I''m starting to rip my classical collection, but I'm confused as how to best organize it on a computer.

I think I need separate folders for each composer. Beyond that . . . I'm not even sure what to include in the file name! For example, Beethoven's 5th & 7th:

1. Symphony No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67: 1 - Allegro con brio
2. Symphonie No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67: 2 - Andante con moto
3. Symphonie No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67: 3 - Allegro
4. Symphonie No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67: 4 - Allegro
5. SYMPHONIE NO. 7 IN A MAJOR, OP. 92: 1 - Poco sostenuto - vivace
6. SYMPHONIE NO. 7 IN A MAJOR, OP. 92: 2 - Allegretto
7. SYMPHONIE NO. 7 IN A MAJOR, OP. 92: 3 - Presto
8. SYMPHONIE NO. 7 IN A MAJOR, OP. 92: 4 - Allegro con brio

I don't know what parts above to include in a file name. Should each symphony have its own folder? What about the conductor or orchestra? YIKES!!!

How do you guys organize & name the classical music on your PCs?

Hi,


I don't know much about classical beyond the fact that it bores me.

But, there is a program that will let you sort by orchestra and composer, etc.

It is called album player (albumplayer.com) and has a free trial.

Import your library using the tags option and you should be able to sort fairly powerfully, even by conductor.

It might be worth trying. There should be no need for different folders as the program will handle that, but if you want to do so it will still recognize things.

Part of album player allows you to edit the tags for conductor and orchestra and composer, etc. so you can get the info right if it is missing or inaccurate.

Here is a post that shows you the screen for setting up the library and how to sort between composer, conductor, etc.:

http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/...es/2/28308.html

I know little about all the information communicated when describing classical, but I have some thoughts.

As I am a huge organizational freak, and if I were to go at this, I would go:

root \ {Composer} \ {Symphony or Work} \

The file name would then include:

{Movement or Act}- {Title} in {Key}

Problem is: finding a database that would help automate that process. I have a limited selection of classical (that 20-disc Classical Masterpieces of the Millennium) so such a scheme would be impractical for me.

However... If I did indulge in my classical tastes... I would probably go about it like that.

For me, the base folders are only reserved for composer names. For each album, I put the conductor or performing ensemble or individual performer in front of the title. If there's various conductors and performers throughout the album, then I just use the album title. If the CD is focused around an individual performer, such as Vladimir Horowitz or Yolanda Kondonassis and they perform pieces by a variety of composers, then I'll do it as a Various Artists type album similar to how EAC does it.

For example:

feldman, morton\(1993) kronos quartet: piano and string quartet

or

ornstein, leo\(2007) complete works for cello and piano

or

VA - (2000) quietude\01 - debussy, claude / rêverie.wv


This usually covers pretty much every variety of classical album I come across.

Actual track titles are different. It's easier for modern composers that oftentimes don't organize their work into suites with individual movements, because then I can just do the track title:

cage, john\drury: in a landscape\01 - in a landscape.wv

But for older composers, here's an example:

beethoven, ludwig van\(1971) brendel: favourite piano sonatas (disc 1)\01 - sonata no.8 in c minor, op.13 "pathétique": i. grave/allegro di molto e con brio.wv

I'm huge into keeping my classical music organized and I like my system all right.

Actually, if I could go back and redo it I'd take the release year out of the album titles because that's pretty unimportant when it comes to classical music.

It very much depends on what player you're using, and what the purpose of your identification is.

For players that understand directory hierarchies, I used a structure of Period \ Composer \ Album, using filenames to identify movement (etc). I never really got clear on how much information to include in filename, but I think a brief identifier of work + movement would be good. You certainly don't need opus number in the filename, except where that's the commonly used brief identifier.

If you've got several performances of the same work, then you need to incorporate an identifier somewhere: perhaps at the level I use for Album. So, you might have

Baroque\Bach_JS\Well_Tempered_Clavier-Gulda

and

Baroque\Bach_JS\Well_Tempered_Clavier-Jarrett

(yes, I yesterday discovered a recording of Keith Jarrett playing the Bach -- only listened to part of it so far).

This will be enough to locate a piece of music you want to hear, probably. You can use tags for further information, such as full details of conductor and orchestra, year of recording, and such, depending on what you want to have visible while you're listening.

This neat scheme (neat in outline, though I never fully implemented it) I'm now having to abandon as the unbeatable price-capacity of the iPod Classic has got me using iTunes, which doesn't understand directories, but relies on tags. I don't understand tags, but I'm working on it.

Probably, because there are so many things that need specifying for any classical track, you need to reconcile yourself to the fact that you're not going to be able to encode it all in the files. If you want to look it up, keep the album leaflet where it's easy to get at. You need to decide what information is important for you in quickly locating what you want to play, and what you might want a quick reminder of while you're playing (movement number as # of # is usually pretty important for a piece you don't know well). I, for instance, use the Genre tag for broad periods, but you might prefer to use it for Orchestral, Chamber Music, Solo, Vocal, and whatever.

There are doubtless people around who have got successful systems operating, and I'm still floundering a bit, but I hope I'll save you some of my thrashing. Certainly the first thing is a bit of analysis: what information is practically important for you, now and in the foreseeable future? What ways of recording that information are available (directories, filenames, tags) and especially understand tags, the way your player reads tags, and the possibility of custom tags.

Good luck, keep the original albums, and don't let it get in the way of enjoying the music.

Exactly.

You can get ridiculously bogged down in tagging for some composers. I had a brutal time trying to rip an Anton Webern boxset. That experience alone influenced me to revamp my tagging/directory system. Heres are some examples of particularly brutal cases:

16 - im sommerwind, idyll for large orchestra: ruhig bewegt/ruhig/lustig/schnell/feierlich bewegt/voll schwung/aufjauchzend/sehr ruhig und weihevoll.wv

^ There's an example of how NOT to do it. Now I no longer include what type of instruments the piece is for nor the tempo descriptions, when they're broken up into ridiculous sections like that.

Now, I would do it like this: 16 - im sommerwind.wv

18 - cantata no.2 for soprano solo, bass solo, mixed chorus and orchestra, op.31: "schöpfen aus brunnen des himmels": sehr bewegt.tak

^ Yikes. Now it'd be: 18 - cantata no.2, op.31: "schöpfen aus brunnen des himmels".wv

This is all just to say that sometimes you'll come across situations where your tagging/directory system doesn't work well because of various factors, such as a composer's longwinded titles or how the publisher organized and split the tracks. You can adapt for each case of course, but it all depends on how much value you put in consistency.

Ugh...I am NOT looking forward to doing more of these.

Thanks to your input, this is what I came up with for file names:

Sym1Op21 - 5. Adagio molto^ Allegro con brio.mp3
Sym1Op21 - 6. Andante cantabile con moto.mp3
Sym1Op21 - 7. Menuetto^ Allegro molto e vivace.mp3
Sym1Op21 - 8. Adagio; Allegro molto e vivace.mp3
Sym3Op55 - 1. Allegro con brio.mp3
Sym3Op55 - 2. Marcia funebre^ Adagio assai.mp3
Sym3Op55 - 3. Scherzo^ Allegro vivace; Trio.mp3
Sym3Op55 - 4. Finale^ Allegro molto; Poco andante; Presto.mp3

I took into consideration how Windows Explorer lists files, how WinAmp displays file names while playing, how my backup software truncates file names when archiving to DVD, how the songs should play back in order in WinAmp or on an iPod, and how little I know about classical music.

This is from an Arturo Toscanini box set of Beethoven Symphonies. So, I'll probably have my folder tree set up as Classical>Beethoven>Arturo Toscanini; as he was likely the greatest conductor of all time, he gets his own folder.

I used the comment field to record the complete symphony name and various keys.

No idea how I'll handle other orchestras, conductors, or soloists. Guess I'll refer back to this thread and figure it out as I go along.

Thanks for all the advice. You guys are great!

Using Foobar I have made consistent use of a couple of additional tags COMPOSER and OPUS to mark up my classical collection with good results.

There's too much info to fit in any filename and, in any case, that is only one way of sorting the tracks but I can query and/or sort in Foobar by artist, composer and title - so, e.g. seeing all versions of a song or everything by an artist etc. etc. (or all versions of a song by the same artist!) I am now looking at use of CONTENT-GROUP and am adding WRITER (meaning who wrote the lyrics). It would be no problem to add INSTRUMENT or ORCHESTRA or what you will.

There was a yahoo group a while ago ("Well tempered Db") which was trying to set up tools for cataloguing classical music and organising an on-line database of works/recordings... but it has died, I think). I'd certainly support such a thing, if it was to restart.

I am just beginning to put Classical stuff onto my PC, but my main difficulty lies in two areas: the fact that I want quite a lot of Rock/Pop/etc albums in the 'library' as well, and secondly that the source of much of the music is LP. I am creating lots of CDs and making a library of m4a files. All of this means some conflicting requirements and that means I need a very flexible player/library package. Having looked at a few (e.g. iTunes, RealPlayer, WinAmp, Foobar, Helium - the last in the list being flexible but complex) I am about to commit to Media Monkey Gold (ie the paid-for version). It is so far the only thing that seems to give me the flexibility that I need. It should be noted that I have not yet set up the classical side of my library; I have just been looking at what I will need. 'teh roxxors', I would strongly suggest that you look at Media Monkey in the free version, and then look at what the 'gold' version might give you. I want different organisation or displays for classical and other music, and the different sub-genres within 'classical', and as far as I can see MM offers more in this area than any other package that I have looked at. I believe that only when you have the required flexibility can you come up with a library 'structure', and, as with databases in other areas of IT, once there are enough data descriptors stored, and enough control over them, then one should be able to display it in the many different ways that are needed. The simple structures of, for example, RealPlayer, let alone iTunes are just not good enough for a very varied library.

One last thought: I would try to remove considerations of the files and filenames themselves from the issues as much as possible, and rely on the database/library to navigate the music; perhaps easier said than done though.

For me, foobar+facets work like a charm. Ultra fast, flexible. Although I have a collection of over 500 classical (in a broad sense, since I'm into early music) CDs, I can pinpoint everything I want in no time.

Yet another reason to wish foobar could be ported to OS X. :sigh:

Some things are for historical reasons. The strict composer scheme is sometimes a problem, if you have multiple composers on one CD. I put those in a "Various" folder, not a problem, because fb2k's search functions rock anyway.

Examples:



My file names only have DISCNUMBER,TRACKNUMBER and the track name. File names are not important for me, only their order has to be correct (because on my notebook I navigate folder-wise)

I wouldn't create too long filenames because very soon you get file system/access problems.

Typical tagging I use:



Most important for me is the consistent use of %work%, %conductor%, %composer% and %ensemble%.

To the original question, which was:



I don't organize it; I let iTunes do that for me. And, in fact, I don't worry about filenames either, because iTunes automatically renames files based on the track name. So all I do is make sure the track name reads how I want it to read.



Well, yes. If you use WinAmp, name to suit it.

Here's what I do.

1. I usually put as the album name whatever the record label put the CD out as. That's not hard-and-fast for me, because that can differ between the front and spine or maybe not be suitable in some other way. Usually I'd make sure I had the composer name in there, whether or not the record label had included it, e.g.:

Bach: Mass in B minor

... but I mightn't bother where there's no room for doubt, e.g.:

Fidelio


2. I usually put the name of the performer/performers in the "Artist" field. That's at variance with some recommendations. Xiph says:



But I'm not about to do that. Since iTunes gives me a "composer" field, I use it. (I don't know what WinAmp does.) So in the "Artist" field I put the performer/s and where there's an orchestra I put that first. I put the conductor next, then any soloists with their instrument given in brackets after, e.g.:

The King's Consort, Robert King

Berliner Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan

Ian Partridge (Tenor), Konrad Ragossnig (Lute)


3. When it comes to the "Composer" field I always put the composer's name in its natural order, e.g.:

Leoš Janáček

It makes searching on a iPod when you're searching by composer name a little more fiddly, because you have to stop and remember the Christian name first, which, unlike the surname, doesn't always come to mind for every composer. However, reversing the natural order of the name just looks too unnatural and clumsy to me.


4. In the "Genre" field I always put "Classical". I don't worry about identifying different periods that people have applied to music (Baroque, Romantic, etc.) or identifying different musical forms (Opera, Madrigal, etc.).


5. I fill in track number and track total, because iTunes has both fields even though some players don't use both. I also fill in disc number and disc total if there's more than one disc -- if there isn't I leave those fields blank.


6. I think that only leaves the track name. If that can be something short --

Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23

-- well and good. However, I think often it can't. Particularly where symphonies are involved I tend to think I'd better put the lot in there, i.e., the name of the piece, followed by a colon as separator, followed by the name of the track:

Symphony No. 41 in C "Jupiter" K551: I. Allegro vivace

El Decamerón Negro: El Arpa Del Guerrero

The Water Goblin: Un poco più mosso

Besides all this I like to keep consistent capitalization (using sentence case). I also like to have titles in their original language (using the correct capitalization rules for the language in question). Usually, I make sure any opus number (or equivalent) is included as well. And I usually put the key signature.

But I'm sure there a few files I haven't consistently done this for.

I perhaps fussier than some people -- but this serves my needs. And as long as the track name is as I want it, iTunes will deal with the filename and folder hierarchy for me. Because I do like to keep a fairly consistent scheme, it does mean that when I get information from Gracenote, FreeDB, or Music Brainz, I often have to do some tidying up of tags, because everyone seems to tag classical music slightly (or quite a lot) differently.

Well, the tagging system has been invented for pop-rock music ...
Also with Classical music it also depends on the kind of music you generally listen to. In your above example I would create a directory Beethoven and then subdirectories as Symphonies - Harnoncourt, Symphonies - Brüggen etc., Missa solemnis - Harnoncourt, Missa solemnis - Gardiner etc.
In Renaissance polyphony I generally (but not always) create directories for the choirs /Tallis Scholars, /Sixteen /Hilliard and put the records in these directories (but the artists are the composers: Josquin, Palestrina, Taverner etc.)
In the above examples I would not include the Opus number in the file names, since Beethoven's symphonies are easily identifiable without them. On the other hand I always include the Köchel numbering for Mozart symphonies (since in the country I live Mozart symphonies - and piano concertos - are not numbered as in the English speaking world, they are identified by Köchel numbers).
It also depends if you rather listen to whole CDs or individual pieces. I have e.g. a CD which has a Beethoven symphony and a Mozart symphony on it. I put the Beethoven symphony in the Beethoven directory and the Mozart to Mozart directory. You might want to do it differently.
I also have problems with filenames. Windows does not accept in filenames characters like : ? ". I do not have such a problem as I do not use Windows, but I have problems when I copy the files on my DAP. Some opera and oratorio song titles have ?, and in symphonies it is customary to separate the name of the movement from the tempo marking with a :, as in 4. Finale: Vivace, or 3. Menuetto: Allegro which cannot be used on my DAP.
Further your choice may also depend on the audio player you use. If you use a player which finds the files by the tags, then you must avoid to have two sets of music having the same Composer and Album. E.g. If you have two recordings of Don Giovanni, and the artist in both sets are entered as Mozart and the album as Don Giovanni, a tag based player (like Amarok on Linux-KDE) in the album view will show you under Mozart Don Giovanni the entries: Overtura, Overtura, Notte e giorno faticar, Notte e giorno faticar etc. In this case you may want to put e.g. the album names as Don Giovanni - Harnoncourt, Don Giovanni - Giulini etc., so they will not show up as the same album.

Yes, and if you happen to belong to the majority of the world's population i.e. your mother tongue is not English, you are required to do quite a lot of tidying up, e.g. to turn "Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor" into "d-moll zongoraverseny K.466" or into "Klavierkonzert d-Moll KV466", whereas in pop-rock music you're not likely to change Yesterday into Gestern or Tegnap or Hier or whatever.

well, if you ever get serious about collecting classical, i'd personally go for a structure that is something like this:

composer\conductor, ensemble, soloist(s) (abbreviate and leave out the info that isn't relevant)\work (performance date)\"composer - title".extension, where the title info usually includes the work name, opusnumber, key, and tempo indications
ie. "Beethoven, Ludwig van - Piano Sonata N°29 in B Flat, Op 106:2 'Hammerklavier' - Scherzo: Assai vivace"

Judging by your accusatory and self-pitying language --



for



and



for



you resent the fact that these services have made their databases available to you, but don't make them available to you in German. There's an obvious answer to that: if it bothers you, start your own German-language service.

Why should he start a service in another non-native language? There's enough indicators he's not german/austrian/switzerman, maybe bosnia or hungary, Mister E.

directories: (conductor/artist/whatever)_album title
files: album title_track_composer, title - (movement/act/whatever)

ex:
C:\My Music\Maria Callas_La Divina 1\La Divina 1_01_Puccini, Madama Butterfly - 'Un bel di, vedremo'.mp3

in song title:
composer, title - (movement/act/whatever)
ex:
Puccini, Madama Butterfly - 'Un bel di, vedremo'

Part of this depends on how you plan to play it. We use Sonos at home and iPods on the go. We do not play our music on a computer (the Sonos music lives on NAS)

The first thing to keep in mind is that the ID3 tagging system has no canonical way to represent a taxonomy bigger than 1 track but smaller than, say, a CD or LP album, i.e., a multi-movement composition. So most serious classical music listeners appropriate the "Album" tag for this, i.e, an "Album" is a work or opus. Thus our Album tag might say

Beethoven Symphony No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67, Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, 1996


So if you wanted to play Symphony No. 5 In C Minor, all four movements, in order, how would you do this with your scheme? We do it by playing that "Album" - and again, this is probably the most common approach in the classical music world to getting around this ID3 problem.

In the Track tag we do Composer, piece, movement - with the movement number before the movement description to ensure proper sort order!

Beethoven Symph No 5 Op 67 1 Allegro con brio

Doing it in that order ensures that even on a display with limited screen real estate you know what you're hearing. Notice that mine is more abbreviated than yours - again this is from hard experience seeing classical tracks displayed on playback devices with small displays, like iPod Nanos. You can always put more detail in the Album tag - the key, the year composed, Köchel or Schmieder numbers, orchestra, soloists, etc.

In the short form -i.e., the track name - the opus is a more important de-obfuscator than the key because in chamber music a composer might have several trios or quartets in the same key and most chamer works don't get assigned a number the way symphonies do.

Also note that it's VERY IMPORTANT to spell the composer's name consistently Pick ONE: J.S. Bach, Bach, J.S., J S Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, etc. N.B. that you can't just say "Bach" because of C.P.E. Bach and J.C. Bach.

My wife and I are big classical music lovers and in the last year we've ripped about 1000 classical CD's to add to our collection. In my experience you should utilize the tagging scheme, not the file system, to maintain your taxonomy because it will self-organize across all devices that read that file type, whereas the file system approach ties you too much to the OS'es file system. In our experience - and, again, we have quite a bit of it - it's a mistake to wed your scheme too tightly to the computer itself.

We only use a broad file system taxonomy - genre (only in the broadest sense - our detailed genre's are in the Genre tag), then Artist or Composer. Within the Composer folder we use a version of the track name for the file name but we don't create subfolders for each work. We do the same thing with rock/pop music - we'll have a folder for, say, the Rolling Stones, and we'll put all their songs in it and use the tagging system to keep it all organized. Our assumption is the we'll be interfacing to our collection via applications such as iTunes which have much more powerful searching and organizing capabilities than the base OS. If you find yourself looking at the actual files and folders of your music you probably aren't taking enough advantage of the technology. Once we've ripped a track we hardly ever see the music through anything but Sonos, iTunes, or similar apps.

This is yet another reason to ditch a taxonomy that's based on the media. Why does it matter what CD something came on? A CD is just a storage and transport device - it's the music that matters. In the near future there won't even be CD's. We already buy lots of music online, and much of our rock music collection is from used "best of-" compilation CD's.

We usually pay no attention whatsoever to the CD something came on. We recently ripped a CD that had Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade and Debussy's La Mer. La Mer went in a Debussy folder and Sheherazade went in a Rimsky-Korsakov folder.

If, for some reason, I want to retain information about the CD-of-origin - say it's a classic rock or jazz CD - "Quadrophenia" or "Kind of Blue" - I put that in the Album tag.

I'm a strong adovcate of relying entirely on the built-in tags because this will make your collection self-organizing regardless of the storage device and playback platform, as long as the playback platform is tag-aware. As others have already pointed out, file systems are not designed to organize music.

But just to summarize - what makes tagging such a powerful concept is that it's embedded in the file so the file already "knows" where it belongs. Regardless of what tag-aware tool you use to play your music, and regardless of how you like to search or sort your music - composer, artist, opus, title, etc, a properly tagged item will appear in the right place.

You can scramble them any way you want on the hard drive - dump 30,000 songs in one folder, put every song in its own folder, have separate folders for each artist, composer, band, CD or LP, different folders for each genre, or do it all inconsistently, and it doesn't matter as long as things are tagged properly. That's why I've long advocated that people don't worry so much over how it's organized in the file system or on the storage medium.

What he said.

All plnelson's advice is particularly good, and it will help me as I reorganize my stuff.

It's worth noting also that the album name that turns up on a database may be quite different from what's on the cover, showing that compilation albums have more to do with marketing than musical taxonomy. However, being of the Sgt Pepper generation, I can't quite get the notion of an album out of my head.

Doing it correctly requires extensive hand-editing regardless of your native language.

1. Gracenote (et al) are too inconsistent. Even within a piece they don't note all the movements the same way, and between pieces they do EVERYTHING differently. In tags like "Artist" and Album Artist" I've seen composer, orchestra, conductor, or soloists! And while rock, pop, jazz, country and other genres are simpler they still find ways of being inconsistent.

2. Even when Gracenote, et al, do a decent job they still won't do it the way I or you want it. I want my tracks: composer - last name first (then initials if necessary) title, opus number (or, say Köchel number if it's Mozart), movement number, movement description. Gracenote can't read our minds about what we want in each tag. I hand edit virtually every tag so I'm sure I do nearly as much work as a non-English speaker.

this is easily done as long as you don't stick to the stupid 'put as much as you can in the %album% field' philosophy (with foobar, granted)

I fully agree. And this is how I do it. But I try to keep my "Album" tags very precise (string needs to be written precisely) and unique, so then I'm able to find the CD where the track belongs to. I was thinking about adding a unique identifier to the album tag, I guess there's something like ISBN also for CDs, but then I found this is just overkill. Finally, 99% of the searches are for artist, composer, conductor or title, but not the album name (i.e. the CD where tracks belong to).

Seems you have consistent use of opus numbers Must have been a lot of work.

BTW people, how do you format %TITLE%? For the works name and opus number I have introduced %work% here, so in %title% it's enough to have "Allegro ma non troppo"... No works name etc... I don't see any disadvantages.

I'm not consistent in the use of tracknumbers, pnelson, how do you handle those and what file names do you use then? E.g. if the 3rd track on CD is the first movement of a symphony, e.g. called "Allegro". %tracknumber%=3 is all in all correct, if we want to preserve the original media information. But it's a bit ugly when it comes to displaying -> "3. Allegro" (though "allegro" is the 1st mvmt here). So I was thinking about using "I. Allegro" as a track title... But still not consistently using it.

Well, my Titles look like this:

Beethoven Symph No 5 Op 67 1 Allegro con brio

So that's basically what I use for my filenames.

Of course parts of it are redundant with the "work" information that I put in the Album tag but there's no harm in that. It makes the scheme flexible enough to work on different playback devices. Some portable MP3 players might just present a scrollable list of "songs", or a search tool that only searches title fields. Right now we use Sonos, iPod, and iTunes but who knows what we'll use in a year or three? Most non-PC-based playback systems (Roku, Logitech, iPod, car-stereos, etc) have much more limited display real estate, and not the 1600x1174 screenshot examples posted in this thread where you can see multiple tags simultaneously.

WRT track numbers - we don't care much about original track numbers. Some playback devices allegedly look at the track number to enforce playing order so we try to make sure that they're in ascending order for a multi-movement piece, but sorting order is enforced by making everything consistent up to the movement number.

Beethoven Symph No 5 Op 67 1 Allegro con brio
Beethoven Symph No 5 Op 67 2 Andante con moto
Beethoven Symph No 5 Op 67 3 Allegro
Beethoven Symph No 5 Op 67 4 Allegro

N.B. that if there are more than 9 movements or sections you should use double digits - 01, 02, 03, etc.

For you classical freaks, here is a link to some Hi-rez 24/96 recordings. There are some free downloads. You can get a sense for how they label the files.


http://www.highdeftapetransfers.net/cgi-bi...?listcategories

Free flac downloads:

http://01688cb.netsolhost.com/samplerdownload/

For organizing my classical works, I use the following system of classification and nomenclature:

My Music\<composer>\<work> (<orchestra> - <conductor>)\<tracknumber> <act> (<catalog>) in <key> - <movement>.<format extension>

This way, if I have more than one instance the same work by the same composer performed by different orchestras and/or conductors, they'll sort well together under the <composer> folder. I always use full names when possible/known (first middle last). And, of course, if any other information is not known to me at encoding time, then it's left out (e.g., <catalog>) and may be updated later.

Example:
My Music\Johann Sebastian Bach\Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6 (Il Giardino Armonico - Giovanni Antonini)\01 Concerto No. 1 (BWV 1046) in F major - I. Allegro.ogg

This method is nicely compatible with the simpler taxonomy I use for all my other genres (jazz, rock, electronica, etc.):
My Music\<artist>\<album>\<tracknumber> <title> (<collaborating artist(s)>).ogg

QUOTE(Nick E @ Feb 11 2008, 09:42)

Judging by your accusatory and self-pitying language --

TOS #2

Call me radical, but I use the flac codec, make use of the single album image with embedded cuesheets feature, and then just do

Music\%album%.flac

i.e. Music\Ravel, Debussy, Fauré - String Quartets.flac

Not only is it the directory structure simplistic, but there are less files to deal with too. For large music collections, I wouldn't have it any other way.

And which portable MP3 players support this scheme?

The problems with using CD images and cuesheets are:

1. You are letting the medium (i.e., the CD) define your taxonomy. Besides the fact that CD's are becoming obsolete, the bigger problem is that CD's are just a transport/storage medium, so organizing music by CD's is a little like organizing your tool collection by what store you bought them at instead of what kind of tool it is.

2. I don't know how much classical music you own, but it's not uncommon for classical music on multi-CD sets to span CD's. I have several 2 CD sets of symphonies where the middle symphony has 2 movements on one CD and the other 2 on the other CD. And this problem is even more common in operas.

3. Not all devices recognize or can utilize cuesheets. So this scheme limits you mainly to PC-based music playback.

4. File-based (e.g.,ID3) tags are very rich so the advantage of storing each track with its own tags is that it gives you great flexibility to view/search your music any way you want to - works for strings, chamber-works, quartets, French "impressionist" composers, Debussy, whatever. And this flexibility extends across all devices - iTunes, Windows Media Player, Sonos, Zune, iPod, etc.

One could argue that classical CDs are fundamentally an "AOR" medium. I mean, it's not like singles for the genre are particularly common. I'd guess most listeners listen to their CDs from start to finish.

That said, if you want to listen based on composer or genre or some other criteria, album-only tagging breaks down. Unfortunately that's a lot more work.

My own particular take on this problem is as follows:

• Artist/Album tags must be the same across all tracks on the same CD. The album-specific information should be preserved.
• Fill out COMPOSER and PERFORMER. Composers are last name first to aid sorting; performers are either first&last name or last name only, depending on how they are most popularly known as.
• Fill out WORK for all compositions. Opus number goes first.
• Fill out GENRE, representing the historical period of the composition.
• Fill out a different tag representing the venue of the performance. I've used SUBGENRE, but I suppose VENUE would make more sense. ie, if it's a solo piano performance, VENUE=piano; if it's a duet/quartet/etc, VENUE=chamber; if it's an orchestra VENUE=orchestra.
• Set DISCNUMBER and TOTALDISCS as appropriate, so that multi-CD performances are collapsed into the same group.

Note that I've moved fully over to Facets for my browsing needs, and I haven't been listening to my iPod directly for a while, so YMMV on how to adapt this to other schemes.

Definitely not - at least not for serious classical music listeners - and those are the ones who have the big collections where questions like how to organize them matter.

The only people I know who listen to classical music CD's from start to finish are the kind of people who buy stuff like "Liszt Cartoon Music", "Beethoven's Favorite Sonatas", "Verdi's Greatest Hits", etc.
Most of my friends are classical music fans (and many of them are also musicians) and we will typically say "I want to hear the Brahms Op. 114" - NOT: "I want to heard the Brahms Op. 114 and whatever other stuff by Schumann or Tchaikovsky the record label felt like putting on that CD"

But you are right that it's more work - the Brahms is 4 movements (i.e. 4 tracks) and it's about 23 minutes long so, like most chamber works, it will never be on a CD all by itself. But even most symphonies don't take a whole CD so there's usually some filler. What if I want to listen to Beethoven's 5th Symphony but I don't want to hear the "Lenore Overture" afterwards?

I'm a software engineer, so if anyone else here is a sw engineer you can understand this analogy: databases and other large, complex data structures can be optimized for write performance or searching and retrieval performance and you have to decide which tradeoff you want to make. If you expect to do lots of writing but only occasional retrieval then maybe it makes sense to optimize for fast write performance even if searching and retrieval performance is poor. But if you exect to be searching and retrieving a lot then it makes sense to optimize for that even if it makes more work upfront when you first store the data.

There is no question that well-designed classical music scheme is more work upfront, but in the long run it pays off.

BTW, the same applies to rock CD's. Unless it's background music for a party, most people want to hear their favorites songs, not every song on the album. I can make a much better playlist for my iPod by only including songs I like instead of playing whole albums.

which is why harddrives are such a marvel. just rip them to HDD once, then split them in composer\performer(s)\work directory structure (see my earlier post for details).. for all i care you can keep the %album% field for compilation info, and use a %work% tag field for the actual works, and then have foobar only display the %work% field in whatever facet/UI component you're using.

I disagree. I always figured that, for CDs with multiple works on them, they are organized in a reasonably thoughtful way. When I see things like Brahms, Schubert, and Tchaikovsky on the same disc, it usually flows quite well.

I don't think single classical records were ever designed as a part of a library of music, where you picked and chose your selections very specifically. Box sets, sure, but not individual records. A lot of them appear to be structured like a real concert, with a wide variety of composers. You can like that or not, but you can't dispute that important production was involved with that, and it's information that is worth preserving.

I agree that listening based on composition instead of record is the better way of listening, but I'd argue that is a purely modern phenomenon, facilitated by digital libraries.

I guess it depends on what tastes people have. Sometimes I want to listen to something specific, sometimes I don't.

Only if you have a wide enough collection that it takes significantly longer to select individual works, compared to selecting whole albums. When I had 30-ish classical records, selecting individual compositions is pretty easy. At 100 records it's harder, and once one aims for full reportory, remembering which composition is on which record is likely to be quite a hassle.

Now, I'm aiming for full reportory, and I guess you are too, so I think we're pretty much in agreement. But I wouldn't foist this scheme on anybody else unless they were doing the same thing

Concert programs are chosen for all kinds of reasons and they are usually not the same ones that drive CD's. These days the most common concert form is to sandwich in a lesser-known piece by a lesser-known or modern composer and hold some old workhorse to the end to keep the wealthier contributers in their seats for the whole performance. This is NOT the basis of CD-programming. CD programs are usually designed to meet various marketing schemes by putting together several works designed to appeal to a certain demographic. So to repeat: sophisticated classical music lovers - and these are the people with the big collections for whom this topic matters - already know what's what and what goes together and what kind of music they want to hear or what sort of musical experience they want to have. They don't need a record producer whose tastes and motivations might be entirely different from theirs to decide for them.

Casual listeners may need or want the sort of guidance a CD provides - "if you like Beethoven you might like Schubert" -or- "If you like the Brahms Academic Festival Overture you might like Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony" but those aren't the listeners with the 900-classical-CD collections who need to be concerned with taxonomical schemes like we're discussing here.

Anyway, you can always put what CD and track number something came from in a tag if you don't want to lose it or if you think you might want to reconstruct it someday. Personally I regard the CD to be all bathwater but if you think there's a baby in there then you can save it in a tag.

But so what if it is a modern phenomenon? So are .FLACs and MP3's and iPods and NAS's.

Gotcha. Consider me edumacated.

Which all means that how we organize music affects how we listen to music -- which has a lot to do with the technologies we use.

The concert is a technology, and it's also a social event -- I agree that typically it's a familiar piece, a new piece and a lollipop, but that's about a real social thing of people wanting to get together to listen to music, even if they have different tastes. It's also about the shape of a social experience. When the Athenians went to those heavy tragedies, they saw three in a row, and then the day was rounded off with an obscene farce. Makes hackneyed encore pieces look quite restrained.

With 78s, listening to a single work of any size was a bit of a marathon. The LP was probably the closest to one item of medium=one work. Now the CD is often a small concert. Sometimes you might want to experience music in someone else's programming, sometimes not. Incidentally, I wonder how many people heard collections like The Well-Tempered Clavier or Shostakovich's 24 Preludes and Fugues all the way through before the CD? I mean, are these "works" in the same way a symphony is a "work"?

What I think this means is that the best way to organize classical music is the way that helps you listen to it the way you want -- allowing that this might change. I'm actually in the process of changing from organizing by album (which is, of course, the easiest way) to organizing by work.

Well, I have to disagree. What about an opera? I have 21 operas (59 CDs in total) and most are on 3 CDs. Few are on 2 and only the Messian's Saint François d'Assise is on 4 CDs (3h 55m). When I have enough time that I want to spend on music listening, I like to hear an entire opera. Currently, about 90% of my collection is backed up on a HDD, and nothing satisfies my needs like the foobar/facets combination.

Here's my 2p... And here's how I tagged and organised two of my first classical categorisations (one was a download, another was my own rip):

O:\audio\lossy\Classical\Henryk Gorecki - Symphony No. 3 Op. 36 (The Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs) (1976) (kord) (MP3 256kbps)\01 - gorecki, henryk - symphony no 3 'of sorrowful songs' (i) lento - sostenuto tranquillo ma cantabile - warsaw po (kord).mp3

Disclaimer: I renamed the folder, I DIDN'T rename the files at the time as I was still seeding them to other people. I might rename them now to match my schema now I've noticed I missed them out ... The "(kord)" is the source, I kept it for reference purposes. Everything was retagged though.

Here's how I tagged:

Title: I. Lento - Sostenuto Tranquillo ma Cantabile
Artist: Henryk Gorecki
Album: Symphony No. 3, (Op. 36, 1976) ("The Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs")
Year: 2000
Track: 1/3
Genre: Classical
Comment (multiline):
Soprano: Joanna Kozlowsk
Conductor: Kazimierz Kord

The multiline Comment field was already in the MP3s when I got them, so extra bonus there. I would've done the same thing anyway

A LONG time ago, I borrowed a 6CD boxset of Mozart symphonies from my music teacher (we were doing Mozart on my music A Level course). I put each CD into its own folder called

Mozart - Great Piano Concertos & Symphonies (CD x of 6) (Concertos y-z) (Barenboim) (320kbps) (44.1kHz)

Where x is the CD number, and Y and Z are the concertos in question on that disc. And yeah, I put bitrate and samplerate into my foldernames.

I know this isn't ideal as your collection grows, if I ever got any more classical on my MP3 player I'd probably rejig it into a folder called Mozart - Great Piano Concertos & Symphonies (6CD) (320kbps (44.1kHz), then inside make each folder like Concertos 20 - 21) (Barenboim), then inside keep the filenames as they are now:

01. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 - I. Allegro.mp3
02. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 - II. Romance.mp3
03. Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 - III. Allegro Assai.mp3

... etc... Here's how the first one's tagged:

Title: Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466: I. Allegro
Artist: Mozart
Album: Great Piano Concertos & Symphonies, Disc 1 of 6 (Berliner Philharmoniker, Piano & Conductor: Daniel Barenboim)
Year: 1992
Track: 1/6
Genre: Classical
Comment: CDex 1.40, Lame 1.27, 320kbps CBR

... I tag according to the info on the box (when accurate), then add to it if I feel the need. I played with the idea of adding 'Wolfgang Amadeus' to the artist, but didn't feel the need. I think we all know who Mozart is.

I always try to include as much info as possible in both the ID3 tags and the filenames... Helps me when I'm searching.

OrangeCD can help automate a LOT of your music catalogueing too - it's saved me a good deal of time scouring my VERY big Drum & Bass archives (arranged by year, date, then release going back about 5 years now).



That's my 2p... good value for money huh

Which is precisely the reason why I advocate the scheme I do. By keeping each track separate and making extensive use of the rich possibilities provided by tags you have the flexibility of doing it any way you want. You can play mini-concerts of several different works; you can play an entire opera that originally came on 2 or 3 CD's as one piece; you can just play your favorite overtures and arias; you can play movements or tracks in shuffle mode; you can compare the same work by different performers; you can play only works by a particular composer or a particular genre, etc, and you can do all this on a PC, on a portable device, or on a home distribution system like Sonos or Roku or Airport Express.

Given how fast the technology and the way and circumstances people listen to music changes, flexibility should be a major goal.

Very interesting topic. So much that made me abandon my lurker status.

I love classical music, which comprises more than 90% of my 2100 hours of music, so of course good organization is crucial for me. This is how I decided to do after experimenting different methods for different players (portable and software) over the years:

I basically organize by tags. The folder scheme goes just by COMPOSER/ALBUM. Composer, in this case, being just the last name, and album always including some reference to the performer. So, it's like BACH/Mass in B minor - Suzuki.

Now for the tags.

For ALBUM name, I use the standard Composer: Work - Performer, omitting the composer whenever the piece has a unique name. The performer is necessary to differentiate multiple recordings of the same work (I have, for instance, 16 recordings of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, 10 of Bach's St. Matthew Passion etc.). So they look like this: "Mozart: Symphonies 40 & 41 - Minkowski" or "La bohème - Karajan". I never split a full work into discs. A four-CD opera will become a single album, with corrected track numbers.

For track TITLE, I try to strike a balance between full information and conciseness. When the album is the work, such as in a Mahler symphony, I may use only the movement description. Say, "II. In tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb". If I have more pieces of the same type in the album, I use the number or opus number of each piece before the individual movement. For instance, "No. 29 in B flat Op.106 'Hammerklavier': III. Adagio sostenuto". If there are different types of pieces, I go for a more complete description. An example of two tracks from the same album: "Serenade in G major, K525, 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik': I. Allegro", "Adagio & Fugue in C minor, K546: Fugue". In an opera, I try to add the characters that sing a particular part ("No.3 Aria: Ah chi mi dice mai (Donna Elvira, Don Giovanni, Leporello)").

My main tag for differentiating composers is the GENRE one. Instead of using Classical, Baroque, things like that, I use Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner etc. That is useful because in players like the iPod the GENRE tag is the only one that will allow me to access a list of artists. COMPOSER will lead directly to albums. Being able to see artists before albums is helpful when you have multiple recordings of the same pieces. Also, some players will not have the COMPOSER tag, so that covers me in those situations as well. I know this may create confusion with non-classical genres. For those, I use some special symbol in the tag to have them grouped together, separated from the composers' names. For instance: * Pop & Rock. And for albums that have multiple composers, say a Vladimir Horowitz recital, I use Various. In these cases, if I really want to select the specific composers, I can use another tag...

For the COMPOSER tag, I write the composer full name, including years of birth and death. Having more than 200 Beethoven albums, of course I know from which period he comes and all, but it's useful to have, say, an information like this: Vagn Holmboe (1909-1996). (In the iPod, I also use the "sort by" tag for having the alphabetical order following the last name.)

The ARTIST is always the performer. Since Media Monkey recognize the semi-colon separator and lists multiple artists in the same line separately, I use it. So, it's like this: Deutsche Kammerphilharmonia Bremen; Paavo Järvi. Or, for an opera, something like this: Agnes Baltsa; José Carreras; José van Dam; Katia Ricciarelli; Berliner Philharmoniker; Herbert von Karajan. This doesn't work, though, for portable players, so I use it only for my Flac files. For an iPod, I leave only the main artist, either the conductor or the soloist, and take advantage of the fact that the iPod reads another tag...

I use both COMMENT and LYRIC tags to have detailed descriptions of the performers. The iPod reads the LYRIC tag, so I can use it to have orchestra, soloists, chorus etc. For example, a CD from Gardiner's Bach Cantata Pilgrimage would have this:
"For Trinity Sunday
St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, 18/6/2000
Ruth Holton, soprano
Daniel Taylor, alto
Paul Agnew, tenor
Peter Harvey, bass
The Monteverdi Choir
The English Baroque Soloists
John Eliot Gardiner"

I considered using the method of one album-per work, but I think this creates too many entries and sometimes breaks the concept of the original album, which I enjoy sometimes. I also thought of grouping works in a more logical way (say, all Shostakovich Quartets by the Fitzwilliam in one album), but that puts too many tracks in one album, and I also think it's easier to apply cover art to the album as it was conceived.

The difficulties of tagging classical music helped push me toward Baroque music -- how much easier to use a tag of RV262a rather than a bunch of Italian words I can't understand. Of course, I always rip a concert to one (FLAC) file, since I cannot imagine wanting to listen to just one movement. But, if there should be something where that might be the case, I'd use Wavpack.
I have file names like Vivaldi, Il Giardino Armonico -RV 262a.flac and Vivaldi, Europa Galante -RV 262a.flac. But, on my new S-E musicphone, I want to be able to select Artist=Vivaldi>All>Play, so I've had to change artist designation in the internal tags to simply "Vivaldi."
I, too, put as much additional info as I have devotion to create in the "Comments" section.
After doing all this work, make sure you have backups! Of course, I think it a mistake to do this tagging work on lossy MP3 files -- if done on lossless files, the tags can be transcoded to whatever is best for future devices.

1. I still don't see what is wrong with using the CD define my taxonomy. Most of the CDs I have are pretty well grouped by composer, artist, or work type. As long as I have a digital media library that will allow me to sort, group, and tag any way I want, directory structure doesn't matter as much. The main advantage to my system is the ease and cleanliness. I dont have multiple subfolders with multiple files, I don't have to add album art to each track in an album, and I am less likely to screw things up. Also, with multi-genre collections, you run into sticky situations if you don't sort by album. For example, if somebody wanted to listen to Freddie Freeloader, then they would know to go looking for Time Out. It can be more useful than is immediately apparent.

2. What's your point? I have many compilations like that. For example, Rostropovich the Russian Years is 13-CDs, but each individual album has a name such as "Benjamin Britten," "Dimitri Shostakovich," or "World Premiers," from which finding a particular work is easy. Not to mention if I want to listen to Rostropovich, then I have 13 CDs to choose from.

3. True, but I use on-the-fly conversion for my iPod.

4. How does that differ from single album images? I am still able to tag individual tracks.

I am usually quite thorough on my tagging. I create work, movement#, movement, instrumentation, key, catalog number, composition date, nickname, and period tags to organize my library. With these details, I can simply use masstagger to create a uniform title scheme that I want across my media library automatically. That is the reason I use foobar2000.

Edit: Example:

Almost all my collection is ripped to single file images. Individual tracks can be tagged if you write APL link files from the CUE sheet of a CD. It can be done easily with foobar. APL files contain an APEv2 tag so you can put in it every imaginable field you use in your tagging scheme.

Here's an example of a Properties page of one of my .apl files

I am able to do that with flac files as well, but I don't see the advantage of tags on individual tracks over tags on album images with embedded cuesheets. As far as I know, they provide the same if not similar functionality. I am able to define the individual tracks within album images with embedded cuesheets using whatever tags I please (shown in the example of my previous post).

I remember that I ran into some trouble when I was experimenting with embedded cuesheets, but perhaps, I was doing something wrong

Have you tried with multiple fields? For example, multiple artists for one track?

The advantage of tagging individual tracks is that you don't need to play it on a device that knows about cuesheets or do some kind of conversion to get there.

The other advantage is that "album" is a dying paradigm. It's like the "dial" telephone - your kids won't even know what an "album" is. So far, in 2008 I haven't ripped any CD's (I did 1400 CD's in 2007) but I've downloaded lots and LOTS of tracks from the Internet. In 2007 about 90% of my newly-added music came from CD's; I predict that during 2008 it might be 50%. By 2009 maybe 10%. At the start of 2007 we had 5 CD stores within a half hour drive of my house; today we have two and they're the same chain. On top of that, many of the CD's I did rip were compilation CD's where I only wanted a few tracks (yes, even in classical).

Again: we live in a world of rapidly-changing technology. There's no way to predict what devices we'll be playing our music on in 2 or 3 years - just in the last year I've played my music on my PC, Sonos, iPod, my LG cellphone and my (Palm) PDA. I don't know how many of these support cuesheets but they all support tagged files.

Two years ago I was in Paris for a workshop and I had a small (4GB) collection of MP3's on my iPod Nano. Because that iPod had been flaky I had a backup DVD of the music in my suitcase. Sure enough, the iPod needed a hard-reset midway through my trip and I had to reload my music. I normally work from a PC but my traveling companions had Apple iBooks. It took no time to reload the music from the DVD and be back up.

Finally I don't see any disadvantage of individual tracks. The real work is not the ripping but the tag-editing, which you would have to do with cuesheets anyway because the online services (e.g., Gracenote) are never accurate or consistent with classical music.

For some devices, you will have to convert your music anyway, whether it has a cuesheet or not, simply because it doesn't support the codec. While it is an advantage to have a more widely supported format, I'm not sure the inconvenience of conversion is really as bad as the inconvenience of over thousands of individual files spread across the computer hidden in subfolder under subfolder. Additionally, the problem with individual files is that if one of the tracks for some reason get separated or deleted from the rest of the album or work, and you lose the CD, then you will render the work useless. Album image files are much easier to manage, and faster to navigate than individual files. I have also run into the problem in the past when I was using mp3s, that when organizing under subfolders, I would come across a file with no tags and only the tempo marking as the filename. Not knowing who the performer was or where the file came from made it a sore spot in my media library. If you have the album title as the filename, then you can immediately find all of the details if and when that should happen.

The album is not a dying paradigm. As long as I have my CDs and LPs, albums will exist. And I am not about to go and throw them all away simply because the way media is purchased has changed.

In a world of rapidly-changing technology, we can hope that future devices will support cuesheets. If they don't? Conversion is always an option.

What is the relevance of this? You could have made an mp3 dvd from any codec through conversion.

Well at least we agree on something -- online services are never consistent. I do all my tags thoroughly by hand, which gives me the freedom to change the tag format of my whole library automatically using masstagger should I want or need to.