Cleaning Up the Music

I am in the process of updating my collection of music files. I have about 5 to 6 gigs worth of music spread over several computers. I have deciding to begin copying them all to one old laptop for organizing and editing tags. I started ripping my CDs around 1999, but I no longer have those earlier files. A hard disk crash took them out. At the time I didn't have a backup because of the size of the files. Now I back them up on an external hard drive.

After weeding out the duplicate files I set out to organize the tags. I usually edit the tags in whatever software I am using to listen to the music (iTunes on my Mac and Amarok on my Linux boxen). I am running Linux on the laptop where I am doing the work and I am using Amarok, Picard (a tag editor from MusicBrainz) and Kid3. I am trying to follow the Classical Style Guide from MusicBrainz since that is what the folks at Last.fm like to see.

I had been tagging my files with the composer in the composer field and the performer(s) in the artist field. Well the Classical Style Guide says to put the performer(s) after the title in parentheses and put the composer in the artist field. The folks at MusicBrainz acknowledge in a FAQ that this is a violation of the id3v2 spec. The reason they give is...

Although the id3v2 spec does say that artist is for 'Lead artist/Lead performer/Soloist/Performing group' most pieces of software will only use this field and ignore the composer id3 field. With classical you are usually more interested in the composer of a work than the performer. Until there is enough software that allows you to use the composer field in any way it seemed least damaging to do it this way round as otherwise it becomes very hard to use the composer info at all.
Classical Music FAQ at MusicBrainz

While tagging can be a touchy subject with disagreements abounding, I have decided that I will try to use the MusicBrainz scheme.