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Digital music collections - organizing/editing filenames and metadata...

Xulonn

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Classical and jazz, in particular, offer many challenges for digital audiophiles with their variable (and often long and complex for classical music) mix of names. Composers, symphonies, concertos, movements, sonatas, suites, conductors, soloists and more are some of the complexities for classical music identification. And for jazz, there are artists, bands, collaborations, jams - fluid interactions between musicians that make simple classification difficult.

I simply ignore the default auto-organizing options of Daphile and Kodi, my audio and video apps that are available to me via dual booting on an Intel NUC mini-PC. These default options simply do not allow me to play what I want when I want to hear it.

I use Daphile, an excellent free, standalone Linux-based headless digital music player which is based on the venerable Logitech Media Server (LMS), With both Daphile and Kodi, my video player - I simply ignore every choice (artist, genre, album, year, playlist, new, etc.) except "Folders" under which I can access internal, external and network drives. (I also use Daphile to listen to internet radio - mostly Tunein stations and direct URLs)

My music and videos are located on a Synology NAS with 4Tb of storage. A folder/subdirectory method gives one greater control, and a logical hierarchical organization works best, but can be difficult to set up, organize, and manage. In the past year, I searched for utilities to help manage my personal collection - and clean up a motley and totally disorganized collection of more than 400K digital music files for a friend who inherited the collection from her late husband.

I copy music folders I want to edit to my fairly fast Lenovo PC (Intel Core i7-6700 @ 3.40GHz + 1Tb Samsung Evo 860 SDD). Then I use a combination of three Windows 10 applications to do the editing and help manage my collection of 36,000 digital music files, which are mostly a combination of FLAC files plus MP3's of various bit rates. I open all three apps and switch between the three windows when I am editing.

1. MusicBrainz Picard is useful for automatic renaming of tracks and adding/replacing metadata. MBP utilizes a volunteer-run, web-based repository of "corrected" OEM information which it uses to automatically update the filenames and metadata of digital music files to the standards specified for legal internet streaming radio stations. It is based on the album format, uses an automatic "cluster" method to group files into known albums. MBP will often be able to identify which of many releases around the world you have. A truly remarkable application, although not every group of files I have edited so far is in their database. For those folders, a simple metadata-editor can be used for manual editing.

2. Ant Renamer is a free utility that I use for simple and fast renaming of groups of files in subdirectories - especially when a I want to delete track numbers for more logical alphabetizing in folders - or I don't like the "official" convention used by MusicBrainz Picard. Again, music meant to be played in a certain order works best with track numbers in place.

3. Directory Opus 12, Light Edition is an Australian dual-pane Windows file manager application that is a bit quirky, far superior to any other one I have tried - for my purposes. To me, it is well worth the $33USD I paid for it. It has a third pane that will play music files or videos and is great for finding and deleting duplicates, and detecting corrupted files. Moving and copying files between the two windows is fast and easy.​
What editing and organizing tools do you use for your collection?​
 

graz_lag

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I file my music by year of album issuing, than I add infos abt. it's sales rank on the year of issuing, when that particular info is available. (i.e. #6 for Nina Simone in 1958.) Then, the artist, album title, origin of the digital version (LP, CD, HDtracks etc.), country of origin, label, etc ...

EasyTAG is my tagging software by default, however on the safer side, I clean up the sheet upstream by means of DeadBeeF to be sure all previous unwanted tags (to me) are removed.

1565297036887.png
 
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Hugo9000

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Everything in my post applies to classical recordings only, mostly because that's over 99% of what I own and listen to. lol

I tried to optimize everything so that no matter whether I was looking in folders in Windows and at actual file names, or using playback software like foobar or the old Western Digital Media Player I used to have with external hard drives connected, I could find everything easily, and with accurate naming of works, individual sections/movements/etc.

Regarding folder structure, within the Music folder, I have folders by artist (opera singer, instrumental soloist, conductor). Within those folders, I have composer folders, and within those, folders by album or work or opus number. I generally don't care what the original CD itself was, I'm more interested in the work/opus number. Because of owning multiple versions of many works, I added some details to folder names to distinguish them, so a folder title could be "Aida (1962, Price, Solti)" for example, because there is also Leontyne Price's later recording with Leinsdorf conducting. With full opera recordings, I don't listen to snippets, so I ripped them by Act or scene, so each opera might only have three individual tracks in it. One of the reasons I chose to do it this way was laziness at having to type out each aria or recitativo track, and also because of players not always supporting gapless playback. So basically, anything that needed to play gaplessly, I just ripped as a continuous track. Some symphonies or concerti that consist of two movements that join unbroken in performance thus are ripped into two tracks instead of three, such as Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3, where the second and third movement must play without a break. I used leading zeros to avoid any issues with 10 appearing before 2, for example, so I'd use 01, 02, etc.

Regarding tagging, "genre" is useless to me, but it seems to be one of the default display tags in players, so I chose to use that for composer. So I just made custom "genre" tags for each composer. I would have just used last names, but for a few composers sharing a surname (Strauss, Charpentier, Couperin, to name a few). I decided to do first initial then last name (R. Strauss) rather than last name first (Strauss, R.) for the silly reason of mixing it up from the usual Albinoni or whoever at the top of the sort list. lol

The artist tag is quite long in some tracks, because I used semicolons to list everyone involved that I might want to sort by. So, for an operatic quartet, there would be four singers, the conductor, and the orchestra all listed in a single artist tag. With the semicolon, it will then show up under each of those artists, unlike the horrible tagging they seem to use in some streaming services, where there are 40 separate listings for a single singer, one for each ensemble she or he recorded with. Or worse, the artists aren't even tagged, and you have to remember who the conductor was or perhaps it's all under "various artists." How useless and awful lol.

I had to learn to consider file listing conventions as well as sort order conventions in the player, like foobar which is what I mostly used on my destop computer. While it might be more standard to refer to Piano Concerto No. 1, in A minor, Opus 28 in normal writing, you have to decide what the most useful order is because of how it will be listed on a computer or in the player GUI. If you put opus No. at the end, you get a non-chronological mess of work listings. Some works don't have an opus number, so where do you want those listed? And so on. At first I chose to go with Composer, Opus 01, Concerto for piano and orchestra No 01, in A-flat Minor, I Allegro vivace.flac as a generic file name convention, and within an "album" titled Composer, Opus 01, Concerto for piano and orchestra No 01, in C Minor (1989, Pianist) so that if I had twenty interpretations of that work, they would appear grouped together, and then sorted by year and pianist, and without having movements from one mixed in with another. Such a pain haha! Then I'd test in my Western Digital thing that was hooked to my home theater system to make sure it appeared the way I wanted it to in that interface as well as whatever foobar or Windows would do with it. I eventually learned to keep file names shorter than the tags, because of exceeding the allowed number of characters in path names a few times haha! So a file name might then be Composer, Opus 001, No 01, I.flac to give me enough detail for finding a file easily if I had to re-rip and replace it or whatever, but keeping the total path name a bit shorter to allow for folders within folders for organizing the files that way.

HWV for Handel, BWV for Bach, RV for Vivaldi, Opus for others, then the major type of work it was, then the specific subcategory, then a key if named, then an individual number if the opus was a group publication.

Leading zeros varied by composer, most only need one. Haydn needs three haha!

In daily life, most say Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, etc., but if you do that, an alphabetical listing will break up the various types of concerti, with Symphony in between.


Concerto for piano and orchestra
Concerto for violin and orchestra
Symphony

It's all very tedious and boring haha!

I'd sort and re-sort every which way, to see if the result messed up a preferred order, or how multiple versions of the same work would be treated. I wanted every version of Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2 to be together when sorted by 'composer' (really the genre tag, but using composer names as genres instead of the usual and useless classical or pop or whatever lol, as I mentioned earlier), but I definitely didn't want each version of the first movement grouped together, then the second movements, etc., hence the way I used "album" tags and folder names and structure.

After I had ripped and tagged around 1000 of my CDs, I encountered my first playback glitch, a tiny little click in the middle of a track. For the first few, I'd re-rip that track and replace it. But eventually I got tired of it all, because I realized I was just slightly on edge, always wondering if there'd be a glitch in the middle of something else to take me out of the bliss of my listening. I had six backup drives for my music, thinking I'd only have to worry about hard drive failure or something catastrophic, but these little glitches for no apparent reason out of nowhere were not something I had counted on at all, and obviously no amount of backup drives could solve it. (I had used EAC, and used 'test and copy' on every single rip, by the way.) So I quit my ripping and tagging project. Easier to just fall back on my large CD collection. I know most don't have the luxury of a 3000+ disc collection carefully chosen and accumulated over decades, so it would be nice if these services would find better ways to tag and sort the material.

All of the above problems and solutions are probably very obvious to everyone reading this, but bear in mind that I went into my ripping project with no experience doing this whatsoever, and it was over ten years ago now. It's just a lot of things that people who listen to popular music most likely wouldn't think of, because most of it won't apply to their collections. Someone might own ten versions of Rumours, but it's due to different releases/remasters/countries of origin/format, so you can use the "year" tag and be pretty much covered, or add a few details to the album tag or something. You won't have twenty different sets of artists, it's always Fleetwood Mac for that "work." (Although you might wish to tag the individual members so that when you sort, you can see their work with the group and their solo work together. Probably what I'd do if I listened to popular music, as there were a number of people that were members of several different groups as well as releasing solo albums.)

Here are a few screenshots, with just my Howard Shelley music folder loaded in foobar's library, just to give an idea of my tagging and naming conventions I went with:
Windows folders.jpg

by genre in foobar.jpg


by artist in foobar.jpg
 
OP
Xulonn

Xulonn

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Wow, Hugo - that is an amazing post - and an amazing music library organizational system. Thank you for sharing (I copied and pasted that into a LibreOffice Doc for reference.)

Amir - if you read this - would it be possible to put Hugo's post into the ASR Audio Reference Library?
 

Hugo9000

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Wow, Hugo - that is an amazing post - and an amazing music library organizational system. Thank you for sharing (I copied and pasted that into a LibreOffice Doc for reference.)

Amir - if you read this - would it be possible to put Hugo's post into the ASR Audio Reference Library?
Thank you very much for the extremely kind reply, but I think my post is a bit too jumbled/rambling to go in any Reference Library! ;) I hope there are some useful bits in there to guide a few other classical fans on the problems of tagging, though. :)

I forgot to mention in that post that I chose a photo I liked of each artist or the composer to use in the tagging, since I did not use the actual complete CD as the "album" in most cases. There are too many cases where record companies chose silly album art, so I preferred to have pictures of my own choosing for the artists instead. That's why in the Windows folder view, you can see all those photos of Howard Shelley repeating haha! :D


P.S. May my favorite composer, George Frideric Handel, forgive me, but I updated my avatar of him, giving him some Sennheiser headphones! His music does sound appropriately beautiful on them, so I hope he wouldn't mind my impertinence. :)
 
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Old Listener

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Most of my music collection is classical music for which composer is as important as the performers.. I also have many CDs worth of Broadway and movie musicals and great American songbook music for which composer is very important.

I picked the JRiver Music Center software as the best tool for my needs in 2006. I can assign the tag values that I choose when I riip CDs or import files (for whatever standard or custom tags that I want to use). I can create views that let me see what's in my collection as I browse for music to play. JRiver has powerful tools for sorting music files by tag values and a very useful query system. Those tools and a tool to populate tags from folder and file names make tagging imported files a quick and bearable task.

While I don't use the Squeezebox ecosystem, in 2006-7 I was one of the people defining tools for browsing classical music in Squeezebox.

Here's a view I use to browse classical music. The top section of the window has lists of values for tags in panes. Click on a value value in any pane and the list of files below will be narrowed to those matching the selected tag value. The lists of tag values in other panes will be narrowed to those present in any of the files listed below. Select a tag value in another pane and the list of files will be narrowed to those matching both selected tag values.

JRiver_classical music view.JPG
 

JJB70

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I am lazy, I have a basic folder system based on classical, pop, blues, C&W and comedy.
If I go into classical it splits into orchestral & instrumental, opera, choral and song. Then it is all listed by composer. If I go into a composer folder I have sub folders for complete symphony cycles, individual symphonies etc then it is by performer.
It's all a bit homespun and basic but I can go to whatever I want to listen to quickly.
I enter the track info etc manually.
 

q3cpma

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I use something like this:

Code:
$ tree -d Music/{'Emerson, Lake & Palmer','Reverend Bizarre','Richard Strauss',Solstice*}
Music/Emerson, Lake & Palmer
├── (1970) Emerson, Lake & Palmer
├── (1971-1) Tarkus
├── (1971-2) Pictures at an Exhibition
├── (1972) Trilogy
└── (1973) Brain Salad Surgery
Music/Reverend Bizarre
├── (2002) In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend
├── (2003) Harbinger of Metal
├── (2005) II: Crush the Insects
└── (2007) III: So Long Suckers
    ├── Disc 1
    └── Disc 2
Music/Richard Strauss
├── Op. 144: Oboe Concerto in D major
├── Op. 16: Aus Italien
├── Op. 20: Don Juan
├── Op. 23: Macbeth
├── Op. 28: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche
├── Op. 30: Also Sprach Zarathustra
├── Op. 35: Don Quixote
├── Op. 54: Dance of the Seven Veils from Salome
└── Op. 64: Eine Alpensinfonie
Music/Solstice
├── (1992) Solstice
└── (1995) Pray
Music/Solstice (2)
├── (1994) Lamentations
├── (1996) Halcyon
└── (1998) New Dark Age
File detail:
Code:
$ tree Music/{Godkiller,'Satyricon _ Enslaved'}
Music/Godkiller
├── (1996) The Rebirth of the Middle Ages
│   ├── 01. (Introduction to the Middle Ages) Hymn for the Black Knights.flac
│   ├── 02. (Preparing for the Final Battle) From the Castle in the Fog.flac
│   ├── 03. (On the Way to the Battlefield) Path to the Unholy Frozen Empire.flac
│   ├── 04. (The Final Battle) Blood on My Swordblade.flac
│   ├── 05. (The Triumph) The Neverending Reign of the Black Knights.flac
│   ├── cover.jpg
│   └── The Rebirth of the Middle Ages.log
└── band_info.txt
Music/Satyricon _ Enslaved
└── (1995) The Forest Is My Throne _ Yggdrasill
    ├── 01. Satyricon - Black Winds.flac
    ├── 02. Satyricon - The Forest Is My Throne.flac
    ├── 03. Satyricon - Min hyllest til vinterland.flac
    ├── 04. Satyricon - The Night of the Triumphator.flac
    ├── 05. Enslaved - Heimdallr.flac
    ├── 06. Enslaved - Allfǫðr Oðinn.flac
    ├── 07. Enslaved - Intermezzo.flac
    ├── 08. Enslaved - Hal Valr.flac
    ├── 09. Enslaved - Niunda Heim.flac
    ├── 10. Enslaved - The Winter Kingdom Opus I: Resound of Gjallarhorn.flac
    ├── 11. Enslaved - Enslaved.flac
    ├── cover_enslaved.jpg
    ├── cover.jpg -> cover_satyricon.jpg
    └── cover_satyricon.jpg

The main points of this structure are:
* All directories at depth 2 relatively to the root music directory are considerd as albums; really simplified writing a music player
* Duplicate artist names are handled by a (number) after it; not optimal, but I don't have any better idea
* Same year releases use a similar trick (year-number) that works better with automatic parsing in tools
* Splits are primarly handled through the ALBUMARTIST and ARTIST tags being different, but I still put something in the filename
* I prefer the use of a band_info.txt to increasing the arborescence depth just to get the genre in. By the way, even on Windows, using a Plan 9 bind(1) approach to tagging (with symbolic links instead of the real thing) really cleans up stuff. For example, (on POSIX) you'd have:
Code:
Music/Godkiller
Music-by-genre/Black Metal/Godkiller -> ../../Music/Godkiller
Music-by-country/Monaco/Godkiller -> ../../Music/Godkiller
With that band_info.txt, I can procedurally generate those, which is pretty useful.


The only thing I miss is a release_info.txt and to use the PERFORMER tag for classical, I'd say. If anyone else has ingenious ways to solve these problems, I'm listening.
 

Tool

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There is one great program for changing tags and a lot more in audio files: Tagscanner, russian made it. Use it all the time. And I use Foobar 2000 as an audio software for nearly everything:)
 

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