Composer list in library browser

[timbarnes]

Is there a way to show a list of composers in addition to genre, artist and album? Much of my collection is classical and it's difficult to find music without a composer list.

[Tim Curtis]

A much improved Universal Search is planned for moOde 4.3. It will allow searching by any of the tags including Composer.

-Tim

[timbarnes]

A much improved Universal Search is planned for moOde 4.3. It will allow searching by any of the tags including Composer.

-Tim

Thanks, Tim.  I'll watch out for it. Do you anticipate that we will be able to use the new capability to configure the browser so we can browse by any tag, or will it be just a search function?

tim

[Tim Curtis]

Prolly just a search feature because the majority of user music collections are organized around genre, artist and album tags.

Maybe another dev will take on the task of creating and maintaining a moOde Library or Browser feature for Classical music collections.

-Tim

[raindog]

Maybe another dev will take on the task of creating and maintaining a moOde Library or Browser feature for Classical music collections.

That would be really great! I have a huge collection of classical music and feature of browsing by composer, composition and performer would be very useful. Maybe the good idea would be to create separate libraries for popular and classical music? Each one with specific default tags set?

Darek

[Tim Curtis]

Hi,

The new tab structure in moOde 4.2 would allow for a Library (Classical) panel but its a substantial amount of work and would require a sample of a collection that had the tags and other elements in order to develop the panel.

Below is link to all the tags that MPD supports.
https://www.musicpd.org/doc/protocol/tags.html

-Tim

[raindog]

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.

[TheOldPresbyope]

Hi,

The new tab structure in moOde 4.2 would allow for a Library (Classical) panel but its a substantial amount of work and would require a sample of a collection that had the tags and other elements in order to develop the panel.

Below is link to all the tags that MPD supports.
https://www.musicpd.org/doc/protocol/tags.html

-Tim

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.

Hey, guys.

I was comfortable when the discussion seemed focused on which MPD-supported tags to use to extract a view of the MPD database. Now we seem to be proposing a specific tagging scheme for a classical music collection in order to fit into the MPD model and I'm not so comfortable. The list of MPD-supported tags is just as much a straight jacket for us classical music lovers as the original ID3 list was.

As fundamental as the concept "composition" is in classical music, we can't just use the MPD tag "name" as a "composition" unless either 1) we re-tag our collection to make it so or 2) we modify the MPD source code to map occurrences of the "composition" tag in sources to "name" internally. Devil's advocate: If we bother to customize MPD, why not just modify the source code to support a "composition" and other useful tags directly? 

Even at a basic level, though, I have a problem. What constitutes a Classical library? It would seem this discussion has assumed it's a collection of all tracks containing the genre-tag value "classical" (or its numeric equivalent). Even the old, deprecated genre list in ID3 recognized there is more than one kind of classical music; iTunes enumerates 17 subgenres under music/classical (not that I agree with their choices). In the MPD scheme of things, a subgenre has to be used directly, e.g., "opera", "symphony", or "medieval" instead of "classical", if one wishes to select on it.

Acknowledging that MPD is a core component of moOde, I have a vague notion of a user-configurable Library panel, one in which I get to select which MPD-supported tags are primary, e.g., whose values appear in the columnar view. I won't make a proposal, however, unless and until I've convinced myself it would work for me and my collection.

Regards,
Kent

[raindog]

I was comfortable when the discussion seemed focused on which MPD-supported tags to use to extract a view of the MPD database. Now we seem to be proposing a specific tagging scheme for a classical music collection in order to fit into the MPD model and I'm not so comfortable. The list of MPD-supported tags is just as much a straight jacket for us classical music lovers as the original ID3 list was.

As fundamental as the concept "composition" is in classical music, we can't just use the MPD tag "name" as a "composition" unless either 1) we re-tag our collection to make it so or 2) we modify the MPD source code to map occurrences of the "composition" tag in sources to "name" internally. Devil's advocate: If we bother to customize MPD, why not just modify the source code to support a "composition" and other useful tags directly? 

Even at a basic level, though, I have a problem. What constitutes a Classical library? It would seem this discussion has assumed it's a collection of all tracks containing the genre-tag value "classical" (or its numeric equivalent). Even the old, deprecated genre list in ID3 recognized there is more than one kind of classical music; iTunes enumerates 17 subgenres under music/classical (not that I agree with their choices). In the MPD scheme of things, a subgenre has to be used directly, e.g., "opera", "symphony", or "medieval" instead of "classical", if one wishes to select on it.

Acknowledging that MPD is a core component of moOde, I have a vague notion of a user-configurable Library panel, one in which I get to select which MPD-supported tags are primary, e.g., whose values appear in the columnar view. I won't make a proposal, however, unless and until I've convinced myself it would work for me and my collection.

Regards,
Kent

Kent, I couldn't agree more. The best way would be to modify MPD to use a wider share of classical tag and also make it possible in Moode to customize the view of the classical library. But I'm not sure if it is possible and if yes, what effort is needed. I'm not a programmer and I don't know policy of MPD developement.

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.

[swizzle]

It’s probably not be the best precedent to create a new viewing style for one genre of music but what would your ideal library experience for your classical collection look like Tim (Barnes)? Maybe we could create something that worked for classical as well as more universally.