Did You Ever Retag Your Digital Files?

[Florestan]

It's Never for me.

I just hit "Play" and listen. I couldn't care less if the first movement of Mozart's Duernitz piano sonata is tagged "1", or "Peter Donohoe" or "Fuck you!".

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." 

[Florestan]

I confess this thread was inspired by my reading today a blog where a guy was greatly, even ragingly, upset because he bought a Naxos album as download files --- and guess what? Not only the files were tagged inappropriatedly (for him), oh no! that was the least annoying thing. The most annoying thing was that they contained tags, and I quote the guy, "that I did not ask for, and I do not need". Guess what did the guy do? He went out of his way to find softwares which he could use, albeit in a very circumvoluted way, to get rid of those tags.

I just do wonder how many of us do exhibit such behaviour.

I mean, how many of us do not see the forest because of the trees?

[Daverz]

If you don't have a lot of downloads, and you are careful about how you lay them out on your filesystem so you can find them, then tags are probably not that important.  But it doesn't take that may downloads before it becomes difficult to find a specific recording.

I actually wrote my own custom tagging software, which should give you an idea of how persnickety I am.
 
I like browsing albums by composer, so I usually need to edit the COMPOSER tag, since if it's filled out at all it's usually by first name then last name, which doesn't alphabetize properly, and I don't want dozens of variations on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

I like to have something useful in the ARTIST tag, e.g. soloist, orchestra and conductor.  The GENRE tag is often stupidly tagged.  Then there are TITLE tags that make it hard to figure out who the composer is or which work it is from.

Logitech Media Server is somewhat picky about the tags in multi-disc sets before it will properly display them as one multi-disc item (ALBUM and ALBUMARTIST must match across discs and DISCNUMBER must be sequenced properly).  It can be "confused" by obscure tags like MUSICBRAINZ tags, and the problem tags can be difficult to hunt down.

Occasionally downloads won't even have the TRACKNUMBER tagged properly.

[AaronSF]

I routinely retag digital downloads...which I started doing long ago when the meta-data on classical music downloads was notoriously terrible.  Some years ago I found a program called, appropriately, Tag Editor; it does a decent job of supplying missing meta-data, and what it misses you can fill in on the fly.

I use Apple Music (formerly iTunes) to store and play my files.  A long time ago I created playlist folders for each composer, then put the pieces in playlists inside the composer folder (e.g., the Chopin playlist folder contains separate "playlists" for, say, Scherzos, Nocturnes, etc.).  I started doing this because iTunes/Apple Music still does not understand how classical music is structured and so, left to its own devices, will think of every track as a separate "song" that is part of an "album" for a single "artist." 

Once imported into Apple Music, I check the tag data to make sure there were no hiccups during the import.  I usually have to adjust the "composer" tag so it conforms to my preferences (e.g., Brahms, Johannes (1833-1897)), and then there are additional tags that Apple Music allows that are almost never included in the meta-data that I may want to adjust/fill in.

Yes, it was initially a lot of work to set all this up, but now that everything is in place it's only a matter of doing one import at a time. 

And it's got nothing to do with "forests and trees."  For me it's just a matter of wanting to easily and quickly find specific pieces of music in my collection.

[Florestan]

For me it's just a matter of wanting to easily and quickly find specific pieces of music in my collection.

Sure, we all want that. It's just that, if I want to find a specific piece of music by, say, Tchaikovsky, I go to the folder Tchaikovsky.

When I download something, I'm not even curious about what metadata the files contain, I never check them. The only thing I care for is that they play correctly what they are supposed to play and that the tracks are numbered in the right order. Everything else is of no importance to me.

[DaveF]

Since I play my music from a server, I do spend a bit of time getting the basic tags right - composer, title, performer and genre.  Relying on the metadata that comes with the file will quickly give you half-a-dozen composers called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, W.A. Mozart, Mozart, Wolfgang Mozart, Mpzart and so on.  Having said which, I'm sure there's a whole area of metadata of which I'm ignorant - tags such as work, movement etc.  Life's too short.

Favourite metadata editing tool - Kid3.

On the same subject, if not actually relevant to this thread, I heard a piece on BBC Radio 4 earlier this week about the difficulties composers have of making any money out of pieces of theirs that get streamed - apparently it all depends on their name being correctly recorded in the file's metadata which, if you're familiar with the poor quality of this tagging, probably explains why very few people earn much from streaming platforms.

[Papy Oli]

I re-tag all my downloads and rips with mp3Tag, if only to harmonise the composers' names, the album name format, artists/album artists (the same for me) etc. I re-tag GENRE into various subcategories, mostly classified by "broad" nationalities in classical music and some particular boxsets I kept separate for clarity.

It can do with further tidying for sure, but it works for me on a day-to-day basis via the MusicBee player, clicking through Genres or via the search button. That's all I need.

[caters]

I don't really do digital downloads, or record collections for that matter, but in any case I'd sort them by composer and retag if necessary, i.e. I'd have all Beethoven pieces with the same tag, all Mozart pieces with the same tag etc.

[Daverz]

Sure, we all want that. It's just that, if I want to find a specific piece of music by, say, Tchaikovsky, I go to the folder Tchaikovsky.

Do you actually break up the tracks on multi-composer discs into separate folders?

For me, maintaining the integrity of the original disc is important.  One disc -- and all the tracks on the disc -- per folder.

[Madiel]

I retag classical files in iTunes reasonably often.

It depends a fair amount on the degree of readability of the existing tags. @Florestan might cope but I'd have a moderately hard time memorising that "fuck you" was actually the first movement of a Mozart piano sonata, and a much harder time remembering exactly which Mozart piano sonata it was and who is performing it.

Sometimes it's to do with just moving information about. People make a complete mess of working out where to put, say, the composer in the metadata. I often put the composer in the performer field (as composer/performer), which then means I don't really want the composers name repeated 25 times in the track titles.

[Florestan]

Do you actually break up the tracks on multi-composer discs into separate folders?

Never. A multi-composer disc is filed in a folder called "Compilations" which contains subfolders such as Piano Concertos, Violin Concertos, Chamber Music, Piano Music, Vocal Music. For instance, keeping with Tchaikovsky, Lisa Batiashvili's recording of his and Sibelius's violin concertos can be acessed via the following steps (each step being a folder): Romanticism >>> Compilations >>> Violin Concertos.

For me, maintaining the integrity of the original disc is important.  One disc -- and all the tracks on the disc -- per folder.

I have exactly the same philosophy.

[Florestan]

It depends a fair amount on the degree of readability of the existing tags. @Florestan might cope but I'd have a moderately hard time memorising that "fuck you" was actually the first movement of a Mozart piano sonata, and a much harder time remembering exactly which Mozart piano sonata it was and who is performing it.

Well, I don't have to memorise any particular tag. If I want to listen to a Mozart piano sonata, I do it via the following sequence of folders: Classicism >>> Composers >>> Austria-Germany >>> Mozart >>> Piano Sonatas & Piano Music. This last folder contains the actual recordings, organized alphabetically by performer.

[Madiel]

Well, I don't have to memorise any particular tag. If I want to listen to a Mozart piano sonata, I do it via the following sequence of folders: Classicism >>> Composers >>> Austria-Germany >>> Mozart >>> Piano Sonatas & Piano Music. This last folder contains the actual recordings, organized alphabetically by performer.

Yeah, but... even with all of that, a track named SUPER weirdly could cause trouble for knowing exactly which piano sonata the performer is playing.

[Florestan]

Yeah, but... even with all of that, a track named SUPER weirdly could cause trouble for knowing exactly which piano sonata the performer is playing.

Before listening, I take a look at the booklet, if available, or at the back cover of the CD. This way I know exactly what sonata is being played on any given track. I might miss the tempo indication in some cases but it's not a big deal for me.

[aukhawk]

Do you actually break up the tracks on multi-composer discs into separate folders?

I do this.  To take a typical example, a CD coupling of Brahms and Bruch violin concertos (by the same artists) will end up in:
classical / Brahms / Violin Concerto (Chung)
classical / Bruch / Violin Concerto (Chung)

I would normally (though not 100% all the time) even split a coupling just to separate out the works, eg a typical coupling of Beethoven Piano Concertos 3&4:

classical / Beethoven / Piano Concerto 3 (Schnyder)
classical / Beethoven / Piano Concerto 4 (Schnyder)

because there's nothing worse (IMO) than having to stay alert to the end of a piece of music in order to stop the player before the next work starts.

[Madiel]

I do this.  To take a typical example, a CD coupling of Brahms and Bruch violin concertos (by the same artists) will end up in:
classical / Brahms / Violin Concerto (Chung)
classical / Bruch / Violin Concerto (Chung)

I would normally (though not 100% all the time) even split a coupling just to separate out the works, eg a typical coupling of Beethoven Piano Concertos 3&4:

classical / Beethoven / Piano Concerto 3 (Schnyder)
classical / Beethoven / Piano Concerto 4 (Schnyder)

because there's nothing worse (IMO) than having to stay alert to the end of a piece of music in order to stop the player before the next work starts.

There are definitely cases where I've done similar in iTunes, splitting up a CD into multiple separate 'albums' on there.

I've also regrouped opuses. Graham Johnson doing song series on Hyperion has a habit of splitting up opuses across different albums and/or singers, and I've been known to put them back together again.

[Holden]

As I've got my whole CD collection ripped to FLAC with dBPoweramp getting the metadata details correct was important. Like others I use a folder system. For many disc where only one composer is on the CD it goes into one of that composers subfiles. For example Beethoven/Piano Sonatas/Disc Name or Number. For example I've got

Beethoven/Piano Sonatas/Annie Fischer/Beethoven complete Piano Sonatas Vol 1.

Now I can't see what's on this CD without amending the last tag but that doesn't matter to me. Also a simple search in Foobar will find me Annie's Op 28 if I want it.

This system also transfers across to my car audio and also my DAP.

[amw]

Generally yes. I try to retag everything with composer and performer names organised as [lastname, firstname] instead of Firstname Lastname, change genre names to reflect the time period [Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Modern, etc.] instead of just having everything listed as "Classical", add a tag for the record label, etc. For iTunes I also make sure every track name uses, where appropriate, the Work/Movement format so that iTunes won't try to shuffle the individual movements of a larger work. (I haven't yet found a way to replicate this functionality in other software, though I'm sure it exists.) I did most of the tagging work back in 2015 over several months, so nowadays I only have to edit tags when adding new albums.

[KevinP]

I have no use for tags. Never bother with them. (Alas, it's an issue in the car, which doesn't care which of my neatly-arranged folder the files are in. But I still don't bother editing them.)

File names are different.

I have two homes, one of which is a crash pad where my music listening is usually done from a blu-ray player reading a usb drive, but I can't see the whole file name at once unless it's short, so I may have to edit out all the superfluous information at the beginning of the file name so I get straight to the unique parts. There's already a folder with the composer's name and another with the work, and possibly some others in-between if I have a lot of works by that composer ('Shostakovich/Orchestral_works/Symphonies/13/' for example).

Even ignoring the idiosyncrasies of this particular playback system, I do wish classical music people wouldn't confuse file names with wikipedia articles. I hate file names like this:

01_Bartók, Béla (1881 - 1945). Concerto for Orchestra, , Sz. 116, BB 123, Conducted by Reiner, Friz (1888 - 1963) Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 1958. I. Introduzione. Andante non troppo – Allegro vivace.flac

They're annoying on a computer, but on my tv screen, I'll have to wait at least 30 seconds before the unique point of the file name (the 'I. Introduzione...') scrolls around.

By all means, put it in the metadata if it's important to you, but please not the file name.

I also sometimes have to edit out non-English characters due to the version of Windows I'm required to use at work not being in English.

[Spotted Horses]

My folder structure has is two deep. I have a folder for each record label (i.e., Decca, Erato, Hyperion, etc) and within each label folder I have folders for each release, named by the catalog number. The folder for the original release of Karajan's Alpine symphony is DGG400039-2, a subfolder of the Deutsche Grammophon folder. I do this so that I can find any release that I have identified from an independent source, regardless of whether there are multiple composers included or I have messed up the indexing. Then I "tag" each release with my own listing system. Each release folder contains a file called contents.txt which contains the essential (to me) information. For each work in the release the composer, piece, Opus number, genre, conductor, ensemble, soloist, recording date, is specified. A program I have written scans the directory tree for contents files and compiles a list which I can view as a spreadsheet file or as a set of html files. When I find something I want to listen to in one of the listings it also lists what folder it is in.

I gave up on media file tags because they are so poorly implemented, even by the record labels themselves. The composers name can appear as composer, artist, in the field for the work name, or in the field for the track name, or not at all, etc.

I only use tags incorporated into the media files themselves to identify which track I want to listen to, after I have found the release in one of the listings. Sometimes they are inadequate even for that purpose.