Category: Classical Music

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. [...] 

I was in discussion with some people on a Classical music forum recently. Topic of discussion: yet again, the issue of how you go about tagging your music collection so that it works efficiently and in a scalable manner to achieve good music discovery and access. Of course, I long ago decided I had the correct approach to that!

Anyway, the discussion did what it usually does: when push comes to shove, two of the people declaring my proposals unworkable turn out not to bother with tagging music at all (too much hard work!). So they simply rely on their operating system's search engine (which in Windows' case, keeps changing as new OS versions are released, but let's not worry about that just for now!), or in a physical storage hierarchy that they can traverse easily in Windows' file manager. For the record, if you've structured your music appropriately physically, it's trivially easy to use that physical structure to back-port into metadata tags in your music files, and thus most of the hard work of structuring it logically has already been done. But let's not worry about that just for now, either! [...] 

Having begun the process of re-cataloguing my collection of Mozart music just before Christmas (see the previous blog post), I thought it about time I posted a bit of a progress report. Naturally, what began as merely an exercise in re-naming things (for example, 'Requiem, K626' would become 'DZ 02082 Requiem' using the new Dizwell numbering scheme), rapidly became a full-on musicological cataloguing process... since I needed a good list of 'new names' with which to rename my music files to begin with.

As I hope the graphic at the left of this blog post indicates, I'm now about half-way through that cataloguing process. That is, if you visit the new catalogue, you will see green '+' buttons next to each listed composition. Click one of those, and for about half of the listed works, a 'hidden screen' will appear that shows a score of the first few bars of music for the piece (an 'incipit', from the Latin for 'Here begins...') and contains a link to an extract of an audio recording of the work (all extracts last for 40 seconds and are presented as 128kbps MP3 tracks, so are not 'hi-fi' quality). [...]