Absolutely Baching

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. [...] 

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! [...]