBUM field using foobar2000's masstagger.

I like to keep the discs separate, because I usually think of double albums as two distinct statements, and not one long album, and I think this is how many artists view them too. It's important to me where the break occurs.

In fact, I will take the opposite approach and actually split a single CD into two discs after ripping it if it was originally released as a double album - for example, London Calling or Exile on Main St.

When a double album is indeed two distinct works, then I agree. Although just now I can only think of one double album I own that qualifies: Ummagumma. In this case I wouldn't bother with DISC tags, just give the two albums different names (eg. "Ummagumma - Live" and "Ummagumma - Garba^H^H^H^H^HStudio").
In my view the vast majority of double albums seem intended to be a single work.


I'm not familiar with those albums, so you may well have a point. I can even think of an example where it would be valid to split what was originally a single *vinyl* album into two: Kate Bush's Hounds Of Love is really two entirely separate works (Hounds Of Love and The Ninth Wave).

Although I said I don't use DISC tags, I'll still split in meaningful parts (using a PART or nowadays even TITLE field). I found too that those parts often don't coincide with disc boundaries, that's the idea behind it.