[mythtv-users] MythMusic -how do you organize your music?

[Joseph A. Caputo]

On Thursday 15 July 2004 23:33, BP wrote:
> Cotter, Paul M. wrote:
> > And I agree with Isaac - if you don't steal your music, the tags
> > are usually spot on - I've never had a problem.
> >
> > Paul Cotter
>
> Not from my experience.  I ripped approximately 500 CDs that I own. 
> I found that CDDB has lots of inconsistencies.

I think Isaac was refererring to downloaded music.  If you're ripping 
your own CDs, then you're responsible for properly tagging them.  I 
never blindly trust CDDB.

> For instance, some 
> artists that I own several CDs from, had a different artist name for
> each album. Some had a "the" inserted at the beginning or a ", the"
> at the end. Others had things like "Liverpool, England" inserted to
> the artist for one album, but not others.  Some had all the members
> of the band and the copyright date appended to the artist name.  Add
> to this that the sorting in Myth is case sensitive and I didn't
> rip/encode with a case filter (again CDDB was not consistent).  Other
> problems also arise with compilation albums such as soundtracks.  Do
> you want the artist tag specified as the movie name, the actual
> artist name, or as "Various Artists"?  I also had some mp3s I ripped
> six or seven years ago that the CD is now too scratched to play.  I
> had no clue about tags back then.

If you use Myth for ripping, it's easy to overcome differences in CDDB 
data.  When you insert the CD to be ripped, Myth will display the CDDB 
information it finds.  The genre, artist & album fields are combo boxes 
that will be pre-filled with the string fetched from CDDB.  However, 
you can use left/right in these fields to select a match that's already 
in your MythMusic database.  For instance, let's say I insert a CD and 
CDDB says the genre is 'Chamber Music'.  Well, I have a single genre in 
my database called 'Classical' that I prefer to use, so I change it.  
Likewise, if a CD comes up with an artist of "Simon and Garfunkel", but 
I have "Simon & Garfunkel" in my database ("&" vs. "and"), I make the 
change before ripping.

All this is not to say that tagging isn't a nuisance.  I personally use 
the directory tree method because I find that the tag format is 
deficient.

-JAC