Classical script suggestion

[MCSmarties]

MCSmarties,
WOW, that research is impressive, and I have to agree with you that it will be best for MM to conform to an existing standard and not implement more custom fields.

Thank you, just trying to do my part... I always bug people in the scripts forum so I figure it's only fair if I try to give something in return.

what you are proposing looks like a luxury system to me, that is something I had not dared to hope for.

I guess I never really thought of it that way. The most important aspect for me
was to show that the ID3v2.4 standard is really well thought through.

One small disagreement I have is, that I much prefer to have the movements separated in individual tracks. In fact, I have been wondering if it would be possible to introduce an artificial pause of 30 to 60 seconds between all tracks. But that’s a topic for another thread.

Yeah I guess we could start a long discussion about this, but here's the short version of my opinion:
- if you have each movement in a separate file it's a real pain to play an entire work in one piece. Unless you prefer to listen just to individual movements, you would have to add ALL movements of a piece separately to the playlist each time you want to listen to it!
What if you want to build a random playlist of classical music? Let's say, you're in the mood for Beethoven - you would only get individual movements at random, rather than complete pieces.

- About the pause? OK, maybe 70% of the time that would be nice, to let the ending of a prior movement really "hang" for a while. But there are also many pieces that immediately jump from one movement to the next
(to stay with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, do you really want a pause between the movements in "Winter"?)

I think that simple logic dictates that the development team also needs to consider the popularity of the iPod and what impact it’s functionality will have on the future of music managers. Whatever tag system it uses will likely become the future standard.

You mean, that the "composer" and "work" would show up on the iPod that onyl shows "artist" and "album"?
I don't think that should be a big problem. Why not simply specify in your synchronization settings to rename all "artist" fields with "composer", etc. during synchronization? I've never done it but I'm almost certain MM could handle this. That way you would have a properly tagged version on your computer and one optimized for iPod playback.

Just as a sidenote: I'm one of those guys who hate the iPod with a vengeance.
I prefer Cowon's players by far (I own the A2). But discussing the pros and cons of Apple vs Cowon certainly doesn't belong in this thread
Hope I haven't started a flame war with this comment...

[olddog]

Yeah I guess we could start a long discussion about this, but here's the short version of my opinion:
- if you have each movement in a separate file it's a real pain to play an entire work in one piece. Unless you prefer to listen just to individual movements, you would have to add ALL movements of a piece separately to the playlist each time you want to listen to it!
What if you want to build a random playlist of classical music? Let's say, you're in the mood for Beethoven - you would only get individual movements at random, rather than complete pieces.

I think that it is much easier to combine several movements from separate tracks into one playlist then to separate them from a single track. In MM, you just click on “album” and – bingo – all movements from that album line up perfectly. Thus making a new playlist just takes a few seconds. I for one very much prefer to listen to individual movements and don’t know of a way of separating them in MM, unless they are on separate tracks.

- About the pause? OK, maybe 70% of the time that would be nice, to let the ending of a prior movement really "hang" for a while. But there are also many pieces that immediately jump from one movement to the next (to stay with Vivaldi's Four Seasons, do you really want a pause between the movements in "Winter"?)

Yes, very much so. I feel that pauses make the atmosphere (mood) more relaxed and thus the music more enjoyable.

[rusty]

Hi,

I've read through many of the threads and e-mails I've received re. classical music support and tried to come up with a spec that would:
-Meet most classical music management requirements, and listening needs
-Allow users to manage/listen to both classical music and pop music in any sitting since many listeners don't listen to one type of music exclusively
-Be compatible with existing tagging standards (ogg, id3 and ape2) and ensure consistency between the database and tags (note that tags are defined at the track level)
-Be compatible with existing music devices (e.g. iPods use the Artist tag for the Performer/Orchestra)
-Not slow down MediaMonkey or burden MediaMonkey with a cluttered UI

Here's what I've put together thus far. Comments are appreciated:

In terms of _absolutely necessary_ fields, I've made the following assumptions based on my reading:
-'Artist' can be used for Orchestra (for compatibility reasons)
-'Title' can be used for Works (for compatibility reasons)
-'Conductor' can be used for Conductor (needs to be sortable?)
-'Composer' can be used for Composer
-'Involved People' can be used for individual performers (doesn't need to be sortable)
-Disc # is a required field
-Original Year is very relevant re. the composition date


The proposed implementation is:

1) Add a 'Composer' node to the default tree, which contains 'Artist' subnodes (The Artist node would be used to represent the Orchestra/Performers. Note: the next release of MM will support multiple Artists per track)

2) On the properties panel, add 'Composer' immediately following 'Artist' (and remove it from the Advanced panel).
2b) On the properties panel change the bottom portion from:
- Year....Genre
- Track#....Rating
TO:
- Disc#....Track# (since multiple disc albums are common)
- Year....Orig. Year (allows for easy tracking of composition year)
- Genre....Rating

3) Allow sorting by Composer, Original Year (i.e. add these field headers to the track list)

4) Conductor should be added as a field to the top of the Properties|Details tab

5) Allow popups that appear when a track is played to display additional information (e.g. whatever has been stored in Custom Fields and/or Comments)

6) One other possibility is to allow the user to change the Field names for Title and Artist in the UI (e.g. Work and Orchestra OR Title/Work and Performer). Not sure about whether this is really needed though.

-Rusty

[olddog]

Cutting that many corners isn't going to work. I have the impression that rusty doesn't really know all that much about classical music.

[Steegy]

Personally, I don't have much classical music (what doesn't mean I don't like it), but these I do have are just tagged like:

Code: Select all

  Artist = "Johann Sebastian Bach"
  Title = "Toccata and fuge - Fuge"

  Artist = "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart"
  Title = "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik - Allegro"

This is enough for me, but obviously not for many other people. And because MediaMonkey should be fully ID3v2.4 compatible, it would need to integrate more advanced "classical" tags anyway.

I think the biggest problem is "How to show all this information, certainly when Classical and Modern songs are used together?", and that's probably also the problem that the dev's have.

-Allow users to manage/listen to both classical music and pop music in any sitting since many listeners don't listen to one type of music exclusively

It maybe would be very nice to be able to switch the Track Information dialog between Normal (Modern songs) and Classic view, so you only see relevant things.

But then, how show this stuff together in one trackview, while having as much information shown as possible (with limited number of columns and screen width)? That's the problem as far as I can see.
So please classical-music-lovers, can you give an answer to that?

Of course, it might be a lot of work for the devs, but full ID3v2.4 support has been asked so often...

-Be compatible with existing tagging standards (ogg, id3 and ape2) and ensure consistency between the database and tags (note that tags are defined at the track level)

I would suggest to create a solution to put the massive load of information into fewer fields, by combining them into the available fields. E.g. for each tagging standard, it could be user-definable what fields are written to what tags, a bit like I'm doing in WebSourcesTagger (all "tags" can be specified with masks which represent fields). I'm doing this to put all available web information in the more limited fields of MediaMonkey tracks.

-Be compatible with existing music devices (e.g. iPods use the Artist tag for the Performer/Orchestra)

Same solution as above, e.g. For iPod, let all Composer fields be written to the Artist tag (e.g. user-definable, or "baked in").

-Not slow down MediaMonkey or burden MediaMonkey with a cluttered UI

- Speed: to be ID3v3.4 compatible, is there any other solution?
- Cluttered: like I said, maybe a switch on the track information dialog. The tracklisting/tree problem doesn't go away of course. An "all tag frames" tab could be added to the track information dialog. This would be very advanced, but wouldn't clutter anything. (and could be loaded from the file's tags only if that tab is really opened)

Cheers
Steegy

[rovingcowboy]

Cutting that many corners isn't going to work. I have the impression that rusty doesn't really know all that much about classical music.

well heres an idea for you and any one else?

sit at your computer take a screen shot of monkey

then go in to the photo editor and add in the fields you think you want.

do the same for the properties panel, and the folder tree.

then send the screenshots to rusty and jiri and let them see just what you want it to be like..

software devlopers and sofware users are like a married couple.

the users say what they want and the developers have to figure the compromise solutions.

[olddog]

Steegy,
Bach wrote several “Toccata und Fuge”, knowing the BWV-number could identify it much better. And I would be rather interested in which performance it is, which organ in which churche, so I can compare them with other performances, or if it was transscribed for guitare or harp, and of course, who is playing the instrument (who the artist is - certainly could NOT be J.S.Bach - as you listed it). But foremost, I would need to know the name of the album and its label.

Showing all that info on a computer screen is no problem, just make the columns rather narrow and then move the pointer over the field you are interested in, to see the full info in the balloon/window.

Rovingcowboy,
The computer screen is no problem, but your suggestion gave me another idea; Would it be possible and helpful to send a few of my mp3 tracks by e-mail to jiri for analysis, so he can study the way I used the various custom and regular fields?

Jiri, are you reading this?
Would a few of my converted tracks be of interest to you? I can also put them up on a website for you to download. Just tell me how to move the tracks from which part of MM with all the tag info intact.

[Steegy]

Olddog, you are completerly right about the very limited details I give to classical music tracks (I do have a custom "Instrument" field tough). The larger your collection becomes (of similar tracks), the more details you want to be able to identify them correctly. That's logical.

@all classical music lovers:

just make the columns rather narrow and then move the pointer over the field you are interested in, to see the full info in the balloon/window.

Is that Ok for all classical music lovers?

I personally always want data to be visible directly, withour having to move the mouse pointer. I wonder if some classical music minded people also have this feeling.
If not, then the solution seems easy.

Cheers
Steegy

[jiri]

olddog,

yes, I read this thread because I suppose it could result in some interesting ideas that could be implemented in the next version. Maybe instead of sending me whole tracks you could do what Steegy did above, i.e. write how would you expect individual fields should be filled in (although I see you already did something like this above).

As a good starting point re. how to fill individual fields possibly http://reactor-core.org/ogg-tagging.html and http://www.gophernet.org/articles/vorbiscomment.html could be used (although they are specific to OGG tagging).

Jiri

[olddog]

That is rather interesting info behind those links, and obviously, THAT many fields WOULD clutter up a computer screen. I will do some research on ID3 etc., and then post my suggestions. It may take me a while.

[Guest]

I have tried to understand the ID3 system but it is much too technical for me, thus I can not make any suggestions in that direction. All I can do, is to show you the way I use MM for my classical collection with this screen capture (if I can manage to post it here):

It appears that this forum can not upload pictures. Any suggestions on how I can post that screen shot here?[/img]

[olddog]

The above "guest" was me, don't know why I got logged out.

Looks like I still can't upload pictures, so I put it on display here: http://realgsd.ca/mm/

A quick translation:
Werk = Work or composition
Verz. = Cataloging name and number of the composition
Komponist = Composer
Dir. = Conductor (Dirigent)

As can be seen, I have 6 versions of the Radetzky March, conducted by 6 different conductors and performed by 5 different orchestras, indicating the strong need for all of this info to be under the "BASICS" tab of the "Properties" section. Because there are only 3 custom fields available, I had to double-use many fields (i.e. - Werk/Verz., Dir./Orchestra, and Album/Lable). Maybe the "Comment" field could be moved under the "Details" tab to make room for at least 7 or 8 more fields under the "Basics" tab?

[Bex]

Hi Olddog.

To provide a image on a forum you'll need to upload it to a host e.g.
http://www.imageschack.us/
http://www.imageshippers.com/
http://www.putfile.com/
There are hundreds of others...
And then link like this:

Code: Select all

[img]Path provided by the host[/img]

/Bex

[urlwolf]

hmm, very interesting conversation.
So true, if MM implements a way to keep all the info relevant for classical music, that'd be a great hit. I know many people struggling with that.

BTW, I'd hate to have to spend the time to properly tag my collection. I wonder
if there is any service that can do this right. Or maybe paying someone to do
it, such as rentAcoder.com. I mean, if you can pay for transcriptions, you can
pay for mp3 tagging, right? I would.

[olddog]

Hello Bex,
looks like you posted almost at the same time I was editing my post after I realised that THAT is the only way to post my screen capture here. Nontheless, your helpfulness is appreciated.

urlwolf,
yes, I know quite a number of classical music lovers as well, that would appreciate a chance to organize their collections with a system like MM. Unfortunate for us; we are a minority compared to pop music lovers.

Jiri – you may also be interested in this;
I did some research recently and found that the biggest problem in organizing a classical music collection is the classical music industry itself, and the way they use music tags. They are just simply all over the place. There appears to be no uniformity in the way they use the tags at all, at least non that I could identify with my limited knowledge of tags. The best we classical music lovers can hope for, is a chance to obtain some software like MM that offers us a sufficient number of fields/columns/nodes/(tags?) to MANUALLY identify, and record, and sort each track of each CD as we each prefer (in accordance with our individual priorities and preferences). I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the complexity of classical music simply can not be standardized.

An example of this may be the Requiems. There aren’t all that many composers (of classical music) that didn’t compose one, yet they all need to be identified individually, by composer and preferably by it’s cataloging ID and number, because some of them composed not just one, but several Requiems.

To forum admin:
How about posting an oppinion pole on what most classical music lovers really need for their collections?