[Vorbis] Adviced way of tagging music

[Steve Fosdick]

On 02/06/08 10:54:43, Adam Badura commented on the issues  
taggingclassical music and suggested that there should be separate sets  
oftags for the work the track forms part of, and for the CD it was  
takenfrom.  He also asked if any work had been done in this field.

I remembered that there have been some recommendations published and  
asearch turned up the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis_comment
http://www.xiph.org/vorbis/doc/v-comment.html
http://www.gophernet.org/articles/vorbiscomment.html
http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html

The last of these articles was not available when I tried to click onit  
but I don't know if it has gone away permenantly or if this is justa  
temporary issue.  I found a copy in the Internet Archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20061004152153/http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html

and also in the Google cache:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http%3A//www.reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html

There is also a Wiki in which there seems to be some debate:

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/VorbisComment

One difficulty, of course, is that whereas you can add any tag you like  
to
your files you won't necessarily get any of the players to use it  
either for
display or indexing.

My personal approach is a bit mixed but in summary:

1. For popular music stick to the artist, album and title as normally  
used.
    In the case of compilation albums the album tag is the name of the
    compilation album but the artist tag is the artist name for the  
track
    (and not "Various Artists").

2. For classical music:

   2a. Add composer, ensemble, performer and conductor tags and then  
make the
       artist tag whichever of those I would want the player to display  
and
       expect to use when searching for it.

   2b. If the track is part of a complete work, for example it is one  
movement
       on a symphony and there are tracks for the other movements, make  
the
       album tag the name of the complete work and the title the name  
of the
       movement.

   2c. If the track is an isolated piece of a complete work such as  
would be
       found on some of the classical compilation albums then make the
       album tag the name of the compilation and the title tag contain  
both
       the name of the work and which movement.

I also have my CD ripper automatically add the CDDB id of the CD the  
track
came from.  In the case where the album tag has been used for the name  
of
the work this 'cddb' tag is what would enable me to link the track with
others from the same physical CD.

HTH,
Steve.