Classical metadata

[left channel]

@Miska @Jud @Mike48 @Polyglot I suggest we move our discussion of classical metadata out of the Qobuz thread, as this is a problem shared by all download and streaming services. Also because the following article mentions only Spotify/Apple/Amazon, Idagio, and Primephonic. It seems to me that Tidal and Qobuz live somewhere in-between those two extremes. This was published by the NY Times yesterday: 

 

In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/business/media/stream-classical-music-spotify.html

[rando]

This was an excellent choice of location.  Hopefully some of the European members not explicitly mentioned will find this unthreatening of an environment to explore the healthy culture of music listening Qobuz grew inside of.    

 

If Qobuz, because that is really who are talking about here... still, push through and can begin devoting resources towards the multiple party complexities Miska touched on.  The only reasonable question is what makes that happen? What brings about this and other much desired progress inside the home office or abroad.

 

 

[semente]

When I moved all my music from CD to HDD I was so disappointed by iTunes' auto tagging that I ended up tagging all classical music manually.

I thought that this wouldn't be a problem with downloads but I was wrong. I've complained to Qobuz about this and if I remember correctly they said that they're not responsible for the tagging. E-classical isn't much better either (and it's gotten worse recently).

 

 

[semente]

iTunes' "column browser" makes it the best music file browser in my opinion and experience because it makes very good use of tags:

 

[Miska]

1 hour ago, semente said:

iTunes' "column browser" makes it the best music file browser in my opinion and experience because it makes very good use of tags:

 

 

It is not very good for classical, only for pop/rock type of music. I have not seen it support separate columns for composer, conductor, orchestra and soloists... In that screenshot, separate things are collapsed into "artist".

 

For me, biggest pain is always genre. Depending on source, same work may not be always categorized under same genre, making genre practically useless (unless I myself manually edit and correct it for most of the material)...

 

[semente]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

 

It is not very good for classical, only for pop/rock type of music. I have not seen it support separate columns for composer, conductor, orchestra and soloists... In that screenshot, separate things are collapsed into "artist".

 

For me, biggest pain is always genre. Depending on source, same work may not be always categorized under same genre, making genre practically useless (unless I myself manually edit and correct it for most of the material)...

 

 

I don't agree with you. Using the column browser I can search by Genre, Composer, Grouping, Artist or Album (I have split major pieces into separate albums, i.e. each "Symphony" or "Piano Sonata" is an individual album but have grouped lesser works as i.e. "Orchestral Works" or "Piano Works").

 

I have also split my music library into 9:

- Classical, Romantic & Modern

- Early, Renaissance & Baroque

- Ethnic & Traditional

- Jazz

- Minimal

- Opera

- Rock

- Sacra

- Soundtracks

 

 

And this is how I tag, using the information on http://imslp.org/ for reference:

 

Song

Beethoven: Symphony No.3 In E-flat Major, Op55 - I. Allegro Con Brio

Composer: Work, Catalogue Number (when available) "Name" (when available) - (roman numerals)Movement Number. movement name - tempo

 

Artist

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Wiener Philharmoniker (or Mstislav Rostropovich (cello), Benjamin Britten (piano))

Maestro, Orchestra; Soloist (instrument)

 

Album

Beethoven: Symphony No.3 In E-flat Major, Op. 55 "Eroica" [Schmidt-Isserstedt, VPO - 1965]

Composer: Work, Catalogue Number (when available) "Name" (when available) [soloist; Maestro, Orchestra acronym - year recorded]

I add the year of the recording because often the same artist recorded the same piece several times

 

Album Artist

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (or Mstislav Rostropovich (cello))

Soloist (instrument) or Maestro

I choose one artist (the one that interests me most or the most prominent) and add the instrument because sometimes the same artist can be a soloist or a maestro…ex.: Rostropovich / Rostropovich (cello).

 

Composer

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

 

Grouping

Symphonies

I group according to Symphonies, Chamber, Songs and Cantatas, Opera Suites, Symphonic Poems, "Instrument name" Concertos, Cello Sonatas, Solo Piano, etc.

 

Genre

Classical

The musical period (Baroque, Romantic, etc.)

 

Date

1804

The composition year (last date)

 

Comments

Decca

Label

 

[Miska]

25 minutes ago, semente said:

I don't agree with you. Using the column browser I can search by Genre, Composer, Grouping, Artist or Album (I have split major pieces into separate albums, i.e. each "Symphony" or "Piano Sonata" is an individual album but have grouped lesser works as i.e. "Orchestral Works" or "Piano Works").

 

I can do the same in HQPlayer too... I also sometimes search for things like "DSD64" to find all DSD64 albums I have.

 

26 minutes ago, semente said:

I have also split my music library into 9:

- Classical, Romantic & Modern

- Early, Renaissance & Baroque

- Ethnic & Traditional

- Jazz

- Minimal

- Opera

- Rock

- Sacra

- Soundtracks

 

Problem with this is that it is your own manual categorization, not something provided as metadata. You have couple of subgenres of classical, but for example all subgenres of rock collapsed into one. For metadata that comes from a service/label it needs to be more specific and standard.

 

28 minutes ago, semente said:

And this is how I tag, using the information on http://imslp.org/ for reference:

 

Problem is that I don't have time to manually tag everything, I expect material to come with correct tagging without me having to touch it.

 

29 minutes ago, semente said:

Song

Beethoven: Symphony No.3 In E-flat Major, Op55 - I. Allegro Con Brio

Composer: Work, Catalogue Number (when available) "Name" (when available) - (roman numerals)Movement Number. movement name - tempo

 

Here you are collapsing multiple metadata fields into one. Composer, work, catalogue number, etc. So this doesn't adhere to any of the metadata format specifications.

 

30 minutes ago, semente said:

Artist

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, Wiener Philharmoniker (or Mstislav Rostropovich (cello), Benjamin Britten (piano))

Maestro, Orchestra; Soloist (instrument)

 

There are many metadata fields for "artist", so this is again collapsing many into one. For example ID3v2 has following:

Quote

4.2.2.   Involved persons frames

  TPE1
   The 'Lead artist/Lead performer/Soloist/Performing group' is
   used for the main artist.

  TPE2
   The 'Band/Orchestra/Accompaniment' frame is used for additional
   information about the performers in the recording.

  TPE3
   The 'Conductor' frame is used for the name of the conductor.

  TPE4
   The 'Interpreted, remixed, or otherwise modified by' frame contains
   more information about the people behind a remix and similar
   interpretations of another existing piece.

  TOPE
   The 'Original artist/performer' frame is intended for the performer
   of the original recording, if for example the music in the file
   should be a cover of a previously released song.

  TEXT
   The 'Lyricist/Text writer' frame is intended for the writer of the
   text or lyrics in the recording.

  TOLY
   The 'Original lyricist/text writer' frame is intended for the
   text writer of the original recording, if for example the music in
   the file should be a cover of a previously released song.

  TCOM
   The 'Composer' frame is intended for the name of the composer.

  TMCL
   The 'Musician credits list' is intended as a mapping between
   instruments and the musician that played it. Every odd field is an
   instrument and every even is an artist or a comma delimited list of
   artists.

  TIPL
   The 'Involved people list' is very similar to the musician credits
   list, but maps between functions, like producer, and names.

  TENC
   The 'Encoded by' frame contains the name of the person or
   organisation that encoded the audio file. This field may contain a
   copyright message, if the audio file also is copyrighted by the
   encoder.

 

33 minutes ago, semente said:

Album Artist

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt (or Mstislav Rostropovich (cello))

Soloist (instrument) or Maestro

I choose one artist (the one that interests me most or the most prominent) and add the instrument because sometimes the same artist can be a soloist or a maestro…ex.: Rostropovich / Rostropovich (cello).

 

Album Artist is one of the things that doesn't exist at all for example in ID3v2 specification. However, iTunes and some others are misusing TPE2 field for "album artist".

 

34 minutes ago, semente said:

Date

1804

The composition year (last date)

 

This is also quite ambiguous, for example ID3v2 defines following:

Quote

  TDEN
   The 'Encoding time' frame contains a timestamp describing when the
   audio was encoded. Timestamp format is described in the ID3v2
   structure document [ID3v2-strct].

  TDOR
   The 'Original release time' frame contains a timestamp describing
   when the original recording of the audio was released. Timestamp
   format is described in the ID3v2 structure document [ID3v2-strct].

  TDRC
   The 'Recording time' frame contains a timestamp describing when the
   audio was recorded. Timestamp format is described in the ID3v2
   structure document [ID3v2-strct].

  TDRL
   The 'Release time' frame contains a timestamp describing when the
   audio was first released. Timestamp format is described in the ID3v2
   structure document [ID3v2-strct].

  TDTG
   The 'Tagging time' frame contains a timestamp describing then the
   audio was tagged. Timestamp format is described in the ID3v2
   structure document [ID3v2-strct].

 

 

Maybe this helps to see how lot of the metadata things are quite a mess... And iTunes deals with a very minor subset of metadata tags available and in it's own non-standard way.

 

[semente]

1 hour ago, Miska said:

I can do the same in HQPlayer too... I also sometimes search for things like "DSD64" to find all DSD64 albums I have.

 

I'm sure that one can do this with many other browsers, just not as easily/effectively.

If HQ Player had such a browser I wouldn't be using iTunes for browsing.

 

1 hour ago, Miska said:

Problem with this is that it is your own manual categorization, not something provided as metadata. You have couple of subgenres of classical, but for example all subgenres of rock collapsed into one. For metadata that comes from a service/label it needs to be more specific and standard.

 

1 hour ago, Miska said:

Maybe this helps to see how lot of the metadata things are quite a mess... And iTunes deals with a very minor subset of metadata tags available and in it's own non-standard way.

 

It was by seeing the mess that I chose to tag everything manually myself and why I have tried to iTunes' available fields work best for my needs.

 

At one point I used the "Year" tag to describe the date of the recording but when that moved to "Album" title I found this other use for it. I don't use it for search purposes but to inform me of when a piece was composed. This is for classical only, for other genres I just use the recording/publishing date.

 

Same with the "Artist" and "Album Artist" tags. Because iTunes favours "Album Artist" I use it to describe the main artist and the other tag to list all artist.

 

iTunes then came up with "Work" and "Movement" fields but I never got round to adapting them because as you say it is too time-consuming and my current tagging system suits me just fine.

Downloads are a mess anyway and need retagging so I might as well stick to what works...

 

In my opinion and experience what distinguishes Apple from other OS and software developers is the intuitiveness and functionality of the GUI.

[left channel]

The NY Times article linked above says "critics of the status quo argue that the basic architecture of the classical genre — with nonperforming composers and works made up of multiple movements — is not suited to a system built for pop. " This is made worse by the labels not even using the fields that are available, delivering classical tracks that must be re-tagged by the service or the customer.

 

It also mentions that "Primephonic and Idagio have tried to solve that problem by building more extensive databases, with extensive listings for composers, soloists, orchestras and conductors", but as @David Craff says in the post copied below there is an industry standard for music data, DDEX http://ddex.net/ which could be expanded upon in a shared and uniform way, yet even what exists now is apparently not yet being fully or correctly utilized by all labels and services.

 

As the article points out, classical represents only 2.5% of album sales and 1% of  streams. The streaming services are all losing money, so perhaps we're expecting too much from them. But hopefully over the long term Primephonic and Idagio will lead the way.

 

[ted_b]

I am responsible for the metadata/tags in our own (Channel, JustListen, NativeDSD presents) and our partner labels' albums on NativeDSD dot com.  From day one we have tried to make sure that, when applicable (and when the labels send us enough info), we include tags for work, movement, composer, conductor and sub genre (as well as the normal name, artist, genre, etc).  These additional fields are not often seen by music players, unfortunately, but know that the tags are often there.

 

I agree that standards need to be expanded significantly.

[rvb]

I need some guiding for classical tagging. Now it is a complete mess.

 

What is best practice ?

 

Maybe https://www.dailyrindblog.com/classical-music-metadata-101/

[rando]

@rvb

 

You might try investigating MusiCHI and threads here tackling the intricacies of getting the most personal enjoyment out of the tagging functionality.  

 

Streaming services don't appear anywhere near as powerful at correcting metadata as customers.  Who can freely edit and outright rename personal files used for private performances.

[rvb]

I want start with the composer's name. There should be a list we all should use.

 

https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.html#itc1b5f58a97

 

This list is far from complete. Any suggestions?

[semente]

14 minutes ago, rvb said:

I want start with the composer's name. There should be a list we all should use.

 

https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.html#itc1b5f58a97

 

This list is far from complete. Any suggestions?

 

I get my tagging info from the International Music Score Library Project website -> https://imslp.org/

 

I have posted my tagging methodology in an earlier post - > https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/56654-classical-metadata/?tab=comments#comment-968236

 

 

I use the "Genre" tag field to specify the Era - Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern

 

I use the "Grouping" tag field to specify the Category - Ballet Suites, Cello Sonatas, Chamber, "Instrument name" Concertos, Opera Suites, Piano Sonatas, Solo Piano, Songs and Cantatas, Symphonic Poems, Symphonies, Violin Solo, etc.

[left channel]

Just found this white paper commissioned by IDAGIO. Apologies if it's been posted before:

 

The Classical Music Market: Streaming's Next Genre?

An interesting report on the who where and how of today's classical music listening, with some interesting global comparisons. It of course briefly mentions the problem we are discussing here. It also notes that radio is still the most common classical listening format, followed by CDs and YouTube.

[Mike48]

On 6/24/2019 at 11:43 PM, semente said:

iTunes' "column browser" makes it the best music file browser in my opinion and experience because it makes very good use of tags:

The same sort of thing can be set up with JRiver, and the user can choose any and all tags to use. For example, conductor, composer, orchestra, as well as the ones iTunes supports.

[semente]

21 hours ago, Mike48 said:

The same sort of thing can be set up with JRiver, and the user can choose any and all tags to use. For example, conductor, composer, orchestra, as well as the ones iTunes supports.

 

Can you post a screenshot?

[ted_b]

34 minutes ago, semente said:

 

Can you post a screenshot?

Just go to Audio->Files and right click to your hearts content.  If tags/fields don't exist you can actually create them, too, in Tools->Library&Folders->Manage Library Fields where you can add fields.  Then populate them.

[semente]

Just now, ted_b said:

Just go to Audio->Files and right click to your hearts content.  If tags/fields don't exist you can actually create them, too, in Tools->Library&Folders->Manage Library Fields where you can add fields.  Then populate them.

 

I don't use JRiver. Audirvana has a similar browser too but it's not as effective as the one on iTunes.

[ted_b]

?  Then why ask about it??

[Mike48]

1 hour ago, semente said:

 

Can you post a screenshot?

Sure, here are two.

 

The first setup is preset to show only tracks in the genres "Classical" and "Classical guitar", which I use as top-level descriptors.  Then you can choose from there.

 

The second setup lists only types of music that are or are similar to concertos. So if I want a clarinet concerto, it's easy to get a list.

 

The bottom of each screen then shows the tracks that meet the criteria.

 

I should note that empty values don't display. So in the first display, once I've chosen Aaron Copland as the composer, many subgenres disappear from the second column; e.g. opera, mass, sonata (string), sonata (wind), etc.

 

I have JRiver set up with a split-screen display, so this part would occupy the right 60% or so of the screen. If I wanted to use the full screen, I'd consider adding more sorting variables (columns).

 

Is it clear?

 

[Mike48]

What I forgot to say is that, in JRiver, you can set up such displays to "sort in both directions,"  as they put it. What that means is, you don't have to start subsetting from the left. If you pick a choice in one of the later  columns, the others columns' content will reflect that.

 

So in my second screenshot, you could start by selecting an album artist and instrument, and see what composers are represented.

[Jim Sylva]

Print media catalogers have a long history of addressing issues similar to those facing producers of digital media. Here is a link describing one approach to this difficult task.

 

U.S. Library of Congress' Cataloging in Publication Program

[Mike48]

3 hours ago, Jim Sylva said:

Print media catalogers have a long history of addressing issues similar to those facing producers of digital media. Here is a link describing one approach to this difficult task.

 

U.S. Library of Congress' Cataloging in Publication Program

 

Jim:  Thanks for pointing that out. It is the sort of thing I was thinking of when I bemoaned the absence of professional library-science expertise at the streaming services. As it happens, my brother is a professional librarian specializing in digital media, so I know that such people exist.

 

Unfortunately, the cataloging at both T and Q has been done haphazardly to the extreme, and apparently with no thought to standards, searchability, information content, and so on.  How else can one take a track labeled simply: "Allegro"?

[PAR]

At "Q" this is no longer a problem as they are now inserting work data as a field above track data for recent releases , rather similar to printed CD booklet listings.

 

The problem remains  both at media player level ( almost all of which only work at album/artist/track levels ) and at record company level.  I still retain contacts in the record business after a large part of my life working in it ( ultimately being involved in a small way on ISO metadata projects). I am told that even now, at least here in the UK,  few practitioners personally use computer file based audio systems and thus have no idea at all of how the metadata supplied by them to accompany downloads or streams  displays in real life.