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I am interested to hear how others here have tackled these issues and particularly if anyone is aware of any standards, adopted or proposed, de facto or de jure or even simply 'best practices' in this area.

Great post, Struts. I am afraid I don't have anything concrete to offer. I tend to leave both my iPod and my SqueezeCenter on "Shuffle," which kinda makes the metadata question moot.

John Atkinson
Editor, Stereophile

A lot of the problem with dealing with composers vs conductors vs performers is that it's just a really difficult problem in general to structure that kind of data. And most of the time, I don't really give a rat's ass who conducted the music. I have very few duplicates of pieces anyway. So in that sense, setting ARTIST=COMPOSER is a very legitimate and rational decision to make, even if I know it's wrong. It's also much easier to browse classical music that way on my iPod. Half the classical performers I've tagged, I couldn't tell you what exactly they performed...

Usually, the best solution for this sort of thing is a dumb text search: Make sure the information is tagged somewhere, and that the music player can do a substring search on it when you search for a particular work/composer/performer/etc. You'll run into collisions, like if you're looking for a Bernstein-composed piece but you wind up with a lot of Bernstein-conducted pieces, but that is of a relatively minor concern.

I'm not sure about other music players, but I use foobar2000 with the Facets plugin, and it is absolutely glorious with that sort of thing. Music is grouped by artist/album, unless I've set the WORK and COMPOSER and PERFORMER tags on it, in which case it groups by that instead. Hierarchial browsing can be based off of any arbitrary tag, or any programmatic combination of tags. That said, it's not exactly a turnkey solution.

Example (from some vinyl I ripped recently):

Code:Artist Name : Chopin, Fr

Great post Struts and as usual you expressed these very trying issues in a clear and concise manner. The current metadata struture is very pop/rock centric and leaves much to be desired when working with claasical music. Jazz falls somewhere in the middle.

A related issue is the use of metadata to establish relationships within one's music library, i.e. while listening to a John Coltrane Quartet track to be able to find other tracks/albums that Elvin Jones plays on. AFAIK none of currently the established metadata/tagging systems can do even this simple task. Sure one can go online and find all the recordings that feature Elvin Jones but there is no way of searching one's own music library to find out this information.

I know that these complaints seem like very minor issues to most people but i feel that one of the main features of a computer based music system is being able to harness the power of a computer to browse one's library.

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My problem is I have a fairly large library (not much of it ripped yet, partly due to this issue) with quite a lot of duplication.

Your example (super disc by the way, I am a huge fan of Pollini's

Wonderful post, Strut!

I feel your pain. Tagging is one of the main reasons I cannot get myself to fall in love with music servers.

I have also defaulted to Artist = composer. I then add a little info to the title of the album to indicate what orchestra/conductor/performer (there are limitations on what portable players and other servers have as available fields).

As I file my CDs by composer my method makes some sense to me. It still is often easier just to go to the physical CD to find what I want however.

The feature I found most appealing about the new players from Olive was the design of their user interface. The schema for the music database includes a very wide range of categories including several targeted to classical, opera and jazz. You can define, for example, a comma-separated list of sidemen for a jazz entry or the act number for an operatic piece. Rather than displaying these fields in a flat table, these categories are organized within hierarchies defined by the genre. Selection of the genre in the UI defines which categories are displayed.

I haven't heard anything about the Opus No. 4 or the Melody No. 2 since their introduction last April. Has anybody out there had a chance to hear one of these or play with its UI? If their hardware products can't make it in the marketplace, it would be a shame to see the software die also.