MrSinatra is absolutely correct in that there is no 'right' way of doing this, it's what works for you. If I was starting from square one, I would give serious consideration to Erland's suggestions for organizing classical music (http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Setup_browse_menu_for_classical_music) which seems a logical and comprehensive way of doing it. Since I was not starting at square one, and couldn't face the huge amount of work involved in retagging and plugin manipulation, I use the following approach which works for me. The main requirement for this is to install Erland's 'Custom Browse' plugin which allows selecting music by composer, the mode I use most.
1. I tend to split actual albums into virtual albums, thus, in your example, I would have two albums labelled:- Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No. 2 Rachmaninov - Rhapsody on a theme of Pagannini Might not seem worth it in this case but probably so when you have a pairing like Brahms and Sibelius violin concertos. My other consideration here is that I tend to find around 20 - 30 minutes is a good time for listening to a 'unit' of music (shows my age, was conditioned by lps). Thus I will also split Chopins Etudes into opus 10 and Opus 25 partly because of the playing time. I label the artist tag as Ashenazy;LSO;Previn Titles would be: I. Largo-Allegro moderato II. Allegro molto etc I also include a genre tab as I like to be able to seperate classical from Jazz and nostalgia type stuff mainly but have also subdivided classical into e.g. solo piano, string quartets, symphonies etc) This allows me to find music by composer mostly ... i.e. Rachmaninov, by artist sometimes (either Ashenazy, LSO or Previn) or occasionaly by genre (Piano concerto). This format also presents all the data you need about the music on the 'now playing' screen. Compilations are always a bit tricky, I tend to retain the original album structure for these and label the titles (tracks) more comprehensively. e.g. album Baroque favourites, composer Pachelbel;Vivaldi;Mouret;Charpentier;Marcello;Clarke;Handel;JS Bach;Purcell;Albinoni, title Pachelbel (arr. Leppard) - Canon artist (for each title) English Chamber Orchestra; Leppard The directory structure matters only in being able to find your files in order to tag or retag them, the squeezebox database looks after how they appear when you browse when wanting to play them. Mostly whatever tagger you are using will stick files into appropriate directories and you don't need to interfere with this much. By and large I expect to see composer as a root directory with artist directories within it and album directories under artists. These album directories do not need to correspond to any virtual albums you create by splitting the Rachmaninov, SB looks after this. Last point is, CD producers seem to employ the most junior member of staff to tag the files, they are often inconsistent within an album and on occasion, totally misleading, like labelling Handle as Brahms! I found re-tagging took much longer than ripping and 1 year on I am still correcting errors. Hope this helps but is probably just confusing. If you have the patience I would strongly recommend that you play around for a few weeks before starting on a major tagging operation. -- JerryS ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JerryS's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=38998 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=86312 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/ripping
