Classical Music taxonomy and digitizing

October 30, 2006 4:33 PM

Help me with digitizing and organizing my classical music collection!

I have a metric buttload of amazing classical music CDs that have been collecting dust because I'm too lazy and unsure how to rip and organize them effectively.

I'd really like to send them all to a CD-ripping service, but I want to make sure that the cataloging is done well, and most services seem to just use Artist/Album/Track fields. Is there some sort of standard tag system for classical music? This one looks good, but I think it's just one person's thoughts, not necessarily a standard.

I have two SlimDevices Squeezeboxes and I've read that there's a plugin that can let you browse by custom fields, so it'd be nice if my collection's tags could play nice with that.

Currently I find it really difficult to navigate classical music on the Squeezeboxes, and in iTunes, for that matter, because you just don't have all the information. I get items like "Track:Allegro, Artist:Beethoven". Grr.

What are my best options, both for digitizing and for cataloging? If there's not a service that can do it all for me, is there good software out there for classical folks?

posted by squishy to media & arts (3 comments total)

See if this poster has come up with something.
posted by Gyan at 7:50 PM on October 30, 2006

This SlimDevices wiki entry is the guideline I use, and might fit you well since it was designed to work well on the Squeezebox. So far so good, for me.
posted by mendel at 8:37 PM on October 30, 2006

I'm not familiar with the Squeezebox, but as long as you have the ability to browse by custom fields, then it's all about picking an organizational scheme that works for you and sticking to it.

I wouldn't bother with the ripping services; I doubt any of them are going to do a halfway decent job of tagging your music, and tagging is really where the work is. Ripping is a fire-and-forget procedure. Machine time is cheap; human time is what matters.

I'd plan on setting aside a little time each evening, and do a few CDs. Make a goal that works for you -- say 5 CDs a night or something. It'll also give you an opportunity to go through your collection and discover things you might have forgotten. It's going to be as much fun or as little as you make it. (I did something similar when I scanned thousands of negatives from family photos.)

Personally, for classical music (I use iTunes for management) I try to always put the Composer field in (as "lastname, firstname mi"), and browse by it as the primary sort. Then I put the name of the Piece into the Album field, and the name of the conductor into the Artist. So if I want to see every recording of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony I have, I browse by Album ... to see all the Beethoven music, I sort by Composer; to see everything conducted by von Karajan, I sort by Artist. The only thing this doesn't allow me to do, is easily browse by the Orchestra. I've though about possibly (ab)using the Genre field for that, but haven't done it yet. If you care more about orchestras than conductors, put that into the Artist field.

There's seemingly no standard for tagging Classical music, and the databases are worse than useless. Whatever system you find and can make work is the Right Way.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:53 AM on October 31, 2006