jezbo wrote: > Where do you store the sub-genre > (instrumental/chamber/orchestral/vocal/etc) in the tags? Do you use > genre for this or something else as sub-genre? I may have to be clever > to allow drill-down by any attribute, but this would be a useful > starting point. Then we can consider how best to drill-down on the > information you require - do you normally target a composer first or > want to browse by sub-genre then composer? > > If you play with the pivot viewer feature, which is only experimental > admittedly, you can drill down by various attributes (not sure if the > one you use for sub-genre is one of them) in any order - I could apply > the same mechanism to the main browser area of muso. Or I could try to > design a brand new drill down mechanism where you pick what you want to > summarise first (eg. list of composers), then having picked one or more > of those choose the attribute you'd like to drill into next (eg. > sub-genre), all the time showing the albums which match the selection so > far - this is basically what the pivotviewer does but I could design the > UI to work in a different way. > > Picking up custom tags from all files may be tricky, since you'd have to > configure what to look for in muso, and new columns in the muso database > to put them in (a finite number or any would be more ideal). Are you > using LMS? Can this handle custom tags via a plugin?
Thank you for your reply and your interest. I'll try to answer as comprehensively as I can. A couple of things to bear in mind. As you have a large classical collection yourself, you're probably aware of this, but anyway: the concept of the 'album' (that is, the original CD) is fairly meaningless when ripping classical music CDs. What I mean by this is: if you rip the album 19 by Adele, then that's exactly what ends up in your digital collection -- a single album by Adele. But take the average classical CD, containing, say, Beethoven's 1st and 4th symphonies. There is no reason to keep these together, so most people rip each work separately, creating a separate 'album' for each work. This is one reason why digital classical collections become difficult to manage -- a collection of 1000 CDs can turn into several thousand separate works, so detailed tagging is essential if you're to retain control. Secondly, experience has shown that trying to avoid using the Artist tag for composers is futile. Too many devices or programs have limited capability for customisation, so I long ago accepted that I would have to use Artist=Composer for classical music. This also introduces problems, solved for most devices by having an additional custom tag called "PopArtist" for when I only want to show pop artists (and the composer tag for when I only want to show classical 'artists'. I only use the genre tag to separate music into 'pop' and 'classical'. I use other tags for more detailed classification. The classical sub-genre (instrumental/chamber/orchestral/vocal/etc) would be contained in both the COMMENT and SUBGENRE tags (I started out just using the custom SUBGENRE tag, but of course many programs don't see custom tags, so I copied the data to the COMMENT tag, which is a standard tag). So for a typical classical 'track' (here, the first movement of Beethoven's 1st symphony) my tags would look like this: *ALBUM:* Symphony No. 1 - Haitink *ARTIST:* Beethoven *BAND:* LSO, Haitink *CATALOG#:* LSO0598 *COMMENT:* Orchestral *COMPOSER:* Beethoven *CONDUCTOR:* Bernard Haitink *GENRE:* Classical *LABEL:* LSO Live *ORCHESTRA:* LSO *PERFORMER:* LSO, Haitink *PERIOD:* Romantic *SUBGENRE:* Orchestral *TITLE:* Adagio molto - Allegro con brio *TRACK:* 1 *UPC:* 822231109020 *YEAR:* 2006 Points to note: (1) The ALBUM is an individual work, not the whole CD. (2) Some tags double up, something I had to introduce for the sake of flexibility. So SUBGENRE (a custom tag) = COMMENT (a standard tag available to most programs), BAND = PERFORMER, etc. (3) The YEAR is, if possible, the year the recording was made. Useful for me to know, but not at all helpful when Muso defaults to sorting by year (as it does when you browse an artist)... (4) It might also be worth mentioning that my digital classical collection is mostly FLAC and OGG files, very rarely MP3s. So my wish in Muso would be to be able to sort classical works as follows: COMPOSER (or Artist) -> SUBGENRE (or COMMENT) -> ALBUM I do use LMS. I use the custom tags to create custom menus in LMS (using the Custom Browse plugin). I have tried Muso's pivot viewer, but if I'm being honest it doesn't really solve the problems I've outlined, not in its current form anyway. If Muso could pick up most or all standard tags, and could have a system to allow sorting by more levels than it currently does, it would be well on the way to delivering a first-rate classical browser (I believe COMMENT, BAND and CONDUCTOR are standard tags in FLAC/OGG/MP3, and are certainly supported in LMS: http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SlimServerSupportedTags). Over the years, I have tried to borrow the best tagging habits from the various guides to classical tagging scattered around the web, so I think my system is fairly commonly used. I hope this information is of some use. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jdk's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=9569 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=91575 _______________________________________________ plugins mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/plugins
