Composer list in library browser

[Tim Curtis]

Thank you, Tim! Classical music collection structure should have the following information:

1. Composer [eg. Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827)]
2. Composition [eg. Symphony No. 5 Op. 67 in C-m (1808)]
3. Title, part of the composition [eg. 1. Allegro con brio]
4. Performer [eg. Jan Willem de Vriend & Netherlands Symphony Orchestra]
5. Album [eg. Symphonies Nos. 1 & 5]

That's the basic set; of course it could be extended with more information, like "opus", "catalogue no.", "part number" and so on. But the five mentioned above are crucial.

It's pity that the MPD does not support the "composition" tag. So I think one should use the MPD tag "name" as a "composition".
I will prepare sample collection and share it on some cloud disk; I will PM you the link.

I've only seen the Name tag in radio streams but never in song files so possibly it could be used to store the Composition text. MPD already supports the rest of the tags in your list.

1) What is the hierarchy that determines which columns appear on the panel?

Genre
- Composer
-- Composition
---- Title


2) Are Performer and Album attributes of the Title or part of the hierarchy?

----Title
----"Album"
----"Performer"

3) Which tags or attributes need to be searchable?

The main challenge is that everyone's Classical collection is tagged differently and no matter what is offered, there will be a requirement to re-tag. Still I think its worthwhile to develop a proposal and get some feedback on what might work :-)

Guides.
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Be..._Classical
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Classical

-Tim

[TheOldPresbyope]

My proposition was - I hope - the easiest way to incorporate the classical music to Moode. The "name" tag is practically not used; retagging the collection takes just a few clicks and several dozen minutes of waiting. That's workaurond, I agree. But it's much better than dealing with "artist", "album" and "title".

Going to the basic level   . My designation of classical library is simple: a "classical" genre tag. The trick is, that I'm using this tag multiple times in one file, ie one file has few genre tags, of which one is "classical". The rest is more specific: "opera", "medieval" and so on. Most of the software I know recognise this [1].

[1] From my personal experience: foobar2000, MusicBee, JRiver, BubbleUPnP, Minim Server, BubbleUPnP Server, Mp3tag editor.

On the use of the "name" tag, you may well be right. It's better than nothing. Then we'd want to be able to select all tracks associated with a specific value of "name" instead of "album" in order to play a typical recorded performance of a work.

As for multiple genre tags, I know most tagging schemes allow it, certainly the FLAC Vorbis-comment scheme does. My reticence was based on a cockeyed understanding of MPD's use of tags. For some reason, I thought it was imposing a single genre per track like old MP3 systems did. I just tried tagging a couple of flac files with multiple genres (using values not previously appearing in my collection) and whaddya know, after rescanning, all the values show up in the Genres column in the Library panel. 

Based on this, it would be possible to create a Classical Library panel by filtering for tracks with "classical" as one of the genre tag values; the Genres column would then display what amount to subgenre tag values. 

But this gets back to my vague notion of a user-configurable Library panel:  jazz aficionados could similarly filter for "jazz" and display subgenres (about 1/3 of my collection is jazz, as it happens); world-music fans similarly, etc. Whether it's one all-purpose panel which allows me to choose the tags to present in columnar format or several genera-specific panels is a matter of taste (and coding complexity, of course).

The bottom line: I like flexibility and dislike creating Procrustean beds for others. It'll be interesting to see where this goes.

Regards,
Kent

[Tim Curtis]

Are there just multiple tags named "Genre" in the file?

[raindog]

I've only seen the Name tag in radio streams but never in song files so possibly it could be used to store the Composition text. MPD already supports the rest of the tags in your list.

1) What is the hierarchy that determines which columns appear on the panel?

Genre
- Composer
-- Composition
---- Title


2) Are Performer and Album attributes of the Title or part of the hierarchy?

----Title
----"Album"
----"Performer"

3) Which tags or attributes need to be searchable?

The main challenge is that everyone's Classical collection is tagged differently and no matter what is offered, there will be a requirement to re-tag. Still I think its worthwhile to develop a proposal and get some feedback on what might work :-)

Guides.
http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/Be..._Classical
https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Style/Classical

-Tim

As well as I know, there is no one standard in classical collection organisation. In my case, the collection is organised by:
- Epoque. There is no support for this tag in MPD so probably it will not be used, but it should be replaced by the Genre EDIT: By Genrea, I mean of course the subgenres of Classical, ie: Opera, Concerto, Vocal and so on.
- Composer
- Composition
- Performer (Artist in my case)
- Album

In my collection; performer and album are the parts of the hierarchy; and they should be in Moode. There are many performances of the same composition and I'd like to have possibility to choose one. Also, in case of compilation albums, the best way to choose is just the album.

I'm attaching the screenshot of my collection in Foobar2000 and JRiver below.

Concerning the search. I'd like to have possibility to search by:
- composer
- composition
- genre
- performer
- album

And yes, there is no stetlled standard in tagging classical music; but also rewriting tags is not so much problem; at least for me. 

[raindog]

Are there just multiple tags named "Genre" in the file?

I'm not sure how technically it is written in the file.

Foobar shows one Genre field with multiple values:
     Classical; Choral

Mp3tag shows it in two way:
  - as two genre fields
  - or as one field separated by double backslashes:
        Classical\\Choral 

The last option (backslashes) are the option I'm using by editing tags with Mp3tag editor.

In the sample collection there are some files with multiple genres, e.g.:
- Butt, John & Dunedin Consort - [2014] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart- Requiem
- Arte dei Suonatori & Dan Laurin - [2006] The Four Seasons
- Gardner, Edward & BBC Symphony Orchestra - [2013] Witold Lutoslawski- Orchestral Works Vol. 4

[raindog]

But this gets back to my vague notion of a user-configurable Library panel:  jazz aficionados could similarly filter for "jazz" and display subgenres (about 1/3 of my collection is jazz, as it happens); world-music fans similarly, etc. Whether it's one all-purpose panel which allows me to choose the tags to present in columnar format or several genera-specific panels is a matter of taste (and coding complexity, of course).

Agreed. The best way should be to have a possibility to define multiple libraries (based on some criterion, like files location or tag) and for each of the library to define set of filters.

[TheOldPresbyope]

Are there just multiple tags named "Genre" in the file?

I'm not sure how technically it is written in the file.

Foobar shows one Genre field with multiple values:
     Classical; Choral

Mp3tag shows it in two way:
  - as two genre fields
  - or as one field separated by double backslashes:
        Classical\\Choral 

The last option (backslashes) are the option I'm using by editing tags with Mp3tag editor.

In the sample collection there are some files with multiple genres, e.g.:
- Butt, John & Dunedin Consort - [2014] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart- Requiem
- Arte dei Suonatori & Dan Laurin - [2006] The Four Seasons
- Gardner, Edward & BBC Symphony Orchestra - [2013] Witold Lutoslawski- Orchestral Works Vol. 4

Here's an example of the craziness involved. Remember yesterday I used metaflac to add two genre comment lines to my test file (a sampler found on the Internet)? The result is  (output from metaflac --list test.flac):

Code:

METADATA block #1
 type: 4 (VORBIS_COMMENT)
 is last: false
 length: 12426
 vendor string: reference libFLAC 1.2.1 20070917
 comments: 18
   comment[0]: TITLE=Schubert: String Quartet No 14 in D minor 'Death and the Maiden', D810 - Movement 3: Scherzo. Allegro molto
   comment[1]: ARTIST=Takács Quartet
   comment[2]: ALBUM=Schubert: Death & the Maiden
   comment[3]: UPC=0034571175850
   comment[4]: TRACKNUMBER=3
   comment[5]: TOTALTRACKS=8
   comment[6]: DISCNUMBER=1
   comment[7]: TOTALDISCS=1
   comment[8]: ALBUMARTIST=Takács Quartet
   comment[9]: COMPOSER=Schubert, Franz (1797-1828)
   comment[10]: COPYRIGHT=© Hyperion Records Ltd, London
   comment[11]: DISCTOTAL=1
   comment[12]: TRACKTOTAL=8
   comment[13]: DATE=2006
   comment[14]: GENRE=Classical
   comment[15]: LYRICS=Album notes:
<<<...deleted a long musicological commentary on this quartet...>>>
   comment[16]: GENRE=Chamber
   comment[17]: GENRE=Quartet

 
This file results in three separate line-items in the Genres column of the moOde Library panel.

When I open this file with EasyTAG, a single Genre line is displayed: "Classical - Chamber - Quartet".

When I open this file with Mp3tag, a single Genre line is displayed: "Classical\\Chamber\\Quartet".

When this file is discovered by MusicBranz Picard, a single Genre line is displayed: "Classical; Chamber; Quartet".

In Mp3tag, I edited the tag to "Classical\\Chamber" and saved the file. Examining it again with metaflac reveals that Mp3tag deleted the Vorbis comment line "GENRE=Quartet". (It also renumbered the comment lines and also did some things like change "ARTIST" to "Artist" (same with "ALBUM", "GENRE", "TITLE"; perhaps because I didn't change default settings?)

I then used EasyTAG to re-edit the tag to "Classical - Chamber - Quartet" and saved the file. Now metaflac displays a single comment line "GENRE=Classical - Chamber - Quartet". (Also, EasyTAG reverted the labels Mp3tag had changed back to all caps and deleted the LYRICS comment!). This would, of course, show up as a single compound line-item in the moOde Library panel.

I then used Mp3tag to re-edit the tag from "Classical - Chamber - Quartet" to "Classical\\Chamber\\Quartet" and saved the file. Now metaflac again reports three GENRE comment lines.
 
Once the file is discovered in MusicBRANZ Picard and I choose to edit its genre line, a box opens which offers each genre tag as a separate value and lets me edit, add or delete values. Each value is written to the file as a separate Vorbis comment line. It also reverts tag labels to all-caps.

Lesson learned: trust but verify your tools; they may be doing unexpected things.

I don't know how multiple genres are handled in other file formats but if I get a chance I'll try a few test cases. I'll have to see what other Linux-friendly tools I can try as well.

My personal preference is for multiple genre lines in a file rather than an single, compound one.

Regards 
Kent

[Tim Curtis]

Hi Kent,

MPD is going to determine what is or is not possible wrt tags. How do the tags show up in MPD?

Just start one of the songs playing and then:

telnet localhost 6600
currentsong

-Tim

[TheOldPresbyope]

Hi Kent,

MPD is going to determine what is or is not possible wrt tags. How do the tags show up in MPD?

Just start one of the songs playing and then:

telnet localhost 6600
currentsong

-Tim

Sorry, Tim, I guess I only implied MPD is good to go with my comment about all the genre tags showing up in the Library panel...

Code:

pi@moode-test:~ $ telnet localhost 6600
Trying ::1...
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
OK MPD 0.20.0
currentsong
file: SDCARD/new-test-multi-genre.flac
Last-Modified: 2018-06-04T15:05:42Z
Album: Schubert: Death & the Maiden
Artist: Takács Quartet
Title: Schubert: String Quartet No 14 in D minor 'Death and the Maiden', D810 - Movement 3: Scherzo. Allegro molto
AlbumArtist: Takács Quartet
Genre: Classical
Genre: Chamber
Genre: Quartet
Genre: String
Composer: Schubert, Franz (1797-1828)
Date: 2006
Track: 3
Disc: 1
Time: 220
duration: 220.093
Pos: 66
Id: 68
OK

As you can tell, I added yet another Genre line in further testing.

[Tim Curtis]

Ok so just a bunch of Genre tags.

Try adding the Name tag to the file. It has to be spelled Name and not NAME or name AFAIK.

Btw what tag editor are u using?

-Tim