I am new here but I have a question about MusicBrainz metadata for some classical albums:
In my filesystem I like to have classical albums filed under directories for composer instead of under directories for the artist. This works well when the whole album has tracks only of the same composer, but classical albums often have tracks of multiple composers.
Here an example album from the database: Virtuoso Recorder Concertos by Michala Petri – This album has works from Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann and George Frideric Handel.
When I file this album under directories of these composers it is split over three directories. This I totally want to avoid.
One solution can be that I manually set the ‘albumtype’ to “compilation”, but I don’t want to do this, because normally “compilation” stands for “compilation of different artists”, not “compilation of different composers”
So I am looking for another solution: Does in MusicBrainz possibly already exist some metadata field for “compilation of different composers” ?
Or is there another way to solve this – preferably with already existing metadata?
Classical music presents kind of a tough puzzle, for exactly the reason you mentioned. Probably most albums fall into one of 4 buckets:
one composer (“Mozart: The Complete Symphonies”)
one ensemble and/or conductor, which may include works by several composers
one soloist, which also may include works by several composers
no discernible “primary” artist
Because of all that, it’s almost impossible to force a single schema on your folder/file system. I tried splitting the files among several composers, as you mentioned, for a while. Your desire to totally avoid that is a good instinct. Albums in bucket #1 were easy – they go under the composer. Everything in the other 3 buckets went under “Various Artists.” But that meant that a large percentage (about a third) of my classical albums fell into the Various Artists bucket, which was far from ideal.
What I eventually landed on was to have my albums in a folder for the primary artist, whether that’s a soloist, an orchestra, a conductor, or a composer. I know that’s not what you want, but it’s what, for me, has been the best workable solution.
So the album you linked to would, in my file system, be under a folder for “Michala Petri.”
After moving to my final (or current, anyway) solution, the Various Artist folder is now down to two albums, which have no artist that I could call the primary.
So here’s a screenshot of a portion of my Classical folder:
Intersting, so you chose as grouping folder sometimes the composer and sometimes the artist (i.e. soloist, orchestra orconductor)?
I assume this decision is a manual one, isn’t it? You look at the album and choose the grouping folder yourself, right?
(I use beets to file albums into my library and beets can do some automatic filing based on whether an album is a compilation or not, but as mentioned in the original post with classical albums this doesn’t work well.)
I’ve always managed my files manually, and It took a lot of work, initially, to get my files and metatags in order. I was using Plex at the time, and it operates based on the metatags, so it was important to get them right. Once I did, most of the headaches I had with Plex went away. I have since switched from Plex to Emby, because Emby handles classical music much better, but it was an easy transition because my tags were already solid. Now, I only have to deal with tags and files when I add a new album to the collection, which isn’t all that often. I actually enjoy the process.
For non-classical music, my method usually agrees with MusicBrainz, but not classical. For instance, take the album you linked in your first post. Following MB’s guidelines, the Release Artist (Album Artist) for that album should be:
Vivaldi, Handel, Telemann, Marcello, Sammartini; Michaela Petri, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Kenneth Sillito, Iona Brown
as that is what you find on the front cover. That’s how the Album Artist metadata tag would be populated if I had this album, but I wouldn’t want a folder named like that. So it would go in Music\Classical\Michala Petri (I keep classical in a separate branch under “Music” precisely because of this puzzle).
As for ‘compilation,’ I would definitely recommend MB’s guideline:
It doesn’t say a lot about classical, but there is this line about what is not a compilation:
a classical release containing new recordings of works by a classical artist.
If you really want the focus to be completely on composers:
You could make folder: Various composers
The only way to properly browse through classical, is making it searchable. You type Prokofiev, all releases containing Prokofiev pop up. You type Michelangeli, all releases performed by Michelangeli pop up, etc.
A single (group of) performer(s) playing pieces by various composers, not being a compilation, is often called a recital.
(A recital can also focus on a single composer, just as a compilation can focus on a single band)
But sometimes it’s just a thematic concert/performance
I have one huge folder, for all releases, the artist(s) (composer & performer or whatever is presented as release artist(s), initial release year of the music, release title.
Every genre, no splitting up. It ends always in cases that are hard to categorise. So I choose not to.
Saves me from categorising, search is my friend.
(playout software or tools usually also have a search for the library, I use foobar2000 local & Plex for remote play)
Plex isn’t ideal for classical. I heard Emby might be better suited (but it’s way too much work to index everything again in a different streaming server system, so I stick to Plex.)
foobar2000 is fine, you can customise it to show about whatever tag in the playlist and the search looks everywhere: file name, tags, directory, could deliver false hits for some names, but still…
Albums in bucket 