I'm in a dilemma with organizing my collection.

I was trying to organize them by the composers (Bach, Beethoven and etc). This seems fine at first but then you have "special" edition pieces performed/conducted by renowned people (yo yo ma, gould, karajan, ashkanezy and etc).

I was thinking of:
1. classifying them as composers for "normal" edition
2. performer/conductor if it's a "special" edition.

any thoughts? maybe you have other ideas? please share!

thank you

Hey, that's the reason why I haven't ripped any of my classical CDs yet. The one dimensional way files are organised in file systems gives me the exact same troubles: composer, conductor or performers, in what order?

A multi dimensional database oriented file system would solve the problem of creating an appropiate directory structure, because the directory structure is of no importance anymore. I don't really like the current possibilites both in Windows or foobar2000... although I must say I could easily create a secondary Facets view for classical music, where I can search or rather navigate starting from different point of origins (composer or conductor or ensemble or main performer).

But back to basic structuring, so far I would order them in this way:

• composer
• type of work (symphony, chamber concert, etc.)
  
  • for symphony:
    • premiere date
    • name of the work
    • date of the recording
    • conductor
    • orchestra
    • main performers
  • for chamber works:
    • premiere date
    • name of the work
    • date of the recording
    • ensemble
    • main performers
  • ...

This is how I would more or less handle the problem how to make the CDs once they've been copied to files distinguishable and meaningful at the same time.

The problem is that I usually want all the basic most important info in the file and directory names, so in case of a major software screw up (losing all the tags), I am still able to rebuild the tags from the file path.

But with classical music the file paths can get reallly long, whereas all this information fits easily in every modern tag implementation. So I do have to give up my ideas above. Then there's the problem again, how to sort the CD rips into directories, how do I avoid the possible overwriting if two records are too similar (after removing the information from the file path I deemed unnecessary)?

I fear it's too much trial and error or even worse, it never gets finished, meaning many wasted hours.

I've been doing something vaguely along the lines of what Fandango is suggesting for a number of years now.
It's ugly, but I'm too busy/lazy to update it from my 1998-era filing system

For instance, for a little of the old Ludwig Van, I have the disc/set folders named along the lines of:
"Beethoven - Eroica Variationen Fur Elise Bagatellen Ecossaisen performed by Brendel"
The individual files are then named with the performer/conductor name and the relevant Opus, Movement etc. information:
"(#) Alfred Brendel, Fur Elise, WoO 59, Bagatelle in A minor.xxx"
Tags are similar but get composer (and additional, ie 'Poco Moto') added up front, space permitting.

FAT16 will of course chop the names to 24 characters, so for USB drive transfers to my lab machine it's critical to have the track number up front.

I hate to sound like a broken record, but have yall tried Facets yet?

useful if you use foobar exclusively which I do use on my other PCs. but my HTPC uses an media center software.

It depends on how you're planning on listening.

I shoehorn things into the Artist/Album format so that my files make sense on my ipod as well as in Amarok, but I imagine it should be clear enough to see how it'd apply when you "properly" use tags.

Unless the performer is performing a recital (or something similar), I stick with the composer. For example, I have Itzhak Perlman doing Paganini's 24 Caprices. For me, it's:
Artist: Paganini, Niccolò
Album: 24 Caprices [Perlman]

I can search for Perlman if I want to, but it's organized as a Paganini piece. On the other hand, Horowitz in Moscow is a recital, and so the pieces are various movements from disparate works. Thus:
Artist: Horowitz, Vladimir
Album: Horowitz in Moscow

Generally if I have a full work, or excerpts from a work (As an example, I have a disc with three of the Six Moments Musicaux of Schubert; I keep this as Schubert because the disc is not an exposition of Jandó; I suppose it's a matter of judgment, to some degree), I organize by composer; only if a disc is clearly recital-like is it organized by performer.

This works for me because the composer is more important to me. I certainly have pieces where I prefer one performance to another, but that is secondary to the piece itself. But if you are a big fan of Yo-Yo Ma, for example, it would make sense to make him your top-level rather than Dvořák, Brahms, or whoever he happens to be playing on a particular disc.

angenial: you're way of doing this is beginning to clear my mind. but how about multiple composers in 1 album?

i just had a thought. maybe doing it by album is not the right way to go with classical.

something like this perhaps?
----------------------------
composer 1 (top level)
- BMW 101 (performer X)
- BMW 101 (performer Y)

composer 2
- op.1
- op. 50 (conductor x)
---------------------------

any thoughts?

I wasn't clear in how I use albums; I don't care about the physical medium itself, I just overload what "album" means. I am, essentially, doing what you mention above.

If I have, for example, a CD with two symphonies, I consider that two "albums". It then shakes out as you have it listed, more or less. Once the FLACs are on my computer, they have no idea that they were on the same disc (apart from the fact that they have the same artwork embedded; I still can't completely get away from the physical medium!) Here's a concrete example from my collection:

... you get the idea. It's the best I could come up with under the requirement of making sense in programs/devices that expect the artist/album format. It was difficult to convince myself to break away from keeping the CD layout intact, but it has been more than worth it as my CD collection expands.

Eventually I'll probably break down and write my own player that fully makes use of tags like Composer, Ensemble, Soloist, Opus, and so forth, but until that time I'm happy with what I have.

If you´re a coder, you could try something like a Mindmap for this purpose.
You have a visualisation and a flexible form of sorting your files - independend from your regular folder structure.

Give every file per XML the informations you need, like comper, year, artist etc. and lets the pc create the connections, the nodes and everything else you could need.

Cloudmap is a very elegant form for this sort of things. You could create a new net for every way of need - Parameter 1: Karajan - Every Song from Karajan will be shown as one node Parameter 2: Year - in the middle of the now created network would you see the songs of the year, you entered and out of the center the year will march forward (or backward), like center everything from 64 and on the outside everything from 65, 66, 67 etc.

You could use the program as an frontend, which will direct the songs to the prefered musicplayer. If you build it with java, every OS will be supported.


Graphical demonstration of my idea

Various Artists for the album artist, the individual tracks artist then is either the composer or the actual performer/ensemble/orchetra.

Too bad if you already use the global artist and the individual track's artists for distinguishing between composer and actual performer.

You could rip to seperate tracks and just split the CDs up into different "albums", but somehow to me that's only a good idea in rare occasions. If not only the composer but also the performers differs. Of course, you can do whatever you like...

This is the second big problem when converting classical CDs to a computer friendly format, many of them contain more than one work but almost all the software is expecting one CD to be one album, there's even the case of 2 CDs for one album covered with special trag fields. But two album tag fields in one image rip with embedded cue sheet? fb2k can handle it, and that's it. But then it does not handle two replaygain album gain values in a single image rip! And it's not planned to be changed, my request was denied once.

All this means you will have some less trouble with classical rips if you do them track-wise and not image-wise.