Hi,

I am at the start of ripping my CD collection and building a library on my PC -- of course with tags. Some of the tags are ok to download from any DB (be it FreeDB or CDDB) and with any ripper (am using CDEx). However, I have problems getting some tags that are very important to me:

Recording Year/Initial release:

All tools only populate the D release year. However, more interesting for popular music is the recording year. When I do a selection of 70s music, I obviously want to include the tracks RECORDED or initially released in the 70s, not the CDs released in the 70s (there aren't many...).

Composer:

Now that seems to be possible, because Windows Media Player retrieves this information. How can I teach my rippers to fetch that from the Internet.

Original Album

Now this is not the CD in the drive, but the album on which this song was released. So not "Christmas sampler 2006" but "Highway 61 Revisited" or so. The actual CD is basically arbitrary and of no value to me. What means is the album which made the song public. I do understand that this is not trivial, but since I only care for the album title, it should not matter that there are 100 versions of it (version 1995, version 2001, Japan import).


Is any of that information available on the internet for download? Where?

What tools do I need? At present, I use Helium and CDEx, but I am willing to use anything available to get this information into the meta data.

It would be great if I can do that both for a sampler CD before the rip AND for the files that I have already ripped (masstagg recording year based on the existing tags artist and title).

Regards,
Martin

Recording Year/Initial release: I don't know of any database that provides this offhand, and even if that exists, finding a tagger that can both access it and write the data to your files is also difficult. As if that weren't trouble enough, nearly no players out there support that tag field. If you're really determined, what you could do is find the year manually, then add a custom field to your tags using MP3tag. Good luck.

Original Album: See above. Again, you'll probably have to do a manual search. Try www.allmusic.com.

Composer: You'll need a tagger that has AMG access. WMP and dBPowerAmp do.

Spoon, has not yet release details, but it appears that the next version (beta in about 7 wks) of dBpoweramp, R13, may well have some VERY nice meta-data tools, in addition to being one of the best CD rippers available

See:
http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=12424

http://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?t=13597

If you are undertaking a significant CD ripping project I would consider waiting for this tool!

I think AMG is pretty lame (literally) and often incorrect. Discogs is the reference database for music releases.

But as long as there's a plugin system for adding arbitrary databases, it's not problem. Although I would recommend to give discogs.com a higher priority than AMG.

In my experience the serious music lover must resign him/her self to a LOT of manual tag entry and a LOT of research. This results from the following:

1. The online databases often have the information just plain WRONG.

2. Even when they have it right they are inconsistent about how they present it - I've seen albums where on different tracks OF THE SAME PIECE the Composer was listed as "J.S. Bach" and "Bach, J.S.", which totally screws up the sort order for composer.

3. There's no agreed-upon definition of what the tags actually mean. In classical music I've seen "artist" used for the orchestra, the conductor, a soloist, and even a composer! Ditto in jazz. We've already discussed the lack of an agreed meaning for "date".

4. Genres are arbitrary: a song that you might call "country", I might call "bluegrass". Is Carlos Santana Rock, Pop, Latin or what? Some people just prefer a Pop or Rock genre, others like to get more specific and have New Wave, Metal, Punk, Acid Rock, Classic Rock, PsychoBilly, Alternative, Grunge, Folk-Rock, or whatever.

While "album" is meaningless for most music today, it still matters for many pieces where the artist intended the works to be part of a whole compostion (e.g., Sketches of Spain and many other jazz albums, rock operas such as Tommy, lots of house and trance music, etc). And then there's the problem of musical genres that have aggregations bigger than tracks and smaller than albums, such as most classical music (anything with multiple movments).

Bottom line - there is no lazy man's way out of the tagging problem for anyone who is serious about his music.

Your feedback in the dBpoweramp forums would be greatly appreciated, especially since I am not really familiar with discogs myself other then knowing of its existence.

I guess it depends on what kind of music you're looking for data on and the type of user you are.

Discogs doesn't allow you to search by track name, doesn't provide you with composer info, and unlike allmusic.com, you can't even click on a track in an album to get extra info. Allmusic provides all of the above, plus clicking on a track automatically brings up a page of EVERY release instance of that track in the database, with album and track length info. I don't know of any other database that's as easily searchable as Allmusic's, except maybe for iTMS, and since that's a store it probably doesn't count.

Hi,

thanks for the many replies! To wrap your information up:

Composer:
Yes, via AMG. This means Media Player or dbPowerAmp.
Is there a way to use this with CDEx or EAC or Helium, as I don't use WMP? Since WMP stores the information offline, could I have my other tools read the tags from the WMP offline db?

I understand that the composer may not be exactly the same ("J.S. Bach" vs. "Bach, J.s."). That's not a big deal. As soon as I have the tags in, I can manually masstagg the wrong ones within seconds.


Original Album:
Available via AMG, but have to manually pick from list. Not ideal but ok.


Recording Year/Initial release:
Not available directly on ANY database!
Or does AMG provide that? For example, if I can pick the original album, its release year should be good enough.


What I conclude from that:
I need a ripper with AMG access to get at least the Composer and possibly the original album. So I would chose dbPowerAmp then. Do you agree?

Is my summary correct?

Thanks,
Martin

For every song you get an album list sorted by year.



You can also use mp3Tag or The Godfather, for both programs are scripts for AMG access available.

BTW: I've seen you are from germany. For manual tagging Germancharts.com is also a good source for composer and release year data.

When looking up the year in freedb (e.g. with EAC) you always get the year of the original/initial release. So imho you'll use the standard date tag as the date of the original release and you'll need an additional tag for storing the year of the actual release (e.g. when an album was re-released on CD).

What codec you're using, btw?

Let's say it's an indispensable DB for electronic music fans while it supports other genres too. It's main advantage is that it is highly moderated so the DB is very high quality and consistent.
There's no easy to use Web API yet although it is planned, so for now it's a bit of a PITA to parse www pages.
I've done it for foo_discogs and the available sources include a complete discogs release and artist page parser which cover a lot of corner cases. It's written in C++ and freely available for whatever purpose.

FreeDB delivers for some re-releases the original year (e.g., Dire Straits 1978 and not 1996), but for some the re-release year (e.g., Dexys Midnight Runners, 2000 instead of 1980). For samplers, it always returns the release year. So this is unfortunately far from what I want.

Regarding Codec, I haven't yet decided between Vorbis and Lame MP3. But the "year" problem persists regardless of my choice.

Martin

The MusicBrainz.org PicardQT tagger does a decent job adding the release year/date to the ID3 tags. If its not already preset in their database, users can add it. I just spent the past 2 weeks retagging my entire mp3 collection; added id3v2.4 tags, embedded album art, downloaded album art, and prefixed all albums with its release year.

OK, but is this the recording year? I doubt it. This will most likely be only the release year of the actual CD.