Maintaining a Digital Music Collection

original years for compilation tracks

I also do this, because I have auto-updating mixes that sort by year. 60s, 70s, etc. God forbid a late-'70s track show up in my 2008+ mix because the compilation came from 2009.

you guys that have these super organised collections, are you quite protective over them?

The original purpose was to make them navigable on SLSK.

FWIW, I went with
<Genre>/<Subgenre>/<Artist>/<Album Artist> (<Year>) <Album Title>/<Track#:2> <Title>
and don't regret it. I can start a genre, subgenre, or artist shuffle in 2 seconds in MediaMonkey.

What if an album belongs to multiple genres?

i do ratings. main reasons are 1. to get rid of the crap 2. not to jam the ipod with not so good stuff. so my ratings are:

***** masterpiece, love it to deat
**** excellent, very good
*** ok, just good enough to stay on ipod, can also mean i am not sure and want to check out more
** average, stays on the hard disk but leaves the ipod
* crap, gets deleted from hard disk

What if an album belongs to multiple genres?

Not sure how iTunes handles this, but with foobar you use a semicolon to separate under the "genre" tag.

e.g. Jazz; Fusion; Progressive Metal ... etc. can be attributed to the same file. So the album, which is stored only once on your HD, appears under each respective genre when the list is sorted as such.

i have always found genres entirely pointless and never use them. i usually put in the record label instead

i use ratings sometimes - mainly for reminding me to relisten to stuff i know i liked the first time i heard it

oh no, I meant how uses genres in a file structure allow for albums with multiple genres. I see their utility, it's just I would reduce myself to a puddle on the floor deciding on a comprehensive genre tag set, so I just don't use any.

Yeah, it can be daunting for some collections. I started with "jazz" and "not-jazz" as my first set of tags. I refined it somewhat after that.

I never touch genres; if I tried, my head would explode. Crap gets marked with one star, which acts as a reminder to delete. I have smart playlists based on 4/5-star ratings, but I'm not an obsessive rater.

In itunes, I use the "grouping" field to add the record label or a more general genre. It's helpful when sorting things.

what's the diff btwn the 'grouping' and 'genre' tag?

It's just an extra field to use. Someone up thread mentioned "What if an album belongs to multiple genres?" and the "grouping" field is perfect for that.

I wish I could customize/add fields

I feel equally ashamed and proud that I've written a couple of perl scipts to handle MP3 tagging. Whenever I get something new I run it through my filter and can re-write tags, attach images, strip extraneous tags, etc. I've got it set to filter out things I don't want in my tags, deal with roman numerals, tag as a compilation, make sure that "DJ" is always capitalized that way, and so on. Kind of OCD makes sounds about right.

I duplicate all the files on a shared network drive, and really should get a new hard drive to keep a backup at work, but I don't bother with my iTunes library because I don't really care about playcounts and playlists and such.

i've got all my files on a NAS but not my itunes library files; those are on my computer because otherwise everything slooows way down. what this means is that podcasts, purchased music, etc all end up on my computer instead of with their brethren. i wish they were all in the same place but whatcha gon do

i too don't have any use for playcounts

Re: ratings. I spent, I don't know, years slowly rating all 10K+ songs in my itunes. I forgot to find out how to transfer those to my new computer before getting rid of the old one. I think I'm going to just start over with 2012 songs onwards. Bloody hell.

I don't bother with ratings, year or genre tags - if I was starting my library from scratch now I'd probably put the year in, maybe genre too. Otherwise it's the kind of thing I'd perhaps embark on if I found myself bed-ridden for a week. I'm really obsessive about other aspects of my library (artwork, track/album titles) though.

how do all you lot deal with classical music?

by not listening to any

haha

haha same thing happened to me when I switched to macbook
Ratings are pretty key for me. I use them like Alex upthread and let smart lists then decide what gets on the ipod

hey nickb, you might be interested in this -

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Classical_Style_Guide

thanks tracer, that looks useful

the feat. bit looks wack though e.g. Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra feat. conductor: Herbert von Karajan)

it makes sense if you consider the conductor a member of the group of artists performing the work, but not one that is always part of that group

musicbrainz has a mechanism for joining artists though, either with the word "feat." or otherwise - itunes can't do this iirc

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Titles/Featured_artists

i would actually be psyched to move to a music player on my computer that allowed me to use more fields than itunes does

oh i see

how do all you lot deal with classical music?

The u+k thing for me -- which musicbrainz happily agrees with -- is that as a rule (to which there may be exceptions, granted) the composer, not the performer, goes in the "artist" tag. This is purely pragmatic for me, in that apps, players etc always have been so artist-centric and ignorant of the "composer" tag.

How do people tag the year when the track was created over two or more years? Start or completion?

i usually contact the artist and ask them how they feel about abortion

Yeah, sorry for my completely inappropriate post there.

haha, sorry. work liquid lunch. don't you just go by release date / the date the work was published? do you have an example where this is a problem?

i had one the other week, was created in 1952 but worked on and released twice more in different years. some electronic thing...

Bruno Maderna - Musica su due dimensioni (Music in two dimensions, 1952, rev. 1957 and 1963)

yeah, that's the weird part about thinking of individual tracks as tied to a physical release. if you obtain it over the internet as a single track unaffiliated with an album, which release does it belong to? who kno

Are people here happy to have year tags as release dates when it comes to compilations? Should you go through a greatest hits and tag each track correctly?

xp: f. hazel
There's some hairspitting, but not much. Generally artists either neatly fit into some category (shoegaze, disco, tape-music composition) or they'll fall through the sieve into a catch-all subgenre like pop (non-spec) or modern composition (non-spec). Admittedly, I define things like "dream pop" or "art pop" fairly broadly. It works.

My listening tends to be pretty genre specific (and anti chart music), so the catch-all categories are generally populated with things that could be labeled with a subgenre (like "singer-songwriter") in fields I follow so little that they don't merit their own folder.

xp: release dates
For historical compilations, I use the last date of commercial release of any included piece. So my Blood & Fire reissues still get played in a 70s shuffle, etc.

i go through and tag each track with its original release year

if it was released on a single in november of one year and an album the following january, i don't really care which; close is good enough

how do all you lot deal with classical music?
i guess people who put the composer into the artist field instead of the performer are not really into classical music. i have started that way but i have changed as a. it is wrong and most important b. if you get the metadata from a music database website the composer goes into the composer field and the performer into the artist field. too much of a hassle changing that. the same goes for the order first name, surname which i used in the beginning in the artist field. everywhere it is first name and then surname.

^ I do that (composer in artist field), but will also put the conductor in the title somewhere (e.g., Pierre Boulez for some of Ligeti's works).

In many instances, the composer/performer are the same (Xenakis, Pierre Henry, Francois Bayle, Mimaroglu, etc.)

ID3 spec says the artist field should contain "Lead artist/Lead performer/Soloist/Performing group"

http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-frames

though you're still left with the question of what to do with something like this..... http://www.amazon.com/Johannes-Brahms-Sextet-Piano-Trio/dp/B0000029LE

i spent about 4 months off and on going through the genres on my itunes library, what a waste of time. I did feel some sad sense of accomplishment when I was done though.

i would actually be psyched to move to a music player on my computer that allowed me to use more fields than itunes does

My #1 request is to have some sort of aliasing for tracks that both appear on an album and a compilation.

Couple years ago, I did email sj✧✧✧@ap✧✧✧.c✧✧ with an outline for something I called "iTunes Pro" that would address features that would help librarians, radio stations, and just anyone with more than 10,000 tracks in their iTunes library. Never got an answer, but I still hope for this someday. I would even pay for it!

Never got an answer, but I still hope for this someday

Sorry to break it to you but I don't think Steve Jobs is going write you back.

Seriously though, I agree with this 10000% It's my number one issue. I have lots of compilations that are essential to me, and those same songs show up on other albums. I don't want to remove one or the other.

The only reason this does make sense is in the strange scenarios where you're dealing with different mixes or mastering jobs where maybe it does make sense to have two different copies of the same song. But mostly no, I'd rather just have the best copy and have it once but have it show up both ways.

Thirded. Anyone got invites for iTunes pro?

i usually put in the record label instead

for record labels with a specific style this is what i do.

Sorry to break it to you but I don't think Steve Jobs is going write you back.

I did say it was several years ago (and when Jobs would occasionally email back people)

I remember that. You also said "but I still hope for this someday" which could as easily apply to the waiting for a response, if you have my sense of humor.

i guess people who put the composer into the artist field instead of the performer are not really into classical music.

Not true, for the record. It probably gets truer if modified to "don't really follow the classical music world" or similar, granted.

i have started that way but i have changed as a. it is wrong and most important b. if you get the metadata from a music database website the composer goes into the composer field and the performer into the artist field

It varies, though -- as I mentioned, musicbrainz uses composer as artist.

It's really just a pragmatic thing for me, as most players and apps don't support the Composer tag well, if at all -- and going by the composer *feels* like the right route for me to look up a work.