MyCustomNodes is another good script to look at for creating your own preferred ways of looking at your music. I find MediaMonkey's "filters" somewhat underwhelming and prefer to use MyCustomNodes for this purpose. Using MCN, you can create useful heirarchies like Composer-SubGenre-Artist or SubGenre-Composer-Title, or something else, or both and more! It's a lot of planning and a bit of fiddling (and a lot of making sure your tags are in order) but I think it's the best way for you to go.
Regarding
genre, I prefer to use things like "Chamber", "Baroque", "Contemporary", etc. although I never really put those to use and probably should just call everything "Classical" for simplicity. To select all classical music in a MyCustomNodes node, I use the condition "Genre in ('Classical', 'Baroque', 'Chamber', etc.)". It sounds like you would want to store info like "String Quartet" or "Symphony" or "Song" etc. in a tag, be it Genre or a Custom tag.
Here is a typical example of my preferred naming scheme:
* Album Artist: Beethoven, Ludwig van
* Artist: Quartetto Italiano
* Album: Complete String Quartets
* Title: Op.127 in E flat - II. Adagio, ma non troppo e molto cantabile
I haven't bothered with Composer or Conductor, though I probably should. I put the composer in AlbumArtist because, as far as I'm concerned, it's Beethoven's album. That might seem weird, but if you look at a typical classical CD cover, I think the record company agrees with me. The composer's name is displayed prominently; the performer is a minor detail in comparison.
For finding the music you want to listen to, or for browsing a subset of it, I think regular searching is generally the best way to go. E.g. searching for "string quartet" will show you all your string quartets; adding "shost" to the search string will narrow it down to Shostakovich ones, etc.
I'm rambling here, but it's useful to read how others arrange their collections, and although mine is far from uniformly organised, it's a few steps along that road.
I just thought of a MyCustomNodes scheme you could employ (as a start).
Code: Select all
;-----------------------------------------------
[Classical]
;-----------------------------------------------
icon=Album
trackCriteria="Genre = 'Classical'"
[String Quartets]
parent="Classical"
level=Composer
level=Album
trackCriteria="Genre = 'Classical'"
trackCriteria="Album LIKE %String Quartet%"
[Symphonies]
parent="Classical"
level=Composer
level=Album
level=Artist
trackCriteria="Genre = 'Classical'"
trackCriteria="Album LIKE %Symphony%"
I hope you can understand the sort of view that would provide you. There would be nodes like
Classical/String Quartets/Beethoven/String Quartets Op. 18/Julliard Quartet. No individual tracks would appear in the node, but they would in the main display. (Incidentally, I use the "Album art with details" view exclusively.)
There are all sorts of options available to you. That's the beauty of MediaMonkey! (And most especially, the scripts that clever people write for it.)
You seem to want to view your collection by piece, not by album per se. In which case, you could use a Custom tag to contain the piece name (of which there could be several per album) and then work that tag into your custom node setup. It's more work for you in tagging, but probably worth it in terms of being able to look at your collection as a set of multi-movement pieces instead of albums.
Good luck! I'd be interested to know how you go. You appear to be a more dedicated classical collector than me, so there will be a lot for me to learn from you once you find a good way to organise your collection.
MyCustomNodes is another good script to look at for creating your own preferred ways of looking at your music. I find MediaMonkey's "filters" somewhat underwhelming and prefer to use MyCustomNodes for this purpose. Using MCN, you can create useful heirarchies like Composer-SubGenre-Artist or SubGenre-Composer-Title, or something else, or both and more! It's a lot of planning and a bit of fiddling (and a lot of making sure your tags are in order) but I think it's the best way for you to go.
Regarding [i]genre[/i], I prefer to use things like "Chamber", "Baroque", "Contemporary", etc. although I never really put those to use and probably should just call everything "Classical" for simplicity. To select all classical music in a MyCustomNodes node, I use the condition "Genre in ('Classical', 'Baroque', 'Chamber', etc.)". It sounds like you would want to store info like "String Quartet" or "Symphony" or "Song" etc. in a tag, be it Genre or a Custom tag.
Here is a typical example of my preferred naming scheme:
* Album Artist: Beethoven, Ludwig van
* Artist: Quartetto Italiano
* Album: Complete String Quartets
* Title: Op.127 in E flat - II. Adagio, ma non troppo e molto cantabile
I haven't bothered with Composer or Conductor, though I probably should. I put the composer in AlbumArtist because, as far as I'm concerned, it's Beethoven's album. That might seem weird, but if you look at a typical classical CD cover, I think the record company agrees with me. The composer's name is displayed prominently; the performer is a minor detail in comparison.
For finding the music you want to listen to, or for browsing a subset of it, I think regular searching is generally the best way to go. E.g. searching for "string quartet" will show you all your string quartets; adding "shost" to the search string will narrow it down to Shostakovich ones, etc.
I'm rambling here, but it's useful to read how others arrange their collections, and although mine is far from uniformly organised, it's a few steps along that road.
I just thought of a MyCustomNodes scheme you could employ (as a start).
[code]
;-----------------------------------------------
[Classical]
;-----------------------------------------------
icon=Album
trackCriteria="Genre = 'Classical'"
[String Quartets]
parent="Classical"
level=Composer
level=Album
trackCriteria="Genre = 'Classical'"
trackCriteria="Album LIKE %String Quartet%"
[Symphonies]
parent="Classical"
level=Composer
level=Album
level=Artist
trackCriteria="Genre = 'Classical'"
trackCriteria="Album LIKE %Symphony%"
[/code]
I hope you can understand the sort of view that would provide you. There would be nodes like [b]Classical/String Quartets/Beethoven/String Quartets Op. 18/Julliard Quartet[/b]. No individual tracks would appear in the node, but they would in the main display. (Incidentally, I use the "Album art with details" view exclusively.)
There are all sorts of options available to you. That's the beauty of MediaMonkey! (And most especially, the scripts that clever people write for it.)
You seem to want to view your collection by piece, not by album per se. In which case, you could use a Custom tag to contain the piece name (of which there could be several per album) and then work that tag into your custom node setup. It's more work for you in tagging, but probably worth it in terms of being able to look at your collection as a set of multi-movement pieces instead of albums.
Good luck! I'd be interested to know how you go. You appear to be a more dedicated classical collector than me, so there will be a lot for me to learn from you once you find a good way to organise your collection.