Doug, All,

I know this question has come up before, but (with 30GB Travelstars down to $150), I'm thinking of embarking on a major classical rip session and am looking for any sage advice. (I'm guessing this kind of stuff is still good for "General", eh?)

One aspect of this is that many classical CDs are semi-thematic compilations -- Sibelius' 3-movement Symphony #2 and separate work Finlandia on one CD, say. In a few test rips of CDs like this, I wound up creating a directory for multi-movement works and I numbered titles if not already numbered to make sure they sort correctly. Separate works like finlandia wind up at the same level as that directory, directly under composer.

I'm also looking at updating my grip rip/encode setup with ID3lib some time soon to allow v3 tag support. I'm interested to know if folks have any bright ideas for inclusion and formatting of performer, conductor, etc. Sages?

Thanks in advance,

I'm interested to know if folks have any bright ideas for inclusion and formatting of performer, conductor, etc.

ID3v2 does have tags for all that sort of stuff, but currently Emplode/emptool/the player do nothing with them. If you wanted to take advantage of them, you'd have to auto-build playlists from them yourself -- e.g. by writing a script (on a Unix system) to make directories full of symlinks, and then using emptool's "upload -p -r".

Peter

Peter: you'd have to auto-build playlists from them yourself -- e.g. by writing a script (on a Unix system) to make directories full of symlinks, and then using emptool's "upload -p -r"

Thanks. This is the kind of stuff I've been noodling -- whether it is worth trying to build playlists off the Empeg first to leverage extended tag info. I was looking at whether I could do that out of MySQL (since I've got grip set up to populate ddj/MySQL), but I'm not sure that ddj is being upgraded to leverage ID3v2.

With classical bits, I'm not really sure that I want to be able to search or build playlists by conductor, say -- my appreciation of classical is pretty rudimentary -- but figured I should think it through (for once!) in advance.

Jim

Hi,

I've been encoding and tagging mostly classical music during the years I've been an owner of an Empeg. I use only ID3v2 tags. Here is the way I've found it most usable to tag. Lets use an example, a Bach cantata.

Title: Verachtest du den Reichtum seiner Gnade
Artist: Bach, Kantat BWV 102 - arioso (B)
Album: Concentus musicus Wien - N Harnoncourt
Year: 1980
Comments: A: Paul Esswood
T: Kurt Equiluz
B: Philippe Huttenlocher
Tölzer Knabenchor - G Schmidt-Gaden

As you see, I've made some use of the tags that perhaps are not standard, but this way works great on the empeg display - especially when we've got the version 2 scrolling functionality.

In the Artist tag I've squeezed in the composer, the name of the work, the movement and as in this case an indication that it is a bass soloist.
In the Album tag is the name of the orchestra and the conductor.
In the Comment field are the various soloists, and also the name of the choir.

The only non-working part in this way of tagging is that emplode only accepts the first row of the comment field. It truncates the tag at the first CRLF. Else it would be perfect when using the details view in version 2. But perhaps that additional functionality could be put in the wish list.

Of course the six movements of the cantata are placed in a seperate playlist and the files are numbered to ensure the correct sequence.
My playlist structure thus is
Classical
- Bach
- Cantatas
- BWV 102

Actually, when uploading Bach music I've also assigned the PIN = BWV number. Thus it is easy to choose as long as I know which BWV number a certain composition has.

Hope this information can be of some help!

Regards

Jan

I'm thinking of embarking on a major classical rip session and am looking for any sage advice.

Jim, you've gone way beyond anything I have done with my classical collection.

Since over 90% of my music is classical, I had to come up with some way of titling the tracks that would be meaningful. I mean, how many "Symphony #4, 3rd Movement" songs are there in the world?

What I did was crude, but effective. All of my tracks are titled like "Beethoven-Symphony #4, 3rd mvt." The playlists below root are organized: Audio Books; Classical; Comedy; etc. The Classical playlist is organized
Composers A--G; Composers H--P; etc. Within each composer name, I have sub-categories like Symphony; Concerto; etc, along with individual tunes, like "Beethoven-Rondo a Capriccio".

This can mean delving pretty deep into the playlist structure to find a particular tune -- I have over 200 just in "Mozart" alone -- but it does enable me to organize the music as a whole and find any particular song.

tanstaafl.