Technique for tagging classical music for itunes using grouping and movements for proper shuffling

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1

Hello again!

Thanks to all that helped me on my last question. This place and program are great! :clap:

I am tagging a bunch of classical music and want to make sure I am doing it the proper way. I have read a lot on the subject and am hopefully doing things correctly.

I am using itunes and am employing the %work%, %movement%, %movementtotal%, & %movementname% fields to populate the tags for Work, Movement Number, Total Number of Movements (Movement Index) & Movement Name.

I have mapped the field as suggested by Florian in order to keep things consistent with both MP4 & ID3v2 (work name, name and movement)

Tag: ID3v2
Source: CONTENTGROUP
Target: WORK

Question: Do I continue to use the %work% field for work, or should I be using the %contentgroup% field. I think I may have been doing it incorrectly and should be using %contentgroup% instead of %work%, but I am not sure. I believe the mapping I did above should allow me to use %work%. I keep flip-flopping so I thought I would double-check here.

I am also using the %showmovement% to trigger itunes to list the song by work name, showing the movement fields.

I am going to populate %grouping% with a unique value for each work so that all the movements of a work will play together, and in order if I decide to shuffle by group. I am not quite sure how I will do this, to avoid different versions or performances of the same song being grouped together, especially with the same composer, and orchestra, but I will probably use %work%-%conductor%-%artist%-%album%-%year%. Hopefully that will not be too long of a field, as my album titles have a lot of information on them, but I need to keep things discrete. Is there a limit to the length of a tag?

Am I employing the proper techniques?

Any help, as always, will be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!

2

%work% cannot be found in the list of standard fields - so it is most likely a user-defined field that will read only by very few players.

the field CONTENTGROUP is the MP3tag field that gets displayed as Work in iTunes. No mapping required.

3

Thanks again ohrenkino!
I am confused as I see WORK (%work%) in Tag fields exclusive to MP4 in Tag Field Mappings – Mp3tag Documentation

Since the only field mapping I did was the one above for ID3v2, do I have to do additional mapping or will I be fine with both MP4 and ID3v2 if I just use CONTENTGROUP (%contentgroup%) for work title?

4

You would have to try whether iTunes really shows the contents of different fields in the same column (@wrk and tit1).
Only then would a mapping make sense. Otherwise I would leave the mp4 field alone and only use contengroup.

5

Thanks again ohrenkino for your help! I really do appreciate it greatly!!!! :beers:

OK, I will see how things transfer over. I am starting to realize that I don't really have that great of a grasp on things when I started thinking about this. I may have forgotten things I have learned along the way as I do this intensively for a month and then leave it along for long periods of time.

I mainly am using MP3Tag to tag .flac and rarely .ape files, which I will later convert to aflac which results in a .m4a extension, which I was confusing with MP4 files. I use .mp3 files very very rarely and don't think I have ever used an .mp4 as of yet. So maybe all this does not apply to me.

I have been using MP3Tag for 5+ years and mostly everything has worked well for my purpose of getting them into itunes, so I must be doing something right. I have saved my configuration each time I reinstall, so I must have set things up along the way.

I see I have VorbisComment tags mapped from DATE, ORGANIZATION & TRACKNUMBER to YEAR, PUBLISH & TRACK respectively. Also, as aforementioned, I have the ID3v2 tag mapped from CONTENTGROUP to WORK (I am starting to think I do not need this, but I don't see how it hurts). I am not sure if the first three were set up by me or are a default in the program.

So, do I have to worry about mapping the MP4 or even the ID3v2? I see no column for Vorbis Comment in tag field mapping chart, so I don't know to what the MP3Tags are mapped, but there must be a reason they were not listed. I guess since I convert the flacs to m4a in itunes, the tags I save to the flacs through MP3Tag are included and everything maps to itunes. Since it is seasy to move tags from one place to another in MP3Tag, I will continue tagging this set of classical music and then convert so test files. Once I see how things transfer I will report back.

Any clarification would be very helpful. I have tried to learn here but have not, as of yet, gotten as firm of a grasp on tagging as I would like. I wish I could learn more about this and if you can point me to a source that covers the topics above, I would appreciate it.