Tagging strategy

[Alsweider]

Automated tagging from databases is useful but it doesn’t always deliver tags consistantly the proper way how you want it. So I stumbled over some questions while tagging my own files:

Accents: é vs. e
Apostrophes: Typewriter (') vs. typographically correct (’)
Alphabet: latin vs. кириллица (cyrillic)
Info about version or event: "demo/studio version" or location name in title tag or use separate tags?
Band name vs. artist names, correct order, "feat." etc.

Typographic tagging with accents and everything looks very nice, but you always have the problem of missing characters on your keyboard if you search a song or you have programmes who can’t read specific unicode characters. Same problem with the original alphabet of Russian or Japanese songs. And for tagging them in latin characters you must know the correct way to transcribe the specific alphabet (too much work in my opinion).
Many databases add version infos like "Studio", "Live" or "Demo" in the title field. On last.fm for example there is no other way to distinguish versions of non-album tracks, because other tags don’t get scrobbled. I would prefer to use separate tags for informations about the recording or live event name, to keep the song title clean.
Another problem: If you have several artists & bands participating in a song, how should you make the artist field look like? "Band A feat. Artist B + Artist C" or separate them by "/", in which order? Again the problem with last.fm only scrobbling the first name in the artist field.
Do you have suggestions for proper tagging?

[psychoadept]

Musicbrainz Picard can help with some of this.  For instance, it has settings to standardize artist names, use original script vs Latin transliteration, etc.  With scripts, you can even have both.  I have scripts in Picard to automatically tag guest artists and remixers, for example.  I also tag the artist tag in original script and use "sort artist" for transliteration, things like that.

[Alsweider]

Good suggestion, I’m already using Picard, I should take a closer look at the functions. But I have still to decide how to tag the files. I could do it in one way or another and I wonder which is the best way. I think a practical (albeit partly ugly) solution would be:

* Convert tags to ASCII
* Use typewriter characters (available on local keyboard for searches)
* Remove any accents (unless you’re French and have them on your Azertyboard)
* Use standard title case (depends on the language)
* Move version info from title to separate tags
* If possible, convert foreign alphabets to latin

[psychoadept]

MusicBee is pretty good about including variations on characters in searches, so unless you have some other reason for converting to ascii, removing accents, etc, I don't think you need to.  Be sure you've turned in diacritics in preferences (it was in tags 2, but might have been moved to sorting/Grouping.  Check the wiki; it's up to date on that.)

If there's a specific character that's giving you trouble, post it in the wishlist and Steven can probably add handling for it

[theta_wave]

For tagging, I cannot recommend mp3tag enough.  Most of what you listed in your first post can be easily achieved by creating your own "Action" (basically, a set of instructions) with any of mp3tag tags functions.  Here's an example of my action "Clean Up," which I run at the end of my tagging:



My tagging setup in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrXekn8N_PE

[Alsweider]

Meanwhile I'm using following custom tags:

* Version: live/demo/studio/mix
* Location: for live performances, the name of the event or the place
* Language: for the language of the song, using ISO-639 language codes
* Artist Country: where the artist/band is located (ISO 3166 country code)

So I can get a clean title field which only includes the actual title of the song.

[alec.tron]

Not musicbee, but maybe it helps... just another approach:
I use

- foobar with foo_discogs for nearly all tags (with a fair bit of fine tuning - only genre & rating is done by semi hand... genre is on discogs, but not too well maintained, and genres mean different things for different people, and I treat keywords as 'genres'/situations...)

- once tagged, there's ascii reformatting within foobar's syntax - which I use for writing file names from tag info [ = $if(%tracknumber%,%tracknumber%-)[$ascii(%artist%-)]$ascii(%title%) - converts everything it can... thai/kytillic/jjapanese are a bit of a problem... combined with foo_discogs defaulting to main artist name with no way out... which if in non-latin letters, I have not found a good solution for... :/, but there is some people on the foobar forums who wrote complete remapping strings [remember seeing russian... not sure about japanese/thai/hebrew/arab/sanskrit/etc...]]

Also, foo_masstagger is neat for mass edits in case need to be shuffled/fixed...

c.

[Alsweider]

- once tagged, there's ascii reformatting within foobar's syntax

I have tried foobar before and it's surely a great player with infinite possibilities, but too much DIY for me. The reformatting makes sense in order to get a good compatibility with most other players or CD players. I think mp3tag can do that and Musicbrainz Picard as well.

thai/kytillic/jjapanese are a bit of a problem... combined with foo_discogs defaulting to main artist name with no way out... which if in non-latin letters, I have not found a good solution for...

I simply avoid the problem by leaving non-latin titles as they are and just enter a hint in the comments field for search function. Better would be a proper transcription, but I don't bother without having an automation for that.

[Alsweider]

What do you do with multiple artists in collaboration, what is the displayed artist?

* Use album artist, if there is one.
* If there is a featured artist, you have the options: "Artist feat. Artist 2 - Title" or "Artist - Title (feat. Artist 2)". The second one is preferred for statistical reasons, though I would like to have a title field without any other informations (feat. info is not really part of the song title, it deserves a separate field).
* A bit more problematic, when you have multiple artists in an equal collaboration, I would couple them all with " & " in alphabetic order. It's not the best solution because last.fm would create a separate artist page, it isn't able to assign the separate artists.

[CritterMan]

I would tag the artists exactly as they were referred to on the packaging/website.

[Alsweider]

I would tag the artists exactly as they were referred to on the packaging/website.

That is one option if you accept the inconsistency in your library. It becomes problematic when the referring tags are obviously wrong, I guess you would then correct them (like a wrong band name or misspelling). And that's the point when you must begin to think about the syntax of your tags. Or even when you tag your own selfmade songs...

[CritterMan]

Of course, one must always make a judgement call when dealing with collaborations on a case by case basis. A good starting point is to use what was already laid out in the release. For ultimate consistency, consider using Various Artists as the artist name and then add the individual artists. Or, name the collaboration as the artist and then add the individual artists. You can have more than one tag of the same kind.

[Alsweider]

The Musicbrainz guideline looks quite helpful to me: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style

[psychoadept]

* If there is a featured artist, you have the options: "Artist feat. Artist 2 - Title" or "Artist - Title (feat. Artist 2)". The second one is preferred for statistical reasons, though I would like to have a title field without any other informations (feat. info is not really part of the song title, it deserves a separate field).

At least within MusicBee, this is easily solved by assigning the feat artist to the guest artist role in the artist splitter

[Alsweider]

assigning the feat artist to the guest artist role in the artist splitter

MB really is good in this, the main problem in this case is the scrobbler which does not heed these informations in additional tags.