


Only compositions constructed of at least two levels will get a 'work' tag besides the 'title' tag. There are many stand-alone compositions that are not part of an overarching work.įor the sake of this scheme and tutorial, such individual compositions will not be considered to be a 'work', and so the 'work' tag for those will remain empty, and they could be treated similar to a regular pop song. Note that certainly not all classical compositions will be multi-level works though. So, while for non-classical music it is usually sufficient to know only the name of the band, the album title and the track title, for understanding and managing classical music it is quite helpful (essential?) to have some understanding of- and be able to manage levels of works, parts, movements, etc. Obviously the original composer of classical music was-and is-not hindered or obstructed that a composition should not be longer than 3 minutes to be played on the radio, or that an LP can contain only 20 minutes per side, a CD some 70 minutes, nor that a CD should really have an Album Title and an Album Artist printed somewhere behind it's ugly polycarbonate enclosure. Maybe even a volume comprised of several books. record, cassette, CD), classical music is usually more like a book, a story, with maybe a main title, perhaps chapters and paragraphs, etc. The first thing to understand is that an essential distinction between popular music and classical music is that while popular music could be described as a single sheet of paper (or for the purpose of convenience and commercial gains an album, a.k.a. Suppose somebody accidentally slipped some classical music in your digital music playing and managing software. While this has expanded into a pretty long read, you can probably trust me when I say that the actual steps you'll have to perform to get this operational are not very complicated, and that the instructions are designed and worded to be as clear and straightforward as possible. This 'howto' attempts to be helpful in achieving that and more. displaying purposes you may have the desire to be able to achieve something resembling what you will find on the printed covers of physical releases of classical albums:Īlso you may want to have some additional tagging options (virtual tags) available, optimized for organising, managing and playing your classic music. If your music library contains some larger classical works, for e.g. The intention of this post/tutorial is to describe a method in achieving a consistent system for tagging, filtering, displaying, and managing the different levels of classical compositions by using MusicBee, MusicBrainz' Picard tagging tool, and a tailor-made script created for this purpose.
