Classical music scraping
#16
Another band-aid approach could be to use GENRE for COMPOSER tag. I don't use GENRE for classical music, so I'll put the composer's name to it. I'll make a profile in xbmc for classical music and another profile for the rest of my music and I'll tag the first one with composer's name in GENRE and the other one as usual.
But I agree that COMPOSER's tag must be supported in XBMC. It is not like a "PRODUCER tag". It is fundamental in classical music!
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#17
I agree that supporting the COMPOSER tag will be better, i just want to point that multi artists tag could be used.

Yes the draw back of that is that composers and performers will appear at the same level as "artists" and there will no way to search specifically by performer, supporting the PERFORMER will give you an entry in the library and in the GUI.

Where did you see that it will be supported in Frodo ?

xbmc roadmap is here :

http://trac.xbmc.org/roadmap

and frodo features here

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/issues?mile...ate=closed
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#18
(2012-11-17, 22:22)syfre Wrote: Where did you see that it will be supported in Frodo ?

If you refer to me...


(2012-11-10, 12:05)SwissElite Wrote: Hopefully, this year's christmas version of XBMC (also called "Frodo" in some places) will include the tag, would be great Wink


...then let me make myself clear. I merely expressed a wish ("hopefully") that it would be supported by Frodo. I did mean to say that I saw in the roadmap that it will be supported. However, I hoped (and still do) that it will be implemented, given quite a number of people would benefit from it.
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#19
Another vote for better support for classical music!

Ive been trying to avoid the problems in a different way; running MediaMonkey on a windows machine, and accessing its content in XBMC over uPnP. Ive only just started experimenting, but it appears that does let you sort and search by composer and other (if need be, custom) tags. Of course its still a kludge, it requires I run a windows machine non stop just for this, and you lose almost all of XBMC's library functions..
BTW, would it be a good idea to setup "bounties" for features we'd like to see implemented?
Im willing to donate, but Id like my donation to steer development in a certain way, like say, better support for classical music libraries. Im pretty sure Im not alone, so if we could pool some pledges for such a cause, with the funds being released when the feature is implemented, perhaps it would inspire some devs to tackle this?
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#20

I side with scott967 and jopie, as well as everyone else who supports, in this thread or in general discusssions on the Internet, the position that it is not the classical music which has to adapt to the tagging system but the tagging system which has to adapt to the classical music.

The present tagging system is not a notion of Platonic purity. It is the attempt by the pop music industry to organize their product. The big difference between classical and modern music (apart from the quality of the sound) is that classical music produces works that last forever, and are thus made to be performed by many-many-many future performers, some of which shall in their turn achieve over time status equal to the work. Classical music isn't classical unless it knows the distinction between work and performer. Modern music, by contrast, is centered around a single artist. It doesn't know the distinction between work and performer because it is, almost by definition, ephemeral and low-value, akin to greasy fast food. The reason it makes the performer stand out while the writer of the song is kept in the background is precisely that the product as such is better kept in the background. It follows that any attempt at solving the problem of correctly tagging classical music indeed any music with claim to more than ephemeral fame, must start with the acknowledgement of the basic distinction between work (and its creator, the composer/writer) and performer (cinductor, orchestra, soloist, etc).

While I expect most people in this thread to share thes views, I do not suppose many realize that the primary reason XBMC doesn't handle classical music well is not a bad schema popularized by the music industry bu a limitation built into its database subsystem. Any database subsystem wishing to pass for a RDBMS must be able to integrate a schema which expresses a work/performer relationship. The reason that an accurate schema is not on offer as an addon is that XBMC's database cannot integrate custom schemas. In fact it cannot even modify its own schema --- it is rigid as stone. Work is in progress to replace it with one which can. Naturally, a better database subsystem shall on its own do nothing to improve handling of classical music. However it shall open the way for a competition among different schemas, out of which a satisfactory solution shall eventually emerge.

Meanwhile I do not mean to criticise those in this thread who reply that things being as they are the safest way is to shoehorn composers into the <artist> tag (or do other tweaks). But I ask them to do it in secrecy. And to start shouting 'NO MORE! 'NO MORE!' as if the whole world were to go down. For it is natural for developers to assume that in the absence of a clamorous importunity of special interests, everything goes well and nothing need be fixed.

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#21
Hear, hear!
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#22
+1 for adding support for composer tags. This would be a huge improvement. XBMC is a great piece of software, but as it stands, its music capabilities are (unfortunately) somewhat crippled.
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#23
(2013-10-17, 21:51)olivine Wrote: +1 for adding support for composer tags. This would be a huge improvement. XBMC is a great piece of software, but as it stands, its music capabilities are (unfortunately) somewhat crippled.
+1 here too
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#24
(2013-10-17, 21:51)olivine Wrote: +1 for adding support for composer tags. This would be a huge improvement. XBMC is a great piece of software, but as it stands, its music capabilities are (unfortunately) somewhat crippled.

Absolutely. It's hard to believe that it cannot work with the Composer field in tags.
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#25

At first blush, scott967's schema is very clean, and its logic impeccable - one of these "why did I not think of it before" epiphanies. As to sstavross's objection, I too wonder how to deal with duplicate records - but hang on, isn't this a rather common occurrence in the realm of music anyway?

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#26
+1 for adding support for composer tags.
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