Classical Music Tagging

[MDE]

The first draft of my wiki on this topic is done - at http://musoware.com/wiki/index.php?titl ... ic_Support
Please reply to this post with any comments and suggestions.

[musoware]

What would be really good is to add one or two screenshots to show just what can be achieved.

[MDE]

What would be really good is to add one or two screenshots to show just what can be achieved.

Agreed. I plan to add some. I'm not quite sure what's the best way of putting them into the wiki. I also plan to provide some downloadable files. I may also put the whole thing on one of my websites and link to the Muso site.

[musoware]

To add them to the wiki you go to the "Special Pages" link on the left hand side and then there's a link "Upload File":
http://musoware.com/wiki/index.php?title=Special:Upload

When it's uploaded you can refer to it as a link from within your page, the above upload page gives examples.

[MDE]

I've added a few pics and will do some more (plus the resources) when I have a bit more time.

[musoware]

Excellent, many thanks.

[MDE]

I'm a bit short of time at the moment, but will get back to this. Also, I'm fine tuning the approach. In particular, I've been looking at iTunes Library Toolkit to automate the iTunes side of things. This would help as currently the effort to make the classical albums usable on iTunes (iPod touch) is scarcely worth it. However, the "Custom Browse" feature of the Toolkit may help here. Any thoughts?

[musoware]

If you want a licence for the Toolkit and don't have one yet I'd be happy to give you one for helping out with this documentation.
I'm not sure what you'd use the Custom Browse task to achieve, but in case you didn't know there's also a Muso option to generate iTunes playlists by Tag - I used this for my iPod since it couldn't hold my entire collection, so I just used a tag to mark the albums I wanted on there, then in iTunes just synched that playlist with the iPod.

[MDE]

What I'm trying to do is to be able to access the classical music by two routes: album/artist and composer/work. iTunes on the PC will handle this but on the iPod you need playlists to handle the "other" dimension (which dimension is which depends on whether you make the album name equal to the work or the CD). So far I have been setting up the playlist each time I rip a CD and use album for the work. Toolkit looks like it can do the playlists automatically (probably by using the grouping=style tag), in which case I might swap the dimensions over. As I understand it, Muso will just create playlists from Muso tags (which is useful for creating specific playlists), but will not create multiple playlists from mp3 tags. Also the "automatic importing" of Toolkit looks useful. I have downloaded a trial version of Toolkit. The only problem I have noticed is that Toolkit won't connect with iTunes when Muso has.
I'll continue to work on this, and try and simplify where I can because I recognise that it seems a bit complex at present. The other research I'm doing is how the major record labels tag their classical music downloads. Also whatever "standards" are already in use (e.g. MusicBrainz). If you like the result and Toolkit is part of the solution, then a licence would be nice and you may also want to consider marketing a bundled solution.

[MDE]

In theory Toolkit looks like a good solution. However, there is one snag, which seems to be an iTunes problem, that I haven't found a way round:
The method I was using (as documented in the wiki) is to define the "album name" as being the composer's work in iTunes, rather than being the actual physical album. Then in Muso (which has CDName mapped to album), I play the CD to iTunes. This creates a Muso playlist that I can use to create a playlist for that CD. This method works fine but is a bit laborious. An automatic approach would be better. However, if I use Toolkit to generate the playlists then at the bottom level (which seems like it must be the album) the track order is all wrong. At higher levels it is correct, but these don't show on the iPod Touch. Sure, I could fix it manually, but that is at least as much work as my previous method. I've Googled around for answers to this, with no luck.