[Vorbis] Adviced way of tagging music

Adam Badura adam at hdp.com.pl
Mon Jun 2 02:54:43 PDT 2008


    I change a lot of my CD to Ogg to be able to listen them easily from my 
computer (I use foobar, I was used to WMP but it does not support library 
for Ogg files and plug-ins I found for this where poor) without the need for 
frequent CD changing.

    I like my music to be richly tagged. But with classical music CD it is a 
real pain to tag those files. Typical problems involve:
    - single CD contains different works (like Tchaikovsky's CD "Piano 
Concertos 1 & 2"),
    - single CD contains different works performed by different artists,
    - some works (usually operas) are contained on multiply CDs,
    - it is interesting to have both date of publishing (the date the work 
was finished, the date it was shown for the first time) and date of 
recording.

    I want to preserve in tags info about the album from which the piece was 
taken but I want to have "album title" to be set to correct data. So in case 
of mentioned Tchaikovsky's CD I want halve of the tracks to have "album 
title" set to "Piano Concerto 1" and the other half "Piano Concerto 2" - 
however somewhere in the tags I want to have data that they came CD named 
"Piano Concertos 1 & 2".
    I could use some tricks like having "album title" set to "Piano 
Concertos 1 & 2 - Piano Concerto 1" or something similar but this is IMHO 
just a workaround and not a very nice one. It makes title much to long it 
does not give enough information since for any plug-in or something that for 
example downloads album cover this title would be useless and so on.
    After some thinking I came to position when it seemed obvious for me 
that what is required is an explicit separation of tags on CD (its releases 
date, publisher, title and so on) and tags on work (its title, composer and 
so on). For typical modern single-artist albums those data would be the same 
in many places. However classical CD (and compositions like "Hits of Summer 
2008") could benefit much from this.

    Is anything already done on this field? Or is anything in progress? What 
are advised ways of dealing with this kind of problem?

    Adam Badura 




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