Re: Composer Tag

I've gone round and round about how to best make use of the composer tag on
the iPod, but haven't come up with a real satisfactory solution for myself.
I've decided that I'm "composer centric" person..i.e. I'll decide I want to
listen to some Bach, and then I'll decide I'll want to listen to Gustav
Leonhardt playing some Bach.  Rarely, do I decide that I want to listen to a
particular performer first, and repertoire 2nd.  So, for me, tagging the
MP3s with Artist==Composer has made sense.  I do sometimes include the
performer name in the album name, but not that often.

I use MP3TagStudio from Magnus Bråding: http://www.magnusbrading.com/mp3ts/
for tagging my MP3s.

It allows me to set both the artist & the composer tags easily from
filenames.  Ephpod then respects those tags when I transfer the MP3s.  (None
of what I'm saying here is germane to MP4s, by the way.)

I store my MP3s on my PC in this format:

d:\recordings\music\genre\composer name\album name\nn - track name.mp3

I make up my own genre names based on my own peculiar way of grouping
classical works: chronologically, by national school.  Thus, I end up with
genre names like this:

a_Medieval
b_Renaissance
c_Early_Baroque
d_English_Italian_Baroque
f_French_Baroque
g_German_Baroque

..etc.  This makes browsing by Genre easy for me on my iPod.

I then have MP3Tag studio retag files according to the file paths.  Because
I encode using VBR, I use TagSudios VBR header repair tool to "fix-up" the
track times.

I've thought of trying to modify this scheme to this format:

d:\recordings\music\genre\composer\album name - artist\nn - track name.mp3

But, in practical terms, I almost always set the artist and composer tags to
be the same (e.g. both artist & composer tags == "Bach, J S".)  The only
exception to this is for compilation albums.  I then use this layout:

d:\recordings\music\genre\Various\album name\nn - composer name--track
name.mp3.

In that case, the Artist tag ends up being "Various" but the composer tag
has the real name in it.  I've found that that makes browsing to the desired
album easier on the iPod: Browse->Genre->Artist->Album ..e.g.:
Browse->b_Renaissance->Various->Stadtpfeiffer - Music of Renaissance
Germany - Piffaro

This is just my peculiar scheme that I've evolved for myself over the past 2
years.  It's worked for me, though I'm sure other folks have thought up
better schemes.  I've got 42+ gigs of MP3s in 7,320 files and this scheme
has allowed me to both keep track and manage things fairly easily, and mass
retag files easily when I modify the scheme.








-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of Warren Merrifield
Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2003 10:28 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ephpod] Composer Tag



I've got my new 3G winpod (using Ephpod 2.73) a few days ago, and I've been
playing around with tagging & directory structures to get everything to sync
up how I want it, and now I have come across a problem:

My PC is organised like this:
    Artist/Album/Artist - TrackName.mp3

apart from soundtracks (&compilations), where the artist directory is a
fixed grouping, i.e.
    Soundtracks/Album/Artist - TrackName.mp3

But when I try to copy a file from my iPod to my hard drive (I rip at work
and at home, and I want to keep everything up to date) I get many extra
artist directories holding just one or two tracks, where they are all off a
soundtrack, for example.

So, I thought, I will retag all my MP3s with the Composer tag to be the
parent directory, copying the artist name for regular CDs and a fixed name,
such as "Soundtracks" for compilation, etc. CDs. then I can arrange
everything thus:
   Composer/Album/Artist - TrackName.mp3
And browse through the Composers on my iPod so that I don't have too many
categories to scroll though. It took some time, but I got it done.

But when I look at the configuration options in ephpod, there isn't a
composer tag letter in the naming conventions.
   ???\%L\%A - %T.mp3

Very annoying! I love Ephpod apart from this little issue!!!


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