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The music classifying nightmare

blog.pkh.me

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#61
post #60

There seems to be confusion between the filesystem and the metadata. The filesystem is for storage... it's only important to be able to group tracks together in small batches (releases - albums/singles/EPs) to be able to manage the files The metadata is for searching, grouping and locating in your music player. With that in mind, a lot of the problems he's cited vanish. I have ~84,000 tracks from over 6,000 albums. T…

What is Squeezebox exactly? I found many programs named like that and the one I think is you are talking about seems to have been discontinued now. Do you have a link or something?

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#62
post #60

There seems to be confusion between the filesystem and the metadata. The filesystem is for storage... it's only important to be able to group tracks together in small batches (releases - albums/singles/EPs) to be able to manage the files The metadata is for searching, grouping and locating in your music player. With that in mind, a lot of the problems he's cited vanish. I have ~84,000 tracks from over 6,000 albums. T…

What is Squeezebox exactly? I found many programs named like that and the one I think is you are talking about seems to have been discontinued now. Do you have a link or something?

I think he is referring to the Logitech Squeezebox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_(network_music_playe...

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#63
Having worked with it for a few years, modelling music metadata is indeed an absolute nightmare.

There are some efforts to standardise this stuff though, see http://www.ddex.net which a lot of the digital supply chain is starting to adopt. It's something of a set of scary great kitchen-sink XML schemas (schemata?) but might be of interest to those who get massively nerdy about this sort of thing.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Squeezebox exactly? I found many programs named like that and the one I think is you are talking about seems to have been discontinued now. Do you have a link or something?

I think he is referring to the Logitech Squeezebox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeezebox_(network_music_playe...

That's the one.

I use Squeezebox server on a QNAP NAS storage thing.

Then I use a Squeezebox Transporter for the superlative DAC that it has.

Squeezebox server allows me to listen remotely too, so for more than a decade I've had the ability to listen to my home music collection from wherever I am in the world (assuming I have an internet connection). I use DNSMadeEasy for their dyndns stuff.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#65
post #13

It looks like the author has come to an understanding with his/her disorganized music collection, but beets makes it pretty easy to bring sanity back to a messy music library: http://beets.radbox.org

I second beets, it handles big libraries better than any tool I've come across. My once messy library is now pretty much perfectly tagged (thanks to MusicBrainz) and organised.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#66
post #8

doesn't the musicbrainz schema cover most/some of this? http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainz_Database/Schema also, given the ubiquity of UTF-8, why the need for ASCII?

It would be interesting to make an analysis on how MusicBrainz deals with all these problems, I admit I didn't look much into this. But AFAICT it wouldn't really solve the file system problem, except if you decide to name your files with a hash. Also, you might still want at some point to keep extra information MusicBrainz wouldn't handle, even if you have a MusicBrainz ID stored in the file to identify the music. Ab…

Not to mention Prince's former name...

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#67
What I lack (and I doubt I'm the only one) is well-thought-out tag system and more advanced players.

All textual entries (title, album, author, ...) should be stored in original language using original alphabet. Player could transliterate them if user doesn't know the alphabet (e.g. doing romanization of hiragana, katakana and kanji using Hepburn system for japanese music). Such entry should be able to store also a translated text, usually at least English one for non-English stuff.

That would solve also another problem the blog post author mentions, first name and last name ordering issue. Quoting Wikipedia:

"In Hungary, along with China, Korea, Japan and in many other East Asian countries, the family name is placed before a person's given name."

Thus in original language the order would be original, but in English one, Western-style, i.e. placing last name after the first name (and of course transliterated already).

It would be up to a user to choose what player should show her or him: original names, transliterated names, translated names.

But AFAIK ID3v2 and Vorbis don't support such stuff (well, you can try going with custom keys, but non-standard means mess) and I haven't heard about player that would do any transliteration either.

---

As for filenames I think that the best is Latin alphabet, with the most-widely used romanizations of non-Latin alphabets and simplifications of extended Latin alphabets (like removing diactric marks etc.). Clean visible ASCII!

I know that Asian people would mostly disagree on such file naming rule. :)

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#68
post #30

I only go so far as sanitizing and standardizing my music collection through Tag&Rename (and I haven't found a good OSX equivalent to this yet sadly). It gets the data from Amazon in 98% of cases, adds the album art (which I like having on my player), etc. Then I store the files in: Artist/Album/Track# - Song name [- Artist name] The last is only there for soundtracks and other "Various Artists" type collections. Thi…

Unfortunately ID3 tags are a terrible failure for classical music: do I put Chopin's Nocturnes by Martha Argerich under Chopin or under Martha Argerich? I actually have a random mix of both : a Chopin folder with stuff played by Argerich, Pollini, etc. and some Argerich, Ashkhenazy, etc. folders.

Standard genres are terrible: you have like 20 different sub-genres of electronic music, but Machaut, Bach, Verdi and Boulez should all go under "Classical", are you friggin' kidding me?

There's a much worse problem which isn't related to classification by the way: it's almost impossible with any compressed audio format to chain parts without an audible cut. It's a big, big problem for classical music too.

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#69
post #15

You're making the problem a lot harder than it needs, or ought, to be. The most telling example, IMO, is the Aphex Twin one... > Oh, and his real name is Richard David James. What are you > supposed to use for the file system directories and files > name? His name? The most common nickname? Both? One file > system solution is to have symbolic links (do you link > Richard David James to Aphex Twin, or vice versa?). Fo…

> The default iTunes structure (Artist/Album/01 - Song Title.mp3) seems to work fine, for example.

It only works fine for basic rock and pop (because even if there is a composer different from the interpreter, that's optional). It starts breaking for remix albums released under a given artist (the original composer) where one song may have been remixed with three different people, now you have to start infecting the track names with the remixer.

And then you've got classical music, where each of the composer, orchestra, conductor and soloist may be considered the artist, but none really is because the authorship of this precise interpretation is a combination of all of them, and any missing will lead to a collision. TFA also touches upon original sountracks (of movies, animes or games) which regularly open whole new cans of worm, and special compilations such as Dark was the Night (40-odd artists — excluding composer for covers — for 31 tracks in a single album, good luck handling that one without relying on the "various artists" crutch)

Re: The music classifying nightmare

#70

Use hierarchical directories. They work. I sort my mp3's into two distinct music collections: /Albums/ /Singles/ Then I sort by genre: /Albums/%GENRE /Singles/%GENRE In Albums, I then sort by artist, then by album: /Albums/%GENRE/%ARTIST/%ALBUM/# - %SONG.mp3 Whereas in Singles, I organize by: /Singles/%GENRE/%ARTIST - %SONG.mp3 This system scales very well. I have a 100GB collection and can nail down any song or albu…

I can see few issues with this that wouldn't work with me: 1) How do you deal with songs that have multiple genres? It is a standard part of the TCON (content type / genre tag) to separate multiple values through either coma, slash. For example this allows you to select songs that are tagged as both 'Ambient' and 'Rock'. 2) how do you deal with album that has songs of varying styles? For example: "Prodigy - Music for…

> I can see few issues with this that wouldn't work with me:

And then, good luck with classical pieces, who's your artist of the composer, the orchestra (or group), the conductor (if any) and the soloist (if there's one)?

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