General tagging advise

[calberga]

Puzzled about some .mp3 tagging practices, which is also about organization of works.

I have a fairly large collection of .mp3 files which I am trying to tag in a consistent and
meaningful way.  They fall into three categories which I think of as, 1: Classical, 2: Folk &
World, and 3: Odds and Ends.

I'm now convinced that the first two types will need different patterns of tagging, while I haven't
even begun to think about the last, which includes spoken word and humor.

The classical (which in turn is broken into Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and
Modern Classical) item are grouped by Composer and then by "work", symphonies, concertos,
song cycles, etc.  Note that some other types of music are organized in this way, in particular
Musicals & Soundtracks.  In these groups the problem I see is that many of the "works" (for
which there really is no tag as such) are multi item, movements in concertos, symphonies,
chamber works, and the often a multi layered structure in operas, oratorios, etc. with arias and
recitative and the bottom and acts or acts containing scenes above.  In general these works do not
map into albums, as an opera may be issued as two or more albums, while the instrumental
works may be two or more in a single album, sometimes linked by a common composer, but
sometimes a best tenuously by nationality of the composer or so such weak similarity.

I had started to use the "album" tag for what I think of as "works", and the "comment" tag for the
place in the structure, "Act I", "Aria", "2nd Movement", but am now thinking these should be in
the "Subtitle" tag.

For pop and jazz I have usually grouped the disks by performer/artist, and within those by album.


For Folk and World Music the first level of groups are by ethnicity/nationality, Asturian, English,
Russian, Welsh.  Here are a lot of hazy (and down right weird) boundaries.  All of the following
are my own divisions, and may well fly in the face of those that I am assigning places.  There are
Canadian, French Canadian, Canadian Maritimes.  There are British Isles, English, Welsh,
Scottish and Irish.  There ISN'T "American".  Given the dense entanglement of imported British
and home grown US music (see Appalachia) I have thrown up my hands and most performers on
the West side of the Atlantic in to "Anglo-American" while retaining an English group. 

Where linguistic and national boundaries are close things are easy.  Otherwise they get
splintered.  Where language seems to map into a distinct musical style I will divide, Spanish, but
also Galician, Asturian, and Basque.  Where language and style (assuming I can distinguish it)
are multi-national They may be spread widely, so there Latin-American is Spanish and Andean in
Indigenous Languages.  Similarly, there is Balkan and Serbian, Croatian, and Bulgarian.

Finally, there are (particularly in English songs) a tendency to use the nationality of the performer
above the source of the songs.

Note also, most, if not all, of these major groups have at an overriding mixed group.  There are
group tiled "Various Composers" in each of the "classical" music groups, for, say, "Duets" with
Bartoli and Terfel, with songs by Mozart, Rossini, and Donizetti.  In others, such as Folk &
World Music, there are sub-groups "Various Artists" containing many compilations, such as
"Archive of American Folk Song", "Don't Mourn - Organize!--Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe
Hill", & "Troubadours of the Folk Era" (of which there are three volumes).  There is also a group
"Various Peoples" (which in turn has a "Various Artists" sub-sub-group!).  Here are albums
which span more than one culture, ordered by Artist.  Things like Shep Ginandes singing in
English (both sides of the pond), French, Russian, and Yiddish, and an album titled with the
following note:

Title 'Fuge Imaginea' is in romanian and is wrong, means 'The Picture is Running'
In fact the author would say 'Beautiful Landscape'

Traditional folk songs from:
România: A1, A4, B1, B4, B7, B8
Greece: A2
Poland: A3
Bulgaria: A4
Mexic: A5, A6, A7, B2
Macedonia: B3
Russia: B5
Ukraina: B6

So, that is where I sit, scratching my head.  I would hope this might trigger a polite discussion (I
know I must be wrong with some of my ideas, but please don't yell, I'm an old man and want to
get things done, so when someone inherits this mess they can find there way about it, and more
important find thing they might be looking for.  Any suggestion (that doesn't involve changing
the names or tags of everything (about 125,000 .mp3 files) are welcome, and any pointers to
where this has all be thrashed out would be greatly welcome.  Even suggestions of software
packages, though I recently downloaded one and turned it loose on the files and watched as it
proposed an organization where many "albums" held a single random movement of a concerto!
To prove my antediluvian position, I'm still using mp3/tag-studio, and the old Editpad
text editor (not the "Lite"or "Classic", to older one)

[Phil Harvey]

Note that ExifTool does not have the ability to tag MP3 files.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

There's not much advice I can offer. You're already far deeper into your categories than I ever got. I would mostly scrape the basic details and that would be it.

You would probably have better luck with a more focused forum or sub-reddit. Or a discord channel if you can find one.

[calberga]

Yes, I use the old mp3/tag Studio program for writing .mp3 tags (and I know it can't handle FLAC).  I just wish Magnus Brading hadn't put it aside.  I actually use it on .jpg files as well.  Its "set tags from list" is most useful.  Perhaps EXIFTool can do the same thing, but I haven't found it.

PS another sign of my out-of-dateness: I do all my programming in Common LISP.  I retired in '91 and had been doing main-frame, mostly assembler language programming, and have never learned any of the languages that have sprouted up since.

[calberga]

I have been unable to find a more focused discussion.  I also have avoided Reddit up until now.  It seems clear that those who have defined the current set of tabs are not very conversant with classical (small c) music.  Nor with the difference between nationality and ethnicity.  Sigh. 

Thank you for your suggestions, although I had hoped some other users would have chimed in.  I can't be the only one with these problems.