Sorting for classical music is random, on both the phone and the laptop. The same goes for composers.
It would be good if the app came with predefined settings when it’s installed, so you get a good user experience right from the start. The user could then change these settings over time.
For classical music, a Venue field (where the performance took place) would also be welcome. In many cases, the fact that a performance was recorded at a specific venue adds to the quality of the music.
It would also be good to have an option for when you have the same symphony in several performances: you select the symphony and it shows you all of its performances. Or, when you open a symphony that has multiple performances, it lists all of them.
Under the Classical view, select the ‘Works’ tab and search for the composer and you get your Symphony variants: I have 3 listed versions of Beethoven’s 5th for example.
The order is a bit weird there - It seems to be sorted by the volume of content for the composer rather than surname or optional sorting, like the Artist view has under Browse.
I must admit I have no idea how the Classical section fills its information, it seems completely random. I have 30 albums composed by John Barry, but the classical section has him as the composer of only one (Starcrash of all things). There are other apparently random entries.
I have absolutely no albums tagged as “Classical” and, to be honest, I’m never likely to use the Classical view. But, I am curious how it does get its information.
Me too - It seems that it doesn’t use Composer tags across your whole library and draws its data from some kind of list of accepted composers - Max Richter appears but most other modern composers I listen to don’t appear in the Composer view.
I can see this being a really tricky one as Composer tags get filled up from all over the place and showing anything in the Classical view would make it unusable. I suspect that the Serento DB has extra data to make certain composers work, but only @lorin.bute can answer that.
It’s a really nice part of the app, IMO - I’d love it if it catered for more composers though.
Serento uses a combination of OpenOpus and MusicBrainz to figure out who is a composer. Not only that, a composer has to actually have works in your library where he is credited by the Serento database as a composer. I will improve this in the future with your input.
Lorin.
I’m sure this would be way too simplistic but could the Classical view be filled with data only from albums which have a genre containing the word “Classical”? I’m assuming that most people that have classical albums, and their sub-genres, would use “Classical” in the genre.
Gaz
Classical and key Classical sub-genres would be a good place to start but at the moment there’s an existing bug with sub-genre determination that would need to be sorted first so as not to pollute it.
An alternative is to use the community to explicitly build up a Composer database and drive it that way - I’m up for either.
Modern Classical / Neo-Classical has a foot in both worlds and should reflect that. I can build lists if needed.
There are also crossover composers that sit between the thin line of the far edge of Progressive Rock, like Mike Oldfield and Steve Hackett - Prince wrote a Ballet once!
I think this might be a quite difficult subject to resolve to please everyone. You’ve previously mentioned that perhaps “Film Score” should be under classical. I have a lot of film scores and have never thought of them as classical. Neither of us is right or wrong, just personal preferences.
One of the things I always liked about ripping music is that it’s your personal library and outside of the absolutely necessary tags, album name, album artist, title, artist, everything else is fair game. I’ve set up genres the way I like so I can easily find the type of music I want to listen to, e.g. Female Vocal; Rock, Female Group; Pop, etc. This may not follow conventional tagging but it works for me.
This is why I think trying to determine exactly what should automatically be ‘classical’ is difficult, everyone has their own idea. I personally would never have thought of Mike Oldfield as classical. That’s why I suggested using a genre containing ‘Classical’ as a starting point. If you think Mike Oldfield should be under Classical you would just add Classical to the album genre and it would be there.
If a collective can agree exactly what should be within Classical it would be great, it just may take some time to produce a definitive list everyone is happy with.
Gaz
@Gaz agree with all the above.
The Mike Oldfield example perfectly makes my case. He released a single classical album (Music of the Spheres) and, unlike many others, he does appear as a composer as expected for that album only (so does Prince for the Kamasutra suite - again genre is Classical.
Classical subgenres are very limited though so you wouldn’t catch much - currently there are bugs in subgenre relations which cause weird stuff to appear but many are period related with a few key modern ones that would drive music to work correctly across both platforms notably Modern Classical, Neo-Classical and Classical Crossover.
Classical is not an easy beast to tame…
In fact if you wanted a “safe” Inclusion rule something like…
IsSubgenreOfClassical && NameContainsClassical
May be a good place to start - Any other subgenres would almost certainly also have Classical itself as a direct genre anyway (Baroque, Romantic, Classical Period etc) while the above 3 examples may not.
@tiefling your comment about Mike Oldfield appearing as composer on his classical album gave me another thought (sorry).
Looking in the Classical view it gives views of conductor, soloist, orchestra, etc. Whilst most ‘pure’ classical albums contain this information I wonder how many sub-genre albums, or other one-off albums like Mike Oldfield’s, do? If you cannot get this information, even from scraping the internet, would there be any point including the album in classical?
A lot of them do, but consistency just isn’t a thing, but what is and isn’t present doesn’t seem to matter.
i have 2 Mike Oldfield classical albums, both with other soloists, conductor and orchestra - one was a performance without him. I think that seems to be the problem - he appears as a Soloist but not a Composer. If I try to clicm through to him from the album that doesn’t appear in the classical view I’m taken to his classical soloist page - there’s an odd disconnect there.
The first doesn’t show in the classical section, the other does - why, I know not. Both are directly in the “Pure” Classical Genre. I haven’t been able to work out the sense of it TBH and what controls what composers appear. Oldfield appears as an Artist and Soloist but not a Composer. Another like this is Nils Frahm - he very rarely uses an orchestra, but his pieces are on numerous classical albums in my collection, as a Composer - I must have at least 3 versions of “Ambre” by him, Luke Howard and Lavinia Meijer for a start. These may not be in the “Pure” Classical genre yet but, having tweaked some other things today I’m not sure that’s a key factor.
On the other side I have some really weird inclusions from things that are being picked up as works but don’t belong there at all as well. I think that’s due to a “best guess” attempt at finding works.
I’m focussing at the moment on getting all the main Browse stuff sorted and getting my data updated before I start digging into the classical part in more detail - it seems a lot is done there that doesn’t follow tagging, so it’s difficult to understand some of the logic at the moment.