SongKong Jaikoz

SongKong and Jaikoz Music Tagger Community Forum

Tagging of WORKS discontinuously split in tracklist

#1

I wonder if Paul (or anyone else) can help with suggestions about how to manage a rather specific issue with tagging of classical works in a large library. My problem is specifically with getting the tags set up for LMS (Lyrion Music Server - previously called squeezebox server), but I would also be interested to hear how other music library server software packages handle this situation.

Consider the album

https://hildgyorgy.github.io/mb-release-viewer/?mbid=15ea1f1b-3e9f-4e8c-af61-8b4747a7c0b8

which consists of several different works, each containing several movements. The trouble is that with one of them - “Trois Gymnopédies” - the movements are distributed as noncontiguous tracks throughout the album track listing, LMS does not handle this situation gracefully and if all of these tracks are tagged with the same value of WORK, it basically gives up and will not group any of the other works in the album either. (This appears to be a design decision or limitation, so I probably have to live with it.) Their recommended workaround is to manually add yet another tag - “PERFORMANCE” (*) with a unique value for each to act as disambiguation. (Though this is in practice pretty much the same thing as simply hand-modifying the WORK tag to include some disambiguation text.)

(* I think this was introduced for the case of big compilations containing more than one different performance of the same symphony, concerto etc., hence the name.)

What I would like to be able to do, at minimum, is to have SongKong detect and somehow flag up a non-contiguous set of tracks belonging to the same WORK. Even if this then required manual editing of tags, this would still be an improvement. I might look to doing something in the scripter, but I believe that SK can not handle or manipulate custom tags.

This can be a considerable headache when tagging a large compendium album containing dozens of recordings and hundreds or tags, so I am drawn to finding programmatic solutions. But right now I am out of ideas, so if anyone else can contribute any, I’m listening!

#2

The trouble is the Inconsistencies section of report is designed for detecting possible issues with tagging, a release containing multiple tracks for the same work but not grouped together contiguously is not incorrect it is perfectly valid even if inconvenient for you.

What may help is to do View as Spreadsheet and use spreadsheet functions to find tracks with a value for Work field but not MinimServer Group field, since Work should be set as required but MinimServer Group is only for contiguous tracks. If you ryun a Status Report on this album and then run Create Suport Files I may be able to help further.

#3

thanks, that seems to work the lines that don’t have a value for MinimServer Group (Column U) are the tracks that are part of work Trois Gymnopédies so that gives you a fairly easy way to find split works (also includes Caress because it is a single track work)

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e.g Filtered

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#4

Thank you. This is already very useful. I can probably get the scripter to do something if the two fields differ. Would there be any way of setting a custom tag named PERFORMANCE? If not a simple text modification of the WORK tag would have to do.

I must look into MinimServer a little more. I wonder how it would display the works and tracklist for this particular album?

#5

Not currently, but we have an issue for that and it is something I am keen to do.

In the meantime we do define five custom fields that we don’t actually use for anything else named custom1 to custom5. So you could do your performance logic using these fields instead. Then either configure Lyrion to use custom1 instead of performance, or use another tool to copy value of custom1 to performance

This may help - Tutorial 20: Groups and Works