[Vorbis] Adviced way of tagging music

[Steve Fosdick]

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

I remembered that there have been some recommendations published
and a search 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
on it but I don't know if it has gone away permenantly or if this
is just a 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 of 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.