Adding Composer to the Music DB

[MacMini]

Originally Posted by rsbrux

MacMini,
... If I had a displayable composer tag, I wouldn't bother filling it for pop music, so it would be easy to filter it out to list music by composer.

rsbrux, what you describe would work if you enter info manually.

The problem arises when you pull album info automatically. For example, in QT or WMP, when you get album info from the web, it is often extensive, and it often fills in the Composer field for pop tracks.

Which means, one will have to go in and manually delete the composer info for each pop track. Also, there are some who may actually care who the composer of Genie In A Bottle is:-)

Anyway, it would be great if there can be an additional field implemented, whatever they call it.

Cheers.

[rsbrux]

Originally Posted by MacMini

The problem arises when you pull album info automatically. For example, in QT or WMP, when you get album info from the web, it is often extensive, and it often fills in the Composer field for pop tracks.

Yes, I do tag my files manually, or at least semi-automatically. I prefer MP3tag to WMP, because I have had a lot of albums/tracks tagged iincorrectly by WMP. MP3tag gives me the opportunity to look through CDDB, Amazon and other sources for the best match, and then make whatever modifications might be needed manually. I'm not sure what you mean by "QT". What is it? The only thing that comes to mind is QuickTIme, and I wasn't aware that it had any music tagging features.

[GoldenEye]

Have you seen ::this:: post? Very, very nice

G.

[rsbrux]

It gives me hope, but the composer doesn't seem to have made it to the UI yet.
After rescanning my music collection with the newest SVN (16108), I still don't see any way to select composer in the music views.

[vakarel]

Well, as of now still no progress on adding composer to the DB! This is the only feature that is stopping from switching to MediaPortal. Can you developers please, please add it. It shouldn't be that difficult.

[jameson_uk]

I want the composer tag added but for a different reason...

My current setup is in Meedio and I have setup the composer tag to basically be the sort by value for album artist
so I have:
Album Artist: The Beatles
Composer: Beatles, The
or
Album Artist: Stevie Wonder
Composer: Wonder, Stevie

This allows me to show the correct name when looking at the collection but sort everything in the right order (ie. Wonder is under W not S). Yes I know you can get MP to sort out "The" in band names but it does not cater for the second thing on the list...

This should be fairly easy to implement. Adding a few more tags so that people can use them makes for a much more flexible tool. You don't have to include them in default views just allow those you want to use them to do so (same goes for release year so you can sort the albums of a given artist by when they were released)

[Roo]

Completely and utterly agree with jameson_uk. I had the same setup with Meedio and it was perfect for me but am still waiting to be able to do the same with Mediaportal. The more tags that are added to the views section of Mediaportal then the more customisable it becomes.

Pleeeeeease can we have some more tags

[hwahrmann]

not before 1.0 is released. we're in a feature freeze.
after that, i can add some more tags, like i.e. composer

[jameson_uk]

Originally Posted by hwahrmann

not before 1.0 is released. we're in a feature freeze.
after that, i can add some more tags, like i.e. composer

If you can think of a better way of storing say Phil Collins and Belinda Carlisle under "C" whilst showing the correct artist name I would be open to suggestions.

Other than having one tag for display and one for sorting I can't see another way of doing this???

If you could add that I would really appreciate it

[rsbrux]

Originally Posted by jameson_uk

If you can think of a better way of storing say Phil Collins and Belinda Carlisle under "C" whilst showing the correct artist name I would be open to suggestions.

Other than having one tag for display and one for sorting I can't see another way of doing this???

If you could add that I would really appreciate it

FWIW, many other media solutions have similar weaknesses. As a classical music fan, I am particularly anxious to have composer tags. Meanwhile, I have settled on the following compromise:
I have tagged pop music "Firstname Lastname", so "Phil Collins" is filed under "P", not under "C". My main reason for doing this is that most pre-tagged MP3s and most entries in CMDB are tagged this way. With nearly 30k tracks in my collection, anything else would be a tremendous amount of work.
The classical pieces are mostly tagged "Lastname, Firstname", so "Beethoven, Ludwig van" gets filed under "B".
I make exceptions only in the "Album Artist" (BAND) tag for albums by various composers, but a single performer, e.g., Anna Netrebko's "Russian Album".