So, a nice complicated discussion there from everyone, which confirms
what we all knew from the beginning - managing classical music (or, I
now learn, folk!) is tricky as we are using tools designed for pop.
So, there are two branches for this problem:
(1) how do you make the best of what we have (which was one of the
original questions in this thread - "what do you guys do")
and
(2) how would we like the system to change to make it better.
To help the OP, I'll add my own answer for Q1, as I found similar
feedback from others very helpful when I was trying to get my head
round the problem.
First - separate the concept of CD and album. In classical music, an
album is a piece of music (eg a symphony). I use a directory structure
which corresponds to the CD, so I an reconstruct it if I ever need to,
in the style
\musiclib\flac\classical\Beethoven\Beethoven PC 4,5 Arrau
The directory name has only a rough abbreviation of the pieces and
enough of the performers to be unique.
Inside the directory I have one track per movement, named like:
Beethoven Piano Concerto 5 in E flat Major, 'Emperor', Op 73 - 1 -
Allegro.flac
I've never yet found any satisfactory automated tagging of classical
music - I usually let EAC look up in CDDB but end up overwriting almost
all of it. Artist tag in this example would simply be "Beethoven".
"Album" is tagged like:
Beethoven Piano Concerto 5 in E flat Major, 'Emperor', Op 73 - Arrau -
Davis - Staatskapelle Dresden
For Genre, I use multi-valued genre tags, so this one might be
Classical;Romantic;Concerto;Piano
Taken as a whole, I find this system works pretty well for me. The
only thing I might do differently if there ever is a next time is to
abbreviate slightly more (PC instead of Piano Concerto) to reduce
scrolling. Otherwise I can find what I want, when I want it. Random
play works as long as you ask for random Albums. I can see the piece
details on the screen all the time, and if I want to check the
performer details they are not too far away in the menus (just go off
to the right to get all the file details).
Moving on to question (2), how could this be better? There is
certainly some potential for making use of the database in smarter
ways, but IMHO this is a long way off and, as noted previously in this
thread, would imply a quite different usage model for Slimserver
(becoming more of a music manager), as well as a different idea of how
to use the database (right now its considered ok to ask users to trash
the database to get round SS problems, this clearly needs a new
ooutlook if we're going that way).
So right now I'm happy keeping all my data in the tags where I know its
safe, and am just looking for slightly better ways for browsing. For
example, either browsing or Random play for a combination of genre tag
values ("piano" AND "concerto" for example).
Still, back to Q1, what I have is working well, and I'm very happy with
my new toy...
Ceejay
--
ceejay
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