No option for tags on classical music, like composer, performer, band, opus, label, etc

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1.Any ripping of classical music CD's
2.
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Encoded music files with meaningful tags for classical music

1) What version of rubyripper are you using? On what operating system?
->V 0.5.5 on Ubuntu 8.04

2) Are you using the gtk2 or the commandline interface?
->gtk2

3) Is the problem gone with the default settings? If so, please attach your
settings file ($HOME/.rubyripper/settings).
->NA

4) Does the problem only happen on a specific disc? If so, please attach
the output of cdparanoia -Q. Also the freedb output would be nice if it may
be related to it.
->NA

Please provide any additional information below.
I'm digitalizing my classical music collection. I've tried various rippers
like grip, crip, ripperx, but none have a possibility to enter the most
important tags for classical music: composer, performer, opus, etc. The
only ripper which comes close is crip, which really has a spartanic
interface. With respect to the genre-tag, assuming that classical music
needs no further differentiation than 'classical' would be the same as to
assume that Black Metal is the same as New Age...
I can understand that it is not the principal interest of most programmers
of ripping/encoding software (Hail to those who do all this hard work!) to
bother about tagging for the classical music lover, but still I have a
suggestion, which may be considering, and which may not be too complicated...:
If you would allow the user to add custom tags in the 'settings' file, like
customtag1=composer
customtag2=perfomer
customtracktag1=conductor
customtracktag2=band
customtracktag..
etc

(optionally: customtag1width=30%, customtag1label=Componist)

And list these tags with 'tag-name/label' (is value behind customtag1...) +
inputfield below album. Or behind the track time (for additional track
tags). Referring to these tags in the encoding process could possibly be
done by %customtag1, or %composer or $1.

If these additions could be implemented, rubyripper would be the first
opensource ripper (as far as I know) which will show flexible tagging and
it will be extremely useful for classical music lovers...

Unfortunately I'm not a great programmer, I would have contributed this
with great pleasure....
Mike

Original issue reported on code.google.com by dispos...@bosschaert.org on 31 May 2009 at 12:28

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Ok, seems like an interesting request :). Never knew this problem existed for
classical music. You do know freedb doesn't support this kind of information? 
(At
least I think it does not). So the tags would have to be manually entered.

I don't think allowing custom tags is a very good idea. For one it's not very 
user
friendly. It's not very consistent as well, tags should follow the official 
standard
if there is any.

Could you please give an overview of the tags you want at the disc level and 
which
tags you want at the track level? Optionally showing these shouldn't be a big
problem.

Original comment by rubyripp...@gmail.com on 31 May 2009 at 12:56

• Changed state: Accepted

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi rubyripperdev,
Thanks for taking this serious.
Indeed also freedb focusses on non-classical music and does not provide the
possibilities to handle adequate tagging for classical music. Furthermore the
information in freedb is extremely inconsistent for classical music. This is not
unexpected because there are so many different players, which all show different
combination of tags.  

The tags which I thinks are required for classical music (n addition to the tags
which are already available in rubyripper) are:

composer
conductor
band (e.g. New York Philharmonic Orchestra)
performer (e.g. Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Glenn Gould: piano)
ensemble (can be used instead of band, but usually is considered a smaller 
group,
like a string quartet, eg the Kronos Quartet(they have a nice interpretation of
Purple Haze...))
label (e.g. Deutsche Grammophone)
labelno (e.g. 415 862-2)
opus (e.g. Op 92)

All of them can be either for the album or for the track (e.g. the Ravels 
Bolero is 1
piece and track on a CD, whereas the St. Johns Passion by Bach can be 40 tracks 
over
2 CD's). But often CD's contain a mix of various pieces by various composers,
performed by various conductors, bands and performers.
With respect to CD's with e.g. orchestra, vocal soloists and instrumental 
soloist, I
have not found a tag which could make a meaningful differences between the type 
of
soloists (e.g a vocal, a piano and a horn soloist). I think putting them in the
performer tag.

The label and labelno tags can be important for people collecting various 
records of
the same piece (which can be really different), think of a performance of 
Bach's St.
Matthews Passion by the Dutch Concertgebouworkest (recorded in 1929, 130 
minutes) and
a recent verions on original instruments of about 90 minutes...).

Summarizing, if you could include the above tags for the album and/or track, you
would make quite some people extremely happy...
Thanks again
Mike

Original comment by dispos...@bosschaert.org on 31 May 2009 at 3:07

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Musicbrainz' ClassicalStyleGuidelines should make classical music with the 
standard
tags a little more bearable.  Simply switch the freedb server settings to
freedb.musicbrainz.org to take advantage of this for releases present in their 
database.

Perhaps Musicbrainz' PicardTagger (http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardTagger) 
could
give an idea of what tags to use for more advanced classical music tagging.

Alternatively, you could just run your rips through Picard (or some other 
dedicated
tagger, such as Ex Falso or Kid3, if you don't like Picard's automated job).

Original comment by Dhr...@gmail.com on 4 Jun 2009 at 5:05

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Thanks for pointing me to Picard by Muzicbrainz. Indeed the program is quite 
useful
(and somewhat complex!). Still it would be most convenient to be able to rip 
and tag
in one step, and rubyripper comes quite close. The list of tags in Picard is 
quite
extensive, however being able to use a selection of those would, as far as I 
can see,
provide all you would want to tag all sorts of classical music. 

One thing I'm still missing is the possibility to use multiple genre tags (or 
is it
possible to define more than 1?). Most classical music can be categorised under
various genres (e.g. the Mattheus Passion by Bach: Classical, Baroque, Vocal,
Religeous, ...). For my purpose I solved it (Squeezebox allows for this option) 
by
entering more genres, separated by a special character. Within squeezebox I can
search all listed genres, but other programs may not have this option.

Original comment by dispos...@bosschaert.org on 5 Jun 2009 at 12:37

[GoogleCodeExporter]

[deleted comment]

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Just an observation:  Vorbis comments that are available for flac music files 
allow a
user to add any tag they want.  Ex Falso is a tag editor that allows editing of 
the
Vorbis comment.  Quod Libet is a player that allows editing of Vorbis comments 
(it
uses Ex Falso to do this) and allows displaying of any tags in the Vorbis 
comment. 
Both of these apps use the Mutagen tagging library.  So, while my comment 
doesn't
address the issue of adding custom tags while ripping, it does allow reasonable 
use
of custom tags once added with a tagging program.

I use many custom tags, and I rip all my music to flac because I do not like
compressed music.  Even if I did use compression for a special occasion, I 
would use
ogg.  Ogg also supports the Vorbis comment.  This has worked for me since my XP 
days
of years ago.

Original comment by csc...@gmail.com on 21 Jan 2010 at 6:01