In Pop/Rock an album usually represents the artistic intent of the artist, i.e. the album was conceived and created as a single body of work.
In Classical it is more complicated. Classical composers work in terms of Symphonies or Sonatas rather than albums, we call these Works. These works comprise sub works or movements, and there may be additional levels. When Classical music and released as an album it may only contain part of a work, or conversely multiple works, so the album grouping may not be the most important grouping.
SongKong captures this data and stores in additional fields. This data can be used in your rename mask and it can also be used by Players, and UPnP Streamers to index your songs by these new fields.
Classical fields are described below, exactly how they are stored depends on the underlying file format as described in the Field Mapping section of the report.
We have to consider two types of work information. Most importantly there is the work information as defined on the album your songs have been matched to, this information allows us to fill in the , Movement, Movement No, Part, Part Number, Movement Total and Work fields, for this information to be useful ion music playback we only add this information when a track represents one of more than one movements for a work on that album.
The difference between Movement and Part is simply that Part also includes the Part Number, Movement does not.
The difference between Movement No and Part Number, is that Movement No is in decimal, and Part Number uses the more usual Roman numbering.
It doesn’t matter if the album represent a single work or multiple works as long as it has more than one movement for each work, whereas if you have a compilation album that contains individual movements from different works these would not have this data added as single movement works are not helpful for grouping.
However this work information may be useful for other reasons so if a track is linked to a work (usually this is actually a movement) within MusicBrainz then we store this work in the MusicBrainz Work Composition Name field, and the top level work that this is part of in the MusicBrainz Work field, sometimes they are the same thing. Usually there are just two level of works but where there are more than two levels of works they are stored in the Work Part LevelN field, where N can go from 1 to 6 levels.
Each Work may also a have Part Type such as Opera or Sonata. The fields are Work Type, Part Type,Work Part LevelNType
If the work or song has an Opus number we store that in the Opus field
If the song title contains a nickname we store that in the Classical Nickname field
If the song title contains an alternative cataloging no we store that in the Classical Catalog field
If an orchestra can be identified they are added to the Orchestra field and also the Orchestra Sort field.
If a choir can be identified they are added to the Choir field and also the Choir Sort field.
If any type of ensemble can be identified that is not either an Orchestra or a Choir they are added to the Ensemble field and also the Ensemble Sort field.
When performers are credited we can add them together with their instrument or singing part to the Performer and the Involved People fields, these are usually but not necessarily individuals.
We use have two different fields for compatibility with Roon and MinimServer. Roon uses the Performer to identify the main performers (Primary Track Artist) whereas performer is usually used for secondary musicians with their instruments. So if you are using Roon you should not use the Performer, and the Roon, Fix Songs profile adds Performer to the Format:Never Modify and Delete all metadata fields options. Roon does understand the Involved People field correctly so this should be used.
MinimServer has a problem with the Involved People field, when using the ID3 format (as used by Wav, Aif and Mp3). For ID3v24 Involved People maps to a TIPL field, and for ID3v23 it maps to an IPLS field but MinimServer cannot read these fields. So for MinimServer the Performer provides a way to get performers and their instruments in a consistent way for all audio formats.
All individual performers are listed for easy indexing to the Performer Name field and the associated Performer Name Sort field.
An example for the first song on this MusicBrainz release http://musicbrainz.org/release/58af4926-6fd2-4c1d-9628-f3ffab3eff25
Table 1. Classical Field Name Example
Movement | Allegro non troppo |
Work | Piano Concerto no. 2 in B-flat major, op. 83 |
Movement No | 1 |
Movement Total | 4 |
Work Composition Name | Concerto for Piano and Orchestra no. 2 in B-flat major, op. 83: I. Allegro non troppo |
Part | I. Allegro non troppo |
Part Number | I |
Work Type | Concerto |
MusicBrainz Work | Concerto for Piano and Orchestra no. 2 in B-flat major, op. 83 |
Opus | 83 |
Orchestra | Wiener Philharmoniker |
Orchestra Sort | Wiener Philharmoniker |
Performer | Krystian Zimerman (Piano) |
Performer Name | Krystian Zimerman |
Performer Name Sort | Zimerman, Krystian |
Conductor | Leonard Bernstein |
Conductor Sort | Bernstein, Leonard |
Composer | Johannes Brahms |
Composer Sort | Brahms, Johannes |
Involved People | Krystian Zimerman (Piano) |