How do you organize your digital classical collection?

[Daniel A]

I've made MP3:s from many of my CD:s (and some LP:s) to be able to bring music with me on my mobile phone or in the car. When it comes to classical music I feel that there's no obvious way of using the ID3 tags and folder structure for organizing the files. Usually I like to listen to music in album form, but in the case of classical music there may be fillers to pad out the CD issue that were recorded at some other point, sometimes various composers represented on one album etc. It doesn't make too much sense to me to create a folder or playlist for an album that consists of a lot of bits and pieces, but on the other hand a lot of stray tracks in a general "composer" folder does not completely appeal to me either.

So, how do those of you who have a big digital classical collection organize your files?

It should be mentioned that I'm a PC user and mainly rip my albums to MP3:s for reasons of player compatibility.

[A Lark Ascending]

Only really applies to me re: the iPod.

I work by:

Genre: I name these things like Classical English, Classical English Contemporary, Classical Germanic (20thC) etc.

Artist and Album artist: I head up both with the composers name. If it's a composer I have a lot of music by I just bracket the area - Mozart (Chamber), Mozart (Orchestral).

This eliminates all mention of performers but I'm not much interested in performers.

Some multi composer discs I do like to save intact as an album so I'll either head up the Artist/Album with something like Britten/Tippett/Arnold or just call it Various English or even the album name.

Not ideal for most people, I imagine, but I can always find what I want very quickly.

[king ubu]

I go by artist (performer) and then by work. But having just changed from an old ipod to an android phone with extra memory card, I'm still unsure how to work things out best.

And I have no symphonic stuff on there so far, just concertos, chamber and solo piano music ... guess I'd go with composers in case of symphonies, but that would still look weird, having Mozart or Mahler in the artist listing next to Rubinstein and Rabin.

It would be nice if these new devices would indeed depict all those fields you can enter tags into, and let you sort by whatever you want (my android phone doesn't even recognize all the genres, some R&B works, some is displayed as Soul/R&B, some is - with some of the classical - in a separate category called "ta", whatever that stands for.

Silly new world.

[Bigshot]

There is a standard for tagging. You put the composer's name in front of the track title.

[king ubu]

I rather put it into the album title (i.e. "Mozart: Piano Concerto K 491").

[A Lark Ascending]

For what it's worth this is what the 'Genre' field shows on my Classical Ipod (I keep the English classical stuff on a separate iPod):

• Classical 16th/17thC English
  
• Classical American
  
• Classical Asian
  
• Classical Baroque (English)
  
• Classical Baroque (French)
  
• Classical Baroque (German)
  
• Classical Baroque (Italian)
  
• Classical Baroque (Various)
  
• Classical Contemporary Various
  
• Classical Early
  
• Classical East European
  
• Classical France
  
• Classical Germanic (20thC)
  
• Classical Germanic (Classical)
  
• Classical Germanic (Late Romantic)
  
• Classical Germanic (Romantic)
  
• Classical Italian
  
• Classical Minimalist
  
• Classical Multi-composer
  
• Classical Nordic
  
• Classical Russian
  
• Classical South America
  
• Classical Spain
  
• Classical Swiss
  
• Classical Xmas
  

Edited January 1, 2013 by A Lark Ascending

[John L]

I have only one genre -classical

I use the composer's last name for "artist," i.e. "Beethoven," with a few exceptions -

(a) for a disc that features a performer doing the works of several composers, I will use the performer's name and keep the composer's name after track titles,

(b) a disc with multiple performers and composers will either be broken up into several itunes selections or filed under "compilations." The former approach is always taken when multiple longer compositions of one or more composers are put on a CD just to fill up 79 minutes. If there is no natural reason to keep multiple compositions on a CD together, I will break them up.

© For the most part, I do not make artist listings for conductors, orchestras, or dates. I list them after the album titles..

Edited January 1, 2013 by John L

[Daniel A]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I go by artist (performer) and then by work. But having just changed from an old ipod to an android phone with extra memory card, I'm still unsure how to work things out best.

.....

It would be nice if these new devices would indeed depict all those fields you can enter tags into, and let you sort by whatever you want (my android phone doesn't even recognize all the genres, some R&B works, some is displayed as Soul/R&B, some is - with some of the classical - in a separate category called "ta", whatever that stands for.

What player are you using with your phone? I'm using the one that came with my SonyEricsson Xperia phone, which is indeed lacking in several aspects. For example it cannot display long track titles. Using the tagging "standard" (which is not official as I take it) I should put the composer's name first. But then the title is cut off like this: "Vaughan Williams: Symphony No.", which makes it impossible to identify the symphony number as well as the name of the movement.

There are many other player apps around so I suppose I should try to find a better one, although I wouldn't want to pay too much unless I knew it worked very well.

Another obstacle is that many hardware players (car stereos, for instance) do only play tracks in alphabetical order within a given folder, which makes it necessary to put the track number first in the title name. For that reason I'm more comfortable with creating one folder for every work (symphony, concert etc.), but it will look slightly ridiculous for very short works like songs outside a song cycle.

[king ubu]

I'm using the pre-installed player on a Samsung SIII, no idea what player it is, but it works very well, except for the genres where somehow with some albums they get lost and I get that "ta".

Long track titles aren't a big issue, if I turn the phone (from vertical to horizontal) I get to see enough in the list and once I'm playing a track, the titles run through and I get them in their entirety.

What I can't see, alas, is the comment field (where sometimes I painstakingly add line-ups and other info), even though I can watch a listing of many (ten or so) fields while playing a track (I can switch between tracklist, cover-view or background info on the running track, and I can of course minimize it all and use the phone for something else like texting or browsing or reading kindle stuff).

Obviously I could have all the covers and txt-files on the phone, too, but the gallery of photos will display each of these as a folder and as that's a nuisance I deleted them all.

As for re-naming files, if ever I do that, I always put the track numbers in front. But usually they're just called "Track01" or I let iTunes do the work (M4A at highest quality) and it, too adds track numbers in front.

[Bigshot]

I rather put it into the album title (i.e. "Mozart: Piano Concerto K 491").

You can certainly put it wherever you want, but the vast majority of the tags in gracenote put the composer's name in front of the work in the song title.