Right, that's a CD ripped then. Now what?
CDs are hard to arrange on a shelf, because they are in a specific physical order that determines how you see your collection. One of the brilliant things about a disk-based collection is that in principle you can have any view you want of it, given that you've made a sufficient range of views possible!
And tags are how you enable those views. Or rather metadata, which includes tags. Artist, composer, track title, album title, genre... what do you want?
There are several online metadata repositories - FreeDB and MusicBrainz being the main freely accessible ones. XLD automatically looks up the ripped CD by a composite hash based on the track timings and offsets, which is usually sufficiently distinct, and sticks the data it finds in the ripped tracks directly. I've found MusicBrainz to be the most authoritative seeming source - it's peer reviewed, and people put a lot of effort into getting it right, with evidence for their entries required to support the reviewing and editing process. The data extends even to recording location and engineer - it's very rich. MB also provides a tool for looking up and tagging CDs and already ripped files - MusicBrainz Picard, which I've used to tidy up and expand the metadata on lots of previously ripped material.
But sometimes your CD is not in the database!! I've got a CD of Astor Piazzolla tangos, played by a piano trio, from SWR the German radio station. It's not in the MB database, in fact, one of the performers wasn't in there either. So I had to add it... and that was seriously non-trivial! They have a Style Guide, which extends to Classical material, loads of standards for everything, it's extremely daunting. And I forgot to add the physical evidence - I ended up taking pictures of the CD sleeve and case to provide the actual source of data, along with a link to the record company website and the SWR studio website. Let's hope it's enough.
CDs are hard to arrange on a shelf, because they are in a specific physical order that determines how you see your collection. One of the brilliant things about a disk-based collection is that in principle you can have any view you want of it, given that you've made a sufficient range of views possible!
And tags are how you enable those views. Or rather metadata, which includes tags. Artist, composer, track title, album title, genre... what do you want?
There are several online metadata repositories - FreeDB and MusicBrainz being the main freely accessible ones. XLD automatically looks up the ripped CD by a composite hash based on the track timings and offsets, which is usually sufficiently distinct, and sticks the data it finds in the ripped tracks directly. I've found MusicBrainz to be the most authoritative seeming source - it's peer reviewed, and people put a lot of effort into getting it right, with evidence for their entries required to support the reviewing and editing process. The data extends even to recording location and engineer - it's very rich. MB also provides a tool for looking up and tagging CDs and already ripped files - MusicBrainz Picard, which I've used to tidy up and expand the metadata on lots of previously ripped material.
But sometimes your CD is not in the database!! I've got a CD of Astor Piazzolla tangos, played by a piano trio, from SWR the German radio station. It's not in the MB database, in fact, one of the performers wasn't in there either. So I had to add it... and that was seriously non-trivial! They have a Style Guide, which extends to Classical material, loads of standards for everything, it's extremely daunting. And I forgot to add the physical evidence - I ended up taking pictures of the CD sleeve and case to provide the actual source of data, along with a link to the record company website and the SWR studio website. Let's hope it's enough.
