Media players and classical

Classical music is composer, composition and performer centered.
If you want to play a composition you can:

• Locate the tracks in an album.
  Often the title contains both the composition and the movement.
  At least this allows you to search for a specific composition.
  
  
• Split the album into compositions.
  The album is a common tag supported by all media players.
  Use this tag for the composition.
  The disadvantage is as internet databases rely on album title and/or number of tracks, by destroying this information, a lookup will fail.
  
  

• Use a custom tag for compositions
  I do think this is the best solution.
  You don’t destroy the album tag.

Splitting albums or populating a custom tag by typing is a tedious job.

Expressions parsing the data can alleviate this.
Your best bet is a media player supporting the composer tag, custom tags and expressions.

WMP12

Windows Media Player 12 supports the composer tag.
If you want compositions, you might decide to use one of the custom tags; use one of the existing tags like Subtitle or split the album into compositions.

 

You can’t import your own custom tags.
You don’t have any option to copy/paste tags so populating the Composition tag is a manual job.
You can’t use expressions to parse e.g. title to generate the composition.

The album title in this view is nicely unreadable.

 

Foobar

You can configure Foobar in all kind of ways if you know how to do it.
Mike Le Voi does.

Pretty cool.

If you want to give it a shot you need:

Foobar2000

foo_ui_columns

foo_upnp

foo_uie_vis_peakmeter_spectrum

Mikes cfg file

 

Download Foobar2000 (V1.1.11 or higher) and do a standard installation.

In File > Preferences > Components install the 3 plug-ins

 

In File > Preferences > Display choose Columns UI as the Interface.

 

After enabling Columns UI copy Mikes configuration file foo_ui_columns.dll.cfg to

C:\Users\Your User Name\AppData\Roaming\foobar2000\configuration\

 

You can add your own custom tags like Composition and Opus.

MusicBee

A simple and elegant player with a consistent interface.
It is album based but you can define custom tags.

You can import your own custom tags.
You don’t have any option to copy/paste values from one tag into another so populating the Composition tag is a manual job.
You can’t use expressions to parse e.g. the title to generate the composition.

Using the selection panes you can filter compositions.

MusicBee V3 has a improved interface.

It is pretty good in handling classical.

MusiCHI

MusiCHI comes standard with a couple of tags typical for classical music:

• Period or style
• Album Artists (aka Performers)
• Instruments
• Grouping
• Composition

 

Choose the composer from the pick list.

Then choose the composition from the pick list.

Saves you a lot of time.

Formatting options like these demonstrates this player is developed by somebody who is really deeply immersed into classical.

 

 

The Text Processor offers al kind of options to clean your tags.

If you feel challenged by creating custom tags, writing expressions, everything that smells like programming; CHI might be the one to look for.

 

More about MusiCHI