How do others edit titles of CDs with multiple composers

Roon Software Discussion
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This is a simple example because the recording only has two composers:

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The screen shot shows my Roon listing for this recording. I’m separating the two composers with a slash, but I’ve also tried entering each one as though I was creating it for a single composer, like this:
Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole; Tchaikovsky: Serenade Melancolique

I’m wondering how others handle this fairly common problem with classical music because either way I compose the metadata title the secondary composer and title is not searchable.

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MusicBrainz has this release so it ought to ID , I would then accept what the ID’ed album name is (I notice its Unidentified)

They conveniently leave out the composers

I normally leave the first half as a Colon, Lalo: and then a Comma hence

Lalo: Symphonie Espagnole, Tchaikovsky Serenade Melancolique

I am not aware of any Standard. In terms of searching , accepting either MusicBrainz format or Tivo format seems sensible.

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3

Because there really isn’t an accepted ‘standard’, as Mike says, you can happily do what works best for you.

I tend to choose either the composer I like the most, or the one whose work(s) occupy the greatest space on the particular recording.

4

I use Picard on my mac. It looks up the album and gives you the ability to edit the tags for the full album, for groups of songs, or by individual song. It is a free app and updated periodically.

5

FWIW - I use dbPoweramp to rip my cd’s and am currently doing a large batch for a collection. Their process theory seems to hold for any editing done to files once ripped. dbPoweramp uses semicolons to separate multiple details - whether composers, artists etc. This creates them as “separate” entities and allows searching etc. (eg Bach; Tchaikovsky) AFAIK and from what I have seen, “slashes, commas and colons” keep the details as one string and therefore only a single result in a search. That’s what I have found anyway.

6

Yes, semicolons are the ‘industry standard’.

7

My titles always include a colon between the composer (or the artist if it’s a collection of songs) and the music title. I follow the music titles with a semi-colon.

Korngold: Violin Concerto in D Major; Barber: Adagio for Stringsi; Bruch: Violin Concerto No 1;

An example of your finished title would be helpful.

8

Welcome to the cruise …

I think @Echolane was asking more about the text format of the album title rather than the mechanics of the actual editing.

There are quite few free tag editing software packages about eg TagScanner or MP3Tag

As mentioned above the go to software is probably DbPoweramp , many Roon users have used it to rip and edit.

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9

Mark actually they are not. So how multiple values are stored is tag format specific so to take two examples

ID3v24 used by mp3, wav and dsf separates multiple values by the null character
e.g
genre1\0\genre2\0\genre3

VorbisComments used by Flac and Ogg files write separate tags for each value
e.g
GENRE=genre1
GENRE=genre2

So DbPoweramp uses the semicolon in the UI as a way for the user to say to DbPoweramp store these as separate values, but how it does this depends on the tag format you are using it doesn’t actually write a semicolon to the field.

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I should have said that semi-colons are the ‘standard’ for artists and composers, which I have always understood to be the case, and to which the OP was mainly referring.

Still prepared to be wrong here, though; thanks for the correction, Paul; is it just for artists?

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Hi Mark, there are a few different things going on here, in your reply you quoted @Sean_O and he was referring to how to split a value into multiple different values when saved so in that context semicolon is not an industry standard it is just the way that dbPoweramp lets you tell it to split a value into multiple values (In SongKong we use ;;;) and that is what I was responding to.

But actually the OP was asking how to format the album title not the artists since composers are not usually the album artist but they are usually part of the album title, MusicBrainz has some quite complicated (and to my mind not that consistent) rules about this . I don’t think there is an industry standard but some ways are more popular than others.

But I think you are referring to how to format the composer or albumartist field (not the album field) when want to include multiple people and I would agree for a list of composers then semicolon would be my choice. However your link muddies the water further because Roon can both deal with real multiple values (this is the easiest case)
e.g.
COMPOSER=Lalo
COMPOSER=Tchaikovosky

or parse a single value into multiple values
e.g.
COMPOSER=Lalo;Tchaikovosky

So if your tags are like the second case then it is important to use semicolon rather than comma to help Roon parse the text correctly. However if you can actually store the values as multiple values then Roon does not have to parse the text into multiple values, how you store as multiple values is dependent on your tag editor.

It is definitely a confusing area, this is how we do it in SongKong, SongKong uses two different field to store album artists, the ALBUMARTIST field stores them as a single field because many music players don’t understand multiple values and it allows us to capture how they are credited, then we have an ALBUMARTISTS field that stores as separate values. But Because Roon understands separate values when using SongKong with the Roon profile we store multiple values in the ALBUMARTIST field as well and this gives best results. And we have a separate COMPOSER field that also stores as separate values.

1 Like
12

Yes, I was indeed asking about format, not the underlying code. Perhaps I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. And on further reflection I wish that the use of colon and semi-colon would be very significant. I always sort by TITLE.

I’m looking for the best way to compose metadata so I can retrieve the recordings I want to listen to.
My music library consists of 90% classical music and opera and I don’t listen to tracks, I listen to albums.

I’m usually faced with two categories of albums 1) those featuring composers such as Beethoven or Brahms, or Mahler of Verdi or Puccini, etc. #2) Those featuring Artists, such as Janos Starker, Oscar Peterson, Luciano Pavarotti, etc.

My music sorts by Title.

For those in category #1 I combine composer and composition in the Title field like this:
Beethoven:Symphony No. 5
If there are multiple selections on the album, I just add a semi-colon and repeat as above as many times as there are different compositions.

For those in Category #2 I combine Artist and album title in the Title field like this:
Luciano Pavarotti;Greatest Hits
As in category #1, if there are multiple artists, I follow each artist entry with a semi-colon followed by as many artists as there are and using the same convention,

Since I sort by Title it’s easy to search by Artist or Composer to find the recording I’m looking for,. Or if I’m scanning, everything is sorted to a logical sequence. The only problem I encounter is in finding the secondary compositions or artists. I wish the semi-colon were significant, so the underlying code that Paul Taylor is speaking of would produce a string of sortable records attached to the album title.

The underlying code would use a relational database like MusicBrainz (SQL is the typical programming language required). The album title would be followed by a string of variable length, depending on how many secondary entries there are or how many semi-colons there are. This would solve one of the challenges facing classical music metadata.

1 Like
13

Have you tried the Filter tool

Next to the sort selection.

Think of an album, then think of 3-4 letters that are “fairly unique”, not a composer say Rigoletto if you choose “rigo” you will get very few hits If you add the next “L” it drops to 2

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It works just the same on Artists so “calla” would fine Callas

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14

It very much depends… how many other composers are on the disc, does the album have an actual title already, is the piece by one composer the “substantial” one, etc… since all the digital libraries I use (regardless of Roon, MinimServer, MusicBee, iTunes) etc. are searchable, I can compromise here and there on the album title. I mean, the composer and the work is mentioned not just in the “album title” tags, so I’ll always find the appropriate albums.

I just looked, and in some cases I have it like this:

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(So composers named first, and the the works, in this case simply “Piano Concertos”)

Sometimes it looks more like this:

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So here it is first composer, then work, then another composer and work. It all works.

15

That’s why Filter is so good it just looks for the sub string anywhere in an album title

Eg “vau” is not going to match much more then Vaughan Williams. If it does just add the “g”

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16

I also discovered that a regular search produces the secondary titled as well.

17

As I am in a similar position, this is a thought provoking post.

Here’s my 2c solution.
Using similar categories, I termed them as (1) ‘by composer’ (2) ‘by recital’. There is also a 3rd which is ‘by box set’. This is for large multi-work box sets eg Mercury Living Presence. Box sets which are singular works eg. an opera, would be ‘by composer’.
In lieu of sorting by title and using the title to display the composer, I sort by Artist and use the composer as the Album Artist for ‘by composer’ or principal performer for ‘by recital’.
For multiple composers, I use multiple Album Artists, listing the dominant composer first. The filter tool helps locate the secondary composer. Most often, if there are more than 2 composers, the album would be by recital rather than by composer.

To assist browsing and searching, album titles are normalised into the Angelised version of the work name with performances identified by the principle artist. Eg Symphony no 5 [Karajan], Symphony no 5 [Harnoncourt].

A subsequent issue arises where Roon uses the original recording date for secondary sorting. I overcame this by replacing the original recording date tag on file to be sequential in the same order as the Album title.

Even across non classical music this approach works well. Jazz, Blues, Pop (by band) are the equivalent of ‘by recital’.
Compilations can be grey area in this approach. Compilation collections are often grouped by using a common Album Artist Eg. Putumayo, Verve etc. which can make browsing more consistent.

18

Although this post has been solved …

Putting Composer into either Artist or AlbumArtist is not a good practice, it will confuse Roon.

Thee is a Composer tag for a reason

Album Artist is what keeps an album “together” an must be one value per album otherwise the album will split and as a result not Identified

There are multiple threads dealing with this practice

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19

If I may intercede, I would like to offer a slightly different opinion.

It is perfectly fine to enter either the “performer” or the “composer” into the Album Artist tag. Of course the performers should also be in the performer and the composer in the composer tag, but you can chose either as the “Album Artist” tag in classical music albums. As long as the tags are consistent, it does not confuse ROON at all. (There is a lengthy, but in between quite interesting thread here, where this subject was discussed – among other things – at length, so I don’t need to reiterate it all her: Roon splits up tracks from some albums. Why? ).

But to sum it up: I have a decently sized collection of lossless high-res albums, thousands of albums, many classical albums, and almost all of them (or at least the vast majority) have the composer as “Album Artist”. I want my Beethoven sonatas under the “Ludwig van Beethoven” folder, and not spread out among Brendel, Levit, Barenboim etc. So the “Album Artist” tag is the unifying element, and I would find it very hard to keep my collection at bay or decently sorted if the classical albums were suddenly spread out in performer rather than composer folders.

Now it’s true that in the artist tag there should be the “artist”, so it’s easy to identify which recording it is, but I assure you ROON has no issues recognizing classical music albums when the composer is in the album artist tag

I have thousands of classical music albums where the composer is the “Album Artist”. Not once was there an issue because of that.

What is true, however, and that is the important thing: like Mike said, the “Album Artist” tag is what holds the album together, it is what unifies the album. So ONE “Album Artist” per album obviously. So that may be “Hélène Grimaud” on an album with composers such as John Corigliano, Ludwig van Beethoven and Arvo Pärt, but it can also be “George Gershwin” on an album with performers such as Leonard Bernstein and Gil Shaham.

For ROON, the important issue is not whether “album artist” is the performer or the composer, but that it is a unifying tag.