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#1 2007-12-30 23:18:28

peets
Member
From: Montreal
Registered: 2007-01-11
Posts: 936
Website

CD Ripper for classical music

It was the summer of 2004. I discovered that The Dollarama sold cds with classical music for $1 each. I bought about twenty discs, and for a while I could brag that my entire cd collection was worth about the same price as a major-label album (this stopped being true this year when I got richer and bought a few costly albums).

Anyway, I want to rip all that music onto my computer in Ogg Vorbis format. I face a few problems:

First, classical music doesn't come in "albums". I'm not sure what the real terminology is, but I like to say it comes in 'works' and there are many movements in a 'work'. You could say artist->composer, album->work, song->movement. The thing is, different orchestras can play the same songs, and I want to be able to differentiate between them. Also, which actual album the song comes from is relevant: some of the cds I have contain only highlights of certain works or movements, while others contain a fuller version.

I'd like to have a setup somewhat like this.

For the filesystem,

composer/work/movement

I'd like movements to have a number in front indicating the order in which they should be played.
Also, if the song is from such and such an orchestra or has such and such a feature, a descriptive string should be placed at the beginning of the file name. Here's an example file name:

Giacomo Puccini/La Bohème/Highlights 01 - Che gelida manima

For the metadata, I don't know what names to use. This is a guess:

Composer (the dead guy who wrote the original piece)
Artist? (The orchestra who recorded the piece)
Album (The name of the cd I got at the dollarama)
Title (The name of the movement, w/special comments as described above)
??? (The name of the work (e.g. "Violin Concerto No.3" or "Turandot")... I really don't know where this info goes.)

Has anyone done something similar before? What software did you use?

Another problem I have is with character encodings. A lot of pieces have accentuated characters in them. I've had trouble trying to rip these using gnormalize (which in turn uses cdparanoia). Neither the UTF-8 or the Latin-1 setting worked properly. Is this the ripper's fault, or some setting that might be wrong on my machine?

Anyway, thanks for any answer. This post may be long and obfuscated, but at least the dollarama website is one of the most absurd uses of the internet ever.

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#2 2007-12-30 23:23:42

DeveloperDave
Member
Registered: 2007-12-25
Posts: 9

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

Pre-ripped with OGG, and named appropriately:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sound/list

smile

Edit: HAHAHA the Dollarama website is _hilarious_! I bet they paid a professional for that thar. *cough splutter*

Last edited by DeveloperDave (2007-12-30 23:29:46)


- Dave

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#3 2007-12-31 00:23:44

peets
Member
From: Montreal
Registered: 2007-01-11
Posts: 936
Website

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

Hmm thank you I'll have a few to add to my collection! I must admit I haven't tried google yet, I'll go do that right now.

Edit: found this: http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/ClassicalStyleGuide

Last edited by peets (2007-12-31 00:31:39)

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#4 2007-12-31 02:32:02

pauldonnelly
Member
Registered: 2006-06-19
Posts: 776

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

I've given up on trying to categorize classical music. I group by composer in my directory structure and leave it at that. As for tags, that's a fundamental failing of pretty much every format. Ideally a file would be able to contain multiple artist tags (one for each performer you care to mention), any number of tags for the ensemble (orchestra or band name), any number for composer, conductor tags, and a meta-tag to denote the main sort field, so that when you look through your music library classical music ends up sorted by composer, rock music by band, and so on. I think the problem is that tags were originally intended to be metadata, possibly searched, but not used as a heirarchy for browsing your library. As it is, I just try to cram relevant information into whatever tag it fits in. I don't even bother with music libraries now. I figure that when I'm thinking about what to listen to I usually think of it in terms of album rather than any of the things I've got in tags. I mostly use tags as a place to store info I might want to know about a given album or track.

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#5 2007-12-31 11:31:23

xd-0
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2007-11-02
Posts: 327
Website

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

Rip with asunder, and use quodlibet to display your music collection.

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#6 2007-12-31 12:40:50

sime
Member
Registered: 2007-12-14
Posts: 96

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

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#7 2007-12-31 15:17:24

peets
Member
From: Montreal
Registered: 2007-01-11
Posts: 936
Website

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

I pretty much gave up (can't remember if it was before or after reading pauldonnelly's post...) and ripped all the cds with

abcde -o flac

It's not like I have a huge collection of songs that I will only listen to once.

BTW, here's some free advertising for magnatune.com. You can listen to full albums, then buy for $5 and up (you choose the price), and 50% goes straight to the artist. Oh, and what helps is that they listen to the submissions and accept only what they deem is quality.

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#8 2007-12-31 15:24:03

peets
Member
From: Montreal
Registered: 2007-01-11
Posts: 936
Website

Re: CD Ripper for classical music

sime wrote:

Wow. Looks impressive. I will try re-ripping with this... later.

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