Classical MP3s

After working though my Rock, Jazz, Blues, Folk, World and Misc CD collections, a couple weeks ago I finally started in on ripping my Classical CD collection to MP3s. I'd been dreading this and so far that dread has proven to be justified. Ripping the more popular forms of music is easy, just pop in the CD, let CDDB do its thing and then it imports fine. Classical however doesn't work so well. The problem is that the ID3 tags that provide the meta-data for MP3 files were never really designed for classical music. This has resulted in the content of CDDB being a real mess when it comes to Classical.

It seems no one knows how to fill in the ID3 tags for classical, so they just fill them in any old way. Sometimes you get the composer in the composer field, sometimes in the artist field, and sometimes even in the song name field. Of course sometimes it's not included at all or may be in a completely different language. The same applies to just about every other field that can be set, they come out all mixed up with missing information and are almost worthless because of that. This makes importing classical CDs a real pain because if you don't fix the ID3 tags you'll never be able to find the music again. With regular CDs you can use spatial memory combined with whatever meta-data you can remember, i.e. the CD is near the bottom of the rack and has a green spine. With MP3s it's detailed meta-data or nothing to find a song again.

When I started importing my classical I was being lazy and went through about 50 discs without fixing the meta-data, what a mistake. Now I can't find anything from those discs so I'm stuck with going back and correcting the already imported discs. Not much fun. Even less fun is that I have about 1,200 more classical CDs to go. I figure I'll be done about, oh I'd say 2010 or so.

Here's what I'm using for tagging.

• name field = work name (including key and catalog #) - movement
• artist field - the artist performing the work. If an orchestra the full name followed by - and the conductor
• composer field - The name of the composer first last
• genre field - classical (I should really break this down more, but it works for now)
• album field - The name off the spine of the CD.
• year field - The year the recording was released. (I haven't always been remembering to do this)

It's not ideal, but given the limits on my patience for entering data it's about the best I can hope for.

Posted by Kimbro Staken