This week at work, I wanted to listen to a particular recording I have of a particular piece, mainly because I’d read a bit of news about the soloist who was featured on the recording, and remembered I had the recording. At first I couldn’t find the recording because the id3 tags iTunes had downloaded for me from Gracenote were ridiculously messed up. Looking more closely at my on-line classical music collection, I realized the id3 tags were even less consistent for classical music than for other genres, like Rock or Pop.
I did a few Google searches because I was sure someone else had encountered and solved this problem. Of course, with all the meta data available about every classical recording, often with multiple composers, pieces, and sometimes even soloists featured on the same ‘album’, it gets to be pretty confusing to search through it.
tunequest supplied the best suggestions so far, which included repurposing the Album tag to refer to the specific piece. That works out pretty well for me, in fact the only time I can see it as a problem is if I wanted to re-rip that album at higher quality later. To account for that, I plan to use the Comment tag to refer to the record label and catalog number for each album, so if I re-rip at a later date I can just search for that, and all the original tracks will come up. Here’s a quick screen-shot of what I’ve done. I welcome comments and suggestions!
