Jump to content
IGNORED

very good article in The Atlantic on Classical music and the mess digital tagging has done to it.


Recommended Posts

Good read but no news with regard to CM tagging, in general, or to iTunes.

 

 

Boy. You have that right! Tagging is a mess, In fact, there are lots of aspects to computer music that simply don't work right or at all.

 

For instance, with Windows, often just getting Windows to load the proper USB DAC driver almost takes an act of Congress! I've spent inordinate amounts of time getting Windows to choose the driver I need to use. Often, even when I've disabled the default driver (for the laptops's internal speakers) Windows still won't enable the driver for whatever external USB DAC or USB/SPDIF converter I'm using, even though it shows up in the audio window with a green checkmark beside it!

 

Then there's iTunes on either Mac or Windows. How about some rips simply refuse to show the artwork even when you physically placed the correct JPEG in the artwork window! How about how some albums show up on one's WiFi music server client or onto one's sync'd iPod with two copies of each song! Go into iTunes and it doesn't show any duplicates. Or, how about when iTunes arbitrarily breaks a single ripped album into two or more separate albums. The worst part is there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for many of these puzzling actions. Not only is there no seeming reason for it, but no solutions either. Maddening.

 

JRiver's Media player doesn't get off scott-free either. I love what it can do, but the program has the most confusing, non-intuitive interface of any piece of software I've seen since the old DOS days! I don't know who jRiver has "designing" their UI, but it looks as if it was thrown together by a committee that never communicated with one another!

 

The bottom line is that computer audio has a long ways to go before it will work like it should.

George

Link to comment
Then there's iTunes on either Mac or Windows. How about some rips simply refuse to show the artwork even when you physically placed the correct JPEG in the artwork window! How about how some albums show up on one's WiFi music server client or onto one's sync'd iPod with two copies of each song! Go into iTunes and it doesn't show any duplicates. Or, how about when iTunes arbitrarily breaks a single ripped album into two or more separate albums. The worst part is there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for many of these puzzling actions. Not only is there no seeming reason for it, but no solutions either. Maddening.

 

The bottom line is that computer audio has a long ways to go before it will work like it should.

 

George, I'm concerned that you state certain things as if they were absolute when, from my experience, I know they're not.

 

For example, with rips or downloads of nearly 2000 albums on the Mac, I've never never never had artwork NOT appear. Perhaps my method differs. I always tweak JPG artwork in the program Graphic Converter first, and then for each cover, I select all and copy the final square album cover. Then, I simply paste the JPG album cover artwork into the album's Get Info box. (I do not drag the JPG file into the Get Info box. Perhaps the copy/paste method is more secure.)

 

This is something I do both with albums I'm just adding, and sometimes in the past I've upgraded the album's artwork by first cutting the previous JPG from each track, and then pasting in the new image for the whole album.

 

I also double-check artwork by using a smart playlist that I call "Artwork FALSE," which has two simple rules:

(1) Album Artwork is false

(2) Media Kind is music

 

Then, I do the copy/pasting in that smart playlist, and watch each album disappear from that playlist as false turns into true.

 

Another concern is about "iTunes arbitrarily breaks a single ripped album into two or more separate albums," which has never never happened to me over 2000 albums. Now here I have to be vigilant when ripping or downloading new albums, and I always double-check metadata before importing or right after importing. Could it be, George, that the "single ripped album" is a compilation -- meaning simply that the artist is not the same on all the tracks -- but the compilation checkbox is not set to "yes"?

 

The thing is -- and yes, this is a PITA -- I need to double-check all metadata in the process of importing. Yes, as iTunes queries the GraceNotes database, that can help save typing time. But even then, I find it best to proofread all the suggested data. And with certain fields, such as composer, I need both to double-check and standardize how the name appears. F'rinstance, I prefer "J.S. Bach" to "Johann Sebastian Bach" or to "Bach, Johann Sebastian" and therefore change that composer field whenever it's not how I prefer it.

 

Another smart playlist that I find helpful for this editing and correcting process is one I call "Added TODAY," which also has two rules:

(1) Date Added is [current date]

(2) Media Kind is music

 

Yes, all this can be maddening. Or, more so from my POV, it's just a bunch of detail work. Now having been an editor and writer most of my life, this kind of detail work comes naturally, and I understand how others either hate it or are simply not all that skilled at it. And in that sense, computer audio has a long way to go before all these metadata details are automated.

 

But if one is painstaking, some problems never occur or, if they do, are easy to find and fix. The problem, for me at least, has not been in iTunes, where I still create my music library even if playing it occurs with Audirvana Plus after it's created its own library which totally echoes the same metadata from iTunes.

 

Dave, who says this article about metadata and classical music is excellent and all the work he cites above is a lot easier with non-classical music

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Music is love, made audible.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Link to comment
Good read. Especially hard on iTunes of course.

 

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tragedy-itunes-classical-music-175157588.html

 

I agree with every fiber in my body that tagging/metadata integrity is unacceptable in that those creating the files have a sense for the database(s) their files will be written against. A recently purchased three CD St. Matthew's Passion had three unique ways to indicate the disc number (1=No Disc Number, 2= Disc 2, 3=Cd3) the files were written to. Simply put, I see little evidence that those creating the containers care about doing this against a standard.

 

I guess the question comes down to if neglectful tagging cost sales? If so there may be more focus on doing it correctly. If my experience is like others, a) I don't know the integrity of the tagging until after I purchased the work; too late in the overall process to effect my behavior, and b) If I really want the music, reworking the tagging is something I'll live with. JRMC is my library management system and it is more than flexible to allow me to adjust the *ahem* tagging to my standards. I HATE the recklessness in how the discrete data is categorized, but I've capitulated and if I don't like it, I change it myself

 

Would you pay an extra $.10 per track to have it tagged correctly? That might interest those on the supply side...

Link to comment
Boy. You have that right! ..

 

Then there's iTunes on either Mac or Windows... Or, how about when iTunes arbitrarily breaks a single ripped album into two or more separate albums. The worst part is there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for many of these puzzling actions. Not only is there no seeming reason for it, but no solutions either. Maddening.

 

George,

 

I sympathize with you about the USB driver issue, but then Windows is crap, IMO, so 'nuff said...

 

I agree with Cycleman about handling artwork for newly ripped CD's: through I usually find the album on Amazon, and right-click, copy, the artwork from there, then do a 'Get Info' in my 'Missing artwork' smart playlist, and command-V paste it into the (selected) artwork box. Works great all the time.

 

I can see where people can have problems with albums showing up in multiples. I struggled with it until I learned that the 'Album', 'Artist', 'Artwork', and 'Compilation' flag all have to be the same to work together and end up with only one instance of an album showing in iTunes. I like to collapse multi-disk albums into one, which means making every tracks 'Album' name exactly the same. Then I discover that some of the 'Artist' fields have different names, as in "Foobar featuring Bilbo", instead of just "Foobar". I cut out the guest name from 'Artist' and paste it onto the end of the 'Track Name', so ALL the 'Artist' names are the same throughout all tracks in my expanded album. The Compilation flag can be set to avoid this, but I don't like my albums hiding in the 'iTunes/Music&Media/ Compilations' folder unless they absolutely have to be. And I hate scrolling through my iTunes library 'Artist' folders and seeing a bunch of variations of an artist name (spelling, punctuation, guest artists, whatever) It bugs me enough to go back to the iTunes metadata editor and fix it !

Oh, and the artwork has to be the same too, in all those tracks metadata.

I have chased down some damn weird problems in this regard, some taking a good long time to find some problem(s) and get it right, but then I always seem to be messing with metadata, and once I learned how to do it right, and finally got things setup right, it stays the same, so I can't blame iTunes (much as I would like to !).

 

It helps me to display the multiple instances in the album art thumbnail(?) mode, then click each 'album' open to see which tracks it contains, to point to the problem areas to be fixed.

 

oops, I seem to have gone off topic... PM or start a new thread if you'd like more on this subject.

 

 

JRiver's Media player doesn't get off scott-free either. I love what it can do, but the program has the most confusing, non-intuitive interface of any piece of software I've seen since the old DOS days! I don't know who jRiver has "designing" their UI, but it looks as if it was thrown together by a committee that never communicated with one another!

 

The bottom line is that computer audio has a long ways to go before it will work like it should.

 

 

It is just as bad, if not worse in the JRiver designed Pono application (maybe their web site too :( ) I spent a good part of my programming career studying User Interface Design, so I know bad design when I see it. I won't use JRiver just for that reason, regardless of its power and popularity. It is not just you, George !

 

 

(back on Topic, sort of)

I agree with you that there are still serious problems with computer audio, and one that bugs me the most is the lack of decent metadata for our music. We have a few basic metadata fields, which were OK early on for popular MP3's, but they fall so far short from what is needed to support classical music, jazz artist/group mobility, releases, remixes, reissues, remastering, etc., etc.

Just give me a damn 'Label' field, please !!! Not to mention liner notes, and additional artwork, and things I forgot, or haven't encountered !!

 

The point is: this kind of stuff IS SO EASY FOR COMPUTERS !!! So, why the hell isn't it solved ??

/ RANT

Link to comment

Classical music has been a minority taste for a long time. We haven't been catered to in online tag databases or in downloads. I don't expect that we will be in the future either.

 

When I moved to computer audio over nine years ago, I couldn't find a satisfactory online tag database for classical music. Even if the composer, work name, performer and track name information was present, it wasn't placed where I wanted it. Names weren't consistent. I accepted that I would have to enter much of the information myself. It takes me about a minute before I rip a CD to get the tag information right for most classical CDs.

 

I decided that I would not settle for cramming the information into the standard Artist, Album and Track name (Song) tags. I needed tools that let me define and use the tags I needed. I also needed a player that could use those tags and let me view my files as I chose. For me, JRiver MC was by far the best tool for tag editing and playback.

 

I knew what tags I wanted and how I wanted to view my collection. I set to work learning to use MC's features. I was able to get what I needed. I've never used the Pono player or the JRiver player that supports it. JRiver MC is very customizable and has far more depth than iTunes. You do have to know what you want to do and learn how to get that result.

 

My advice to someone who has lots of classical music and wants to get that collection into a computer audio system is

 

- Don't settle for living with the inadequate minimum standard tags and players that are limited to those tags.

- Look for tools that allow you to do things the right way.

- Learn to use those tools.

- Allow time to experiment before you plunge into ripping your entire collection.

 

This is the view I use most often for classical music.

 

major_composers_view-XL.jpg

Link to comment

We will never get to a proper solution for the tagging problem unless there is one universally accepted tagging standard for classical music.

 

I actually started a thread on this a while ago: http://www.computeraudiophile.com/f11-software/managing-classical-music-metadata-itunes-experiences-17856/

 

However, I don't think we'll ever get to a universally accepted standard for several reasons:

 

- this would require all classical music labels to align, and the market is seeing new labels created every day, and getting more and more fragmented. 20 years ago, Decca, DG and Philips could have set a standard, these days they can't

 

- the other element in the distribution chain that could take care of tagging are the resellers, but with the exception of Native DSD with Ted's admirable efforts, I don't see any other doing this

 

- the classical music market and the computer audio market overlap only partially, there are still many classical listeners out there buying traditional CDs - so we're talking about the niche within a niche.

 

- the tagging databases rely on unpaid volunteers, and every single one of them has a different system

 

By the way, where this problem gets even worse is not with your own library, which each one of us can fix manually (even if it takes forever) but with streaming. Just to find a certain version of a classical work with Tidal, Qobuz et al is a nightmare, and to make sure you get all versions of a certain work is nothing but impossible.

Link to comment

 

By the way, where this problem gets even worse is not with your own library, which each one of us can fix manually (even if it takes forever) but with streaming. Just to find a certain version of a classical work with Tidal, Qobuz et al is a nightmare, and to make sure you get all versions of a certain work is nothing but impossible.

 

 

Impossible is the right word. If all you want to do is listen to a little Mozart or Vivaldi as background music then the streaming service is just fine but certainly not if you are even a LITTLE interested in the genre.

 

By the way, here is what "metadata and album artwork" looks like to those that have only had the experience (and I use that term loosely) of classical music via computer.

 

image.jpg

image.jpg

David

Link to comment

The only thing that makes it possible for me to find the music on my computer is that I refrain from ripping CD's until I'm planning to listen to them. This way I have listened to most of the music in my library and know what pieces are grouped together in albums. I do my best to keep the metadata consistent when I rip, subject to usability on iOS devices (ie short song names), but the composer tag is a mess and the artwork is usually missing.

Link to comment

Interesting, I gave up on Classical tagging once I learned the Ted B school of tagging (he did some videos of JRMC tagging, very helpful). Now I am perfectly pleased to tag it all myself, that way I know what and where everything is. For classical, in addition to Artist, Album Track, Genre, etc., I pick up the Composer (full name), use Group as a sub-genre (i.e. symphony, ballet, opera, chamber, etc.), Orchestra, and probably more that I can't think of right now - ah yes, Conductor

 

Then I created views, I can search on "Group" (sub-genre), Composer, Orchestra, Conductor, or your basic Arist, Album stuff. Now that I have all of this for over 1,000 albums I could care less about any other Classical tagging scheme unless someone comes across a truly earth shattering tagging concept - that gets adapted by the industry.

Analog: Koetsu Rosewood > VPI Aries 3 w/SDS > EAR 834P > EAR 834L: Audiodesk cleaner

Digital Fun: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (JRMC) SOtM USB > Lynx Hilo > EAR 834L

Digital Serious: DAS > CAPS v3 w/LPS (HQPlayer) Ethernet > SMS-100 NAA > Lampi DSD L4 G5 > EAR 834L

Digital Disc: Oppo BDP 95 > EAR 834L

Output: EAR 834L > Xilica XP4080 DSP > Odessey Stratos Mono Extreme > Legacy Aeris

Phones: EAR 834L > Little Dot Mk ii > Senheiser HD 800

Link to comment
George,

 

I sympathize with you about the USB driver issue, but then Windows is crap, IMO, so 'nuff said...

 

Well there's no doubt that Windows is garbage - the worst OS there is (even Linux is better), but it's what I've got for my computer-based music, so there it is.

 

I agree with Cycleman about handling artwork for newly ripped CD's: through I usually find the album on Amazon, and right-click, copy, the artwork from there, then do a 'Get Info' in my 'Missing artwork' smart playlist, and command-V paste it into the (selected) artwork box. Works great all the time.

 

That's how I do it as well. I finally got album art for all of my ripped CDs save one: The new Reference Recording of Saint-Saens Organ Symphony (#3) I went to Amazon, copied the cover art jpg to my desktop and placed it in the artwork field of the album using the "get artwork" button in the "info" dialog, and it just refuses to show up in place of the generic musical note. There doesn't seem to anything wrong with the rip. It plays perfectly. I've tried every way I can think of to transfer that artwork to iTunes, but it just won't take....

 

I can see where people can have problems with albums showing up in multiples. I struggled with it until I learned that the 'Album', 'Artist', 'Artwork', and 'Compilation' flag all have to be the same to work together and end up with only one instance of an album showing in iTunes. I like to collapse multi-disk albums into one, which means making every tracks 'Album' name exactly the same. Then I discover that some of the 'Artist' fields have different names, as in "Foobar featuring Bilbo", instead of just "Foobar". I cut out the guest name from 'Artist' and paste it onto the end of the 'Track Name', so ALL the 'Artist' names are the same throughout all tracks in my expanded album. The Compilation flag can be set to avoid this, but I don't like my albums hiding in the 'iTunes/Music&Media/ Compilations' folder unless they absolutely have to be. And I hate scrolling through my iTunes library 'Artist' folders and seeing a bunch of variations of an artist name (spelling, punctuation, guest artists, whatever) It bugs me enough to go back to the iTunes metadata editor and fix it !

Oh, and the artwork has to be the same too, in all those tracks metadata.

I have chased down some damn weird problems in this regard, some taking a good long time to find some problem(s) and get it right, but then I always seem to be messing with metadata, and once I learned how to do it right, and finally got things setup right, it stays the same, so I can't blame iTunes (much as I would like to !).

 

While what you say is true about 'Album', 'Artist', 'Artwork', and 'Compilation' flags all having to be the same to work together and end up with only one instance of an album showing in iTunes, it doesn't always work that way. I have a three-CD set that I imported as 48 contiguous tracks. For some reason, iTunes insists on showing tracks 1-34 as one album and tracks 35-48 as another. Everything in the two "albums'" info fields is exactly the same, yet it refuses to consolidate all 48 files. Anything I do to alter that arrangement ends up with more than two albums. One cut has gotten separated into a third album (all with the same album name) and nothing that I do will coax it back into the fold. So, now, instead of having two albums of the same name, now I have three, and one of them has only one cut on it! It's enough to drive one crazy. Why does it have to be so difficult?

 

It helps me to display the multiple instances in the album art thumbnail(?) mode, then click each 'album' open to see which tracks it contains, to point to the problem areas to be fixed.

 

oops, I seem to have gone off topic... PM or start a new thread if you'd like more on this subject.

 

Perfectly all right!

 

 

It is just as bad, if not worse in the JRiver designed Pono application (maybe their web site too :( ) I spent a good part of my programming career studying User Interface Design, so I know bad design when I see it. I won't use JRiver just for that reason, regardless of its power and popularity. It is not just you, George !

 

Well, no, I didn't suspect for one moment that it was "just me". I think most computer-savvy people know good GUI design when they see it, and instinctively know when a program's interface is substandard - unless of course, they're Windows users, in which case they've never been exposed to a decent computer experience and just figure that the Microsoft way is just the way computers are! :)

 

 

(back on Topic, sort of)

I agree with you that there are still serious problems with computer audio, and one that bugs me the most is the lack of decent metadata for our music. We have a few basic metadata fields, which were OK early on for popular MP3's, but they fall so far short from what is needed to support classical music, jazz artist/group mobility, releases, remixes, reissues, remastering, etc., etc.

Just give me a damn 'Label' field, please !!! Not to mention liner notes, and additional artwork, and things I forgot, or haven't encountered !!

 

The point is: this kind of stuff IS SO EASY FOR COMPUTERS !!! So, why the hell isn't it solved ??

/ RANT

 

Agreed. And, especially I'd love to get my hands on the person/people at Apple responsible for the iTunes mess. I can understand the JRiver fiasco, after all, it was designed, originally, for Windows, but iTunes is a Mac application, it should be as intuitive and as logical as other Mac programs like Mac Mail and Safari. That it isn't shows that somebody at Apple isn't paying attention to the "family jewels".

George

Link to comment
George, I'm concerned that you state certain things as if they were absolute when, from my experience, I know they're not.

 

No, I state my experiences with this stuff. I have no idea what others find to be absolutes or not so I don't pretend to speak for them. But from some of the responses I have received, I do see that I'm not alone in my frustration over this stuff.

George

Link to comment

Classical music is for sure a different animal, not sure if it can be "tamed"! On the flip side, in the physical recording world was/is everything so rosy? The computer has definitely opened up possibilities in database management that weren't available in the physical media world which is resulting in problems we never had before. But I have numerous examples of physical media with bad "tagging". I am an English speaker but have physical media in foreign languages. I have a few recordings that don't list orchestras or conductors. I have multiple copies of various works and they are frequently labeled differently. Maybe I was just more in tune with my physical LP and CD collections than I am with my digital collection to worry about such details. But with physical media you had to deal with the way the recording information was presented and packaged, no retagging!. With digital, a whole world of personalization and tweaking was opened up and in this "me, myself, and I" world we all live in we have, I propose, a basic need to make our collections 'ours" through personalized tagging. This does not negate the need in today's software for the very basic classical music tagging fields, no more dealing with "Artist", 'Album Artist" in lieu of composer, etc.

Jim

Link to comment

As I watched the credits roll after a movie at our wonderful local film festival last night I couldn't help but think of the "tagging" issue in the article this thread is referencing. Even the small intro short film that opened the main film I was there to see had a list rolling of pretty much everyone that was involved in the making of that film. I understand that there are many more recordings of music than films but I couldn't help but look back on the wealth of information that was regularly contained on a vinyl record cardboard sleeve.

 

It will be interesting to see where digital music (as in storage and playback) moves as it (supposedly) matures. Hopefully not the direction of "Muzak" or the piped in repetitive compilations heard at the local grocery store where it is basically an anomomous stream of like sounding "tunes" that have no name, origin or value.

David

Link to comment

Anyone who has had issues with tagging and metadata - have you tried Roon? It is supposedly the first player/music interface to actually do classical correctly. And I agree with musicophile, trying to find specific pieces to listen to in either Tidal or Spotify is akin to finding the needle in the haystack.

 

And Windows doesn't suck, sorry to say. Windows has to deal with USB driver authors just like end-users do and it's not always rainbows and unicorns. It takes far less technical skill to get all pieces working in harmony within Windows than it would in something like Linux, that's just an awful comparison. PEBKAC is a real thing, but most would just prefer to bash the OS instead.

Ryzen 3900x Roon Core PC -> Intel i9900k HQPlayer W10 machine -> iFi Zen Stream NAA

Holo May KTE, Benchmark LA4 preamp

SMC Audio upgraded DNA-125 Amp

Dynaudio Confidence C2 Platinum speakers

Vinyl rig - Schiit Sol, Nagaoka MP-500, Mod Squad PhonoDrive phono stage

Link to comment
Classical music is for sure a different animal, not sure if it can be "tamed"! On the flip side, in the physical recording world was/is everything so rosy? The computer has definitely opened up possibilities in database management that weren't available in the physical media world which is resulting in problems we never had before. But I have numerous examples of physical media with bad "tagging". I am an English speaker but have physical media in foreign languages. I have a few recordings that don't list orchestras or conductors. I have multiple copies of various works and they are frequently labeled differently. Maybe I was just more in tune with my physical LP and CD collections than I am with my digital collection to worry about such details. But with physical media you had to deal with the way the recording information was presented and packaged, no retagging!. With digital, a whole world of personalization and tweaking was opened up and in this "me, myself, and I" world we all live in we have, I propose, a basic need to make our collections 'ours" through personalized tagging. This does not negate the need in today's software for the very basic classical music tagging fields, no more dealing with "Artist", 'Album Artist" in lieu of composer, etc.

 

It can definitely be tamed, but not without considerable manual effort in editing by one's self the tags obtained from common sources. Many existing recordings predate any concern about tagging, for example, and I doubt if anyone is going to go back to the main sources on the web of that centralized tagging info in a consistent way to fix it. So, you have to bite the bullet and fill in the tags yourself if you want decent tagging.

 

A friend who had previously tagged his CD collection of over 3,000 disks collaborated with me. He had used the excellent MusiChi tool for that, and it is very classically oriented, but still very manual. Fortunately, MusiChi can store its tagging in the media files themselves. Unfortunately, it could not handle DSD rips.

 

We have perhaps 3,000 discs in my JRiver hi rez library, 95% classical, mostly multichannel SACDs, which have embedded IDV3 tags in the media files themselves which is imported into the JR library for the DSF format. For our purposes, we added only one custom field to JR's standard tag set: Composition, which is the title of the work. The Name field, normally the track title, is used to tag names of the movements within the work.

 

The other fields considered essential: composer, genre, publisher, year, artists, disc #, track #, resolution, etc. were already defined in JRiver. But, very little of the metadata from the SACD discs themselves was accurate or fit the scheme consistently, so it was still a huge manual effort to fill those in or edit them for consistency.

 

It is now done for the SACDs, and it works terrifically well. The trickle of new releases into the library is fairly easily manageable.

 

Unfortunately, JRiver tagging does not support easy tagging of BD-A or BD-V libraries without getting into cumbersome Particles. And, JR cannot access the BD menu in the disc. We have left those 700 or so BDs we have unaddressed for now.

 

I am monitoring developments with Roon, but I seriously doubt that it will support the classical music niche well at all, much like Tidal streaming. Classical is just too small to interest these guys.

 

I see no silver bullet on the horizon for classical tagging. You just have to roll up your sleeves and do the work manually.

Link to comment
And Windows doesn't suck, sorry to say. Windows has to deal with USB driver authors just like end-users do and it's not always rainbows and unicorns. It takes far less technical skill to get all pieces working in harmony within Windows than it would in something like Linux, that's just an awful comparison. PEBKAC is a real thing, but most would just prefer to bash the OS instead.

 

 

I've been using Windows since 1989, and used DOS before that. I know the OS like the back of my hand, I also know Mac OS, having used that since my first Mac in 1984. I have also used Linux on-and-off over the years (and the latest Ubuntu distro makes Win 8 look like the primitive mishmash of poorly implemented ideas that it is) as well as various forms of command-line Unix, and yes, Windows most assuredly does suck (and seems to suck more with each new release)! Just about the only people who think Windows does not suck are those who either have never really used anything else, and therefore don't know any better, or are hair-shirted computer masochists. :)

George

Link to comment

I am the tagging editor for NativeDSD. I follow a tagging scheme for all of our own label (Channel Classics) and partner labels (who ask us to tag). Some labels like Pentatone come already tagged, and the quality of the tags are therefore varied.

 

For our stuff, I tag track #, Name (which is track name), Artist, Album, Conductor, Composer, Other Artist (typically a soloist), Year, Genre, Sub Genre, Label, Catalog # and ISRC.

 

When the label provides a Work and Movement, I tag them as such (and have added Work and Movement to JRiver as fields), and then also concatenate Work and Movement (with a hyphen and a space before and after) into Name. For example, Work is "Symphony No. 4", and Movement is "I. Allegro" so Name becomes "Symphony No. 4 - I. Allegro". So if you add Work and Movement to a player like JRiver, your NativeDSD downloads will fill them in, if available (this is usually not the norm, however). But in all cases, Name is available, of course.

Link to comment
I've been using Windows since 1989, and used DOS before that. I know the OS like the back of my hand, I also know Mac OS, having used that since my first Mac in 1984. I have also used Linux on-and-off over the years (and the latest Ubuntu distro makes Win 8 look like the primitive mishmash of poorly implemented ideas that it is) as well as various forms of command-line Unix, and yes, Windows most assuredly does suck (and seems to suck more with each new release)! Just about the only people who think Windows does not suck are those who either have never really used anything else, and therefore don't know any better, or are hair-shirted computer masochists. :)

 

George, you may not like Windows but your pronouncements about Windows, JRiver and other things indicate that you aren't able to use them successfully. If other people can use them successfully, then you are just commenting on your own limitations.

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...