Classical Music: Works vs Tracks

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hcdarmara
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Classical Music: Works vs Tracks

Post by hcdarmara »

This topic was first posted in Support, but it's really a feature request. In classical music, track is not the relevant item -- work is. This information is available on Amazon and Tower, but it's not collected.

On the advice of someone in the iTunes forum, I change the album when I rip the music. If the work (like an opera) is on several discs, I treat all of them as one "album"; if the work (like a concerto) is less than a disc, I treat each work as a separate album.

I have edited the track information on many cds in iTunes -- I change the Album information to reflect the work, then the tracks usually settle in just fine within each work. If I were to import this information into CDpedia, would it override the edited album information? Would CDpedia be confused?

I don't mind (much) having to type it in myself, but I really would like to see if it can be added to CDpedia. It's really a subset of the CD; tracks then become a subset of "work". We already distinguish our search between Music and Classical, can't the choice of Classical help gather data that is more meaningful for the type of music?

Amazon also carries "works" information -- it's just that there's no where to put it that makes any sense.

This is analogous to the anthology problem in Bookpedia -- What is it that we're cataloging -- the box (cd), the work (whether on 1 cd or 1/2 of a cd) or the "song" (which is meaningless in classical works).
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Conor
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Post by Conor »

Thanks for the detailed suggestions. We will take a closer look at the classic music information and see if we can make CDpedia flexible enough to be able to handle works as well as regular music tracks.

As for your import question from CDpedia, you can give it a try. The import will create a new collection that is not part of the Library (you have to select all the entries with select all and drag them to the library to incorporate them). This gives you the opportunity to look over the import make sure it's correct. In this case you will get the entries separated into works just as you have them in iTunes. CDpedia uses the album and artist information to group the tracks together. If you have labeled the Tracks with the album as the work then CDpedia will think that the work is the album and group them that way. This might lead to Amazon getting confused if you try to gather more information and the cover images on the imported entries, as the original album name is no longer present. But it's all about trying it out with your particular data.
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