I've arrived at the following system for my own classical collection, after several years of experimentation. Here's how I'd tag the four movements of Beethoven's Symphony #5, as performed by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1982.
Artist: Karajan Berlin 1982 Tracks: Bee Sym 5.1 Bee Sym 5.2 Bee Sym 5.3 Bee Sym 5.4 I find 3 letter abbreviations offer the best balance between brevity and readability. I chain together abbreviations as needed, e.g. for Mozart's second violin concerto: Moz VioCon 2.1 Moz VioCon 2.2 Moz VioCon 2.3 I don't see what's gained by including tempo markings: Adagio, Allegro, and all that. I think of things in terms of movement numbers: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. If I really want the exact tempo marking, which I never do, I can always look it up online. There are two reasons I think it's important to include composer in track title: 1. When you glance at the display, it instantly gives you all the essentials in less than 20 characters: OK, I'm listening to the third movement of Mozart's 2nd violin concerto. 2. Tracks sort together sensibly. If you have a program like MediaMonkey, you'll find it's easy to get sorted lists of all your tracks. With composer name as part of track title, all your Beethoven symphonies will sort together in order, with multiple versions of the same piece sorted next to each other. Without that, you get Tchaikovsky Symphony #5's weirdly interleaved with your Beethoven Sym 5's. I capture the year of performance as part of Artist, because as your classical collection grows, you'll find you have multiple versions of the same piece by the same artist. So if you follow this system, Track tells you what piece you're listening to, and Artist what specific performance. Album is less important. I currently use it to make sure I've completely identified the CD. I put year, brand, and its own ID, e.g: 1997 DG 435 234-2 I filling in the Year tag with year of performance: somewhat useful for quickly grouping your recordings by era. I agree that freedb's classical tags are worse than useless. Because you have to enter them by hand, that's another reason to use terse abbreviations. -- dukelaw ------------------------------------------------------------------------ dukelaw's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2756 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=33600 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list ripping@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
