Category: cataloguing

Schubert's symphonies are surprisingly tricky things to catalogue correctly, although as someone who hasn't exactly been been a huge a fan of the man or his works, it's taken me quite a long time to realise the extent of the problem!

I noticed it today, though, as Giocoso decided to randomly select Schubert for a couple of plays: [...] 

Thanks to another recent video by David Hurwitz, I was finally persuaded to bite the bullet and splash out on the complete Domenico Scarlatti keyboard sonatas as performed by Scott Ross (the album artwork of which appears off to the left). It's a 34-CD collection, available for purchase from Presto Classical at only around £2.50 a box, which seems reasonable value to me.

Curiously, this collection of works has previously been discussed by me in comments on this blog piece, where I was asked by 'DACO' how I would go about tagging the multiple Chopin Nocturnes or the even more multitudinous Scarlatti keyboard sonatas. I had to answer DACO in that exchange in the abstract, since I didn't at that point actually own the Scarlatti. The general principle I advanced, however, was: group lots of little pieces together in whatever way makes them accessible and attractive to play. Thus, I could speak from experience: a CD of Britten arrangements of folksongs would be ripped and catalogued as a single collection of folksongs, rather than 21 short pieces of (usually) less than 3 minutes' duration. Similarly, I had only just completed a re-rip of the complete works of Percy Grainger, where because of the quantity of music involved, and its overall great similarity, I found it more expedient to essentially rip entire CDs as 'Grainger Compilations' than try to separate out each individual composition as its own 'album'. [...] 

This is the last in my series of three posts explaining what I've done to fix up a silly cataloguing error in my extensive music library. The problem was first described back here. But to recap: whilst I have always "allowed" the inclusion of a recording year in the ALBUM tag where it was necessary (to distinguish, for example, between Boult's 1959 and 1968 recordings of Vaughan Williams' 9th symphony), I only added the recording date rarely, and as an exception to the norm. Rethinking the logic of what counts as recorded music's primary key, however, I realised that the recording date should always and without exception be included in a recording's ALBUM tag.

So, the past few posts have been about the scripts I wrote to (a) check every recording had a recording year stored in its YEAR tag; (b) to check that those recordings that had a date included in their ALBUM tag matched there what their YEAR tag said should apply as the recording date. [...] 

So, this is the next in a mini-series of posts, explaining how I went about fixing up the discovery that I'd tagged my music files incorrectly after all these years, despite knowing better!

The short version is that I always knew the recording date was an important factor in distinguishing between recordings of the same work by the same artist, but since I didn't often have duplicates, I assumed I'd get away without including it in the ALBUM tag for a composition. And then I realised that though I might well get away with it today, a new acquisition here or there could well mean that I wouldn't get away with it for ever: if the information is theoretically necessary to distinguish recordings, then it ought to be present, always. [...] 

My last post explained that my music collection needed to be re-catalogued to some extent. In particular, I needed to make sure that every track I've ever ripped has an entry in its YEAR tag, identifying when a particular recording was made (because that little piece of information turns out to be a crucial component in classical music recordings' "primary key")

I wasn't going to check all 64,000+ ripped audio tracks by hand to achieve this! Instead, I needed to script something that could batch-check my entire collection in one go. [...]