iTunes now supports movements and works for Classical music but does not provide any way to automatically add data to these fields. So if you are using iTunes as an editor it becomes very time consuming to add this new data.
The screencast belowis a tutorial on the Mac, and the tutorial in this blog post is for Windows, steps are the same for both.
Adding Only Works and Movements for iTunes
Luckily both SongKong and Jaikoz can now add this data for you totally automatically. This guide explains how this works with SongKong. In this walkthroughwe are going to limitSongKong to only update the Work related fields. But of course it can be used to identify songs and add the full set of metadata
For the purpose of this guide I have created an iTunes database consisting of just three albums that we are going to update in one go with SongKong. Two albumsare classical music album that we know to contain works and movements and one regular rock album. I have enabled the Movement, Workand Movement No columns in the Song View, and they are currently empty of data.
And the Album view does not look any different then it would for a Pop/Rock album
Lets start SongKong and select your music folder.
Start Fix Songs and ensure that Save Changes to iTunes on the Basic tab is enabled.
Go the Format tab, select Never Modify add add all fields to the Selected Fields list except Work, Movement, Movement No and Movement Total so it looks like the screenshot below and select OK
Now lets go to the Classical tab, the defaults are tuned for iTunes. Most notably if you have files in the AIF or MP3 format you really need Copy Work to Grouping field to be set to MP3 and AIF (iTunes)
Now press Start and wait for the identification and iTunes update to complete.
If we look at the report that is created we can see that the Movement and Work fields have been added for the Classical releases.
Lets go over to iTunes, we can now see that the movement and work data has been added.
But if we go the Album View the work and movement data is still not displayed.
Now this is because of the one manual step potentially required. Sometimes we need to go back to the Songs View and sort by Work, then select all the songs that have a value for work, and select Get Info
Now checkthe new Use Work and Movementoption
If we now go back to the Album View and look at these albums we see songs are now grouped by Work (e.g Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 80) and therefore can use the short Movement Name instead of the the longer Song Title (e.g III Andante instead of Sonata for violin & piano No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80: Andante). iTunes also derives a Movement No using Roman numeral notation derived from the Movement No
For songs already added to iTunes before these new options were introduced into iTunes the Use Work and Movement option may need checking. For songs added since iTunes 12.5 it seems this option is checked by default so this extra step may not be necessary.
The reason we matched to three albums, was to show that the manual step can be applied to all albums with works in a single step, it doesn't have to be applied one album at a time
So as you can see we can easily use SongKong to identify classical music and the work and grouping metadata, the process is very similar for Jaikoz.
And you can use an identical method onOSX and Windows.
All the new work and movement metadata is stored in the file themselves so you can also run SongKong without enabling the Save to iTunes option. Then at a later date select all the files in iTunes and useGet Infoto update with any changes made by SongKong
We introduced a bug into SongKong 4.3 that meant it wasn't closing its connections to its internal database properly and this meant it could run out of database connections and then hang in some circumstances.
We have been working over this weekend to get this resolved, and now fixed in this new SongKong 4.4 release
Yesterday we released SongKong 4.3, but there was one rather significant bug that we didn't pick up on testing.
If you have never installed SongKong before then this version looks for a recent path setting in your properties and because this is not set it actually prevents SongKong from starting.
This is now fixed, and to enable the quickest deployment and because there are no functionality changes we have just replaced the existing 4.3 with a new version of 4.3. Simply redownload if you have had this issue, and sorry for the hassle.
Back to Part 5 - Classical Classification We have seen in earlier articles how the Track Artist field is not well suited for Classical music because there are many artists involved in a piece of Classical music.
The other major problem with Classical Music is the Albumwith Tracks format usually doesn't represent the artistic intent of the composers(s) of the music, there is a parallel structure we want to capture comprised of Movements and Works.
Movements and Works
Classical Composers usually think in terms of a Work, such as Symphony or Sonatacontaining multiple parts known as Movements. This is certainly true of the masters like Bach and Beethoven, remember when they wrote their masterpieces there was no way to actually capture a performance, audio could not be recorded.
Albums
Albums of recorded music were developed in the early 20th century, first as books of individual 78rpm records, then from 1948 as vinyl LP records played at 33 1⁄3 rpm, then Compact Discs and then various formats that can be saved to a computer drive. The album represents the artistic intent of the performer, and for pop/rock music this is often the composer and is the primary means of distributing their music, but this is not the case with Classical music, which may have been written hundreds of years before.
Classical Albums
So a classical album can contain multiple works by different composers with the only connection being they are being performed by the same orchestra or soloist.
Sometimes the album contains a complete work and sometimes only certain movements of a work We want to capture the Work structure in parallel to the Album structure. Support for Works has been poor but is now improving since iTunes have recently added a new Work field, and where iTunes leads others usually follow.
Movements and Tracks
A single movement is usually represented by a single track, so we have a nice one-one representation. The difficulty with tracks as we have seen is they can contain alot of work information and this can make the track name unwieldy. If we know that tracks 1-3 are movements I-III of a particular work then there is no real need to repeat the work information in the title. What we really need is a separate Movement field, and again iTunes have now added a Movement field.
Movement No and Track Nos
So if we have an album consisting of tracks 1-5 representing the five movements from one work and tracks 6-10 representing five movements from another work we want to capture this information, and this is the purpose of the Movement No and Movement Total fields. These fields index the tracks in relation to the work they are part of.
Jaikoz and SongKong
Jaikoz and SongKong already support these new fields and have full integration with iTunes. Hopefully other players will add support for all these fields very soon. Here is a simple example Movement :Allegro non troppo Work :Piano Concerto no. 2 in B-flat major, op. 83 Movement No :1 Movement Total:5 Part :I. Allegro non troppo Part Number :I Work Type :Concerto
We are pleased to announce the release of Jaikoz 9.1.0 and SongKong 4.3 today
Classical Feature Parity
We have made lots of improvements to classical matching in SongKong, but even better the whole classical matching functionality has now been added to Jaikoz. Classical matching now works the same in both applications and all the Classical music options that were in SongKong are now in Jaikoz as well.
Support for iTunes Work and Movement fields
Recently iTunes added support for Work, Movement and Movement No. SongKong already had support for deriving this information from classical releases but now it writes this information to the equivalent iTunes fields so you can now use SongKong to update these new columns for your classical releases. And even better news is that Jaikoz does this as well.
We will explain how this works in more detail in another blog post.
New Field Mappings
These it is quite customary to transcode music collections from lossless to lossy so that you have a high quality version of your music for your hi-fi system and smaller files for use on your iPod or car stereo.
We have noted that transcoders such as dbPoweramp do an excellant job of converting the audio, and a reasonable job of converting the metadata for the standard fields like album, artist and title. But they dont do such a good job of converting custom fields such as MusicBrainz Ids or the classical fields we have recently added such because they expect the fieldname to be exactly the same on all metadata formats. For MusicBrainz Ids this is not the case, i.e the MusicBrainzReleaseId field is called MusicBrainz Album Id for Mp3 and Aiff files but MUSICBRAINZ_ALBUMID for Flac and Ogg files.
We cannot change how MusicBrainz Ids are stored but we have revised the mappings for some of our recently added new classical fields in order to make it easier for metadata to be maintained when the files are transcoded.
This means in Jaikoz you many notice that some fields seem to be empty when you load them, just run Update Metadata from MusicBrainz to re-add the data to the newly mapped fields.
Acoustid Song Only Metadata
The Acoustid database is crowd-sourced and when songs are submitted to Acoustid they are submitted with their metadata. If this none of the songs submitted for a particular Acoustid fingerprint include a MusicBrainz Id then the Acoustid is not linked to MusicBrainz but the basic metadata - artist, album and title are available from Acoustid
Now when a song is matched to an Acoustid with no links to MusicBrainz metadata but with some basic metadata we use this metadata if our song doesn't already contain that information. In the SongChanges part of the report such songs are labelled (Acoustid Song Only)
This is great when your songs contained no metadata since the Acoustid database is larger than the MusicBrainz database. Also there are some songs that are in both Acoustid and MusicBrainz databases but not currently linked so adding this metadata increases the chance of your songs being matched to MusicBrainz by metadata (and Discogs).
When tracks contains featured artists
We have also added the When tracks contains featured artists option to Jaikoz this give you options when a track lists both a main artist and featured artists.
In this previous post I explained the good news for Classical music fans that iTunes now has support for works and movements. But the bad news for Mp3 and Aif formats was that it was now using the TIT1 field to store the Work instead of the Grouping. This meant the Grouping field could only be set within iTunes and was stored in the database.
I have just installed iTunes v12.5.4.42 and this has changed.
iTunes has now added a GRP1 field for formats that use the ID3 metadata format such as Mp3 and Aif formats. The good news is that now you can set the Grouping and Work fields from outside iTunes by writing data to the GRP1 and TIT1 fields respectively.
But the bad news is that ever other player out there uses TIT1 for grouping so if grouping is important to you and you need to play your songs on iTunes and other players you have a problem. Because if you set the Work field in iTunes, this will be seen as the Grouping field in other applications. If you set the Grouping field in iTunes this will have no affect in other applications because they don't support the new GRP1 field
It would have been infinitely more sensible for iTunes to leave the TIT1 field alone and define a new field to store the Work
There has been update to this regarding the Grouping fieldView Post In October iTunes added some long overdue better support for classical releases in the form of new moment, movement no, total and work fields. This allows movements within a release to be shown together, and really helps for classical releases, especially when you have an album containing multiple works. This is exciting news for SongKong and Jaikoz and we are working on adding support for auto population of these fields in the next release.
However these new fields have caused a problem.
Why is my grouping column blank for newly imported files ?
MP3 and AIFF files use the ID3 metadata format for storing information about the music such as the artist or album name. ID3 did not have any fields (known as frames) defined for most of these new fields so Apple has defined some: MVNM - Movement MVIN - MovementNo/MovementTotal
But ID3 does already have a field that could possibly be used for storing the work, the TIT1 frame, this is how it is defined in the ID3 specification document.
The 'Content group description' frame is used if the sound belongs to a larger category of sounds/music. For example, classical music is often sorted in different musical sections (e.g. "Piano Concerto","Weather - Hurricane").
This definition is a bit open to interpretation so over the years the frame has been used by different applications in different ways, both as a work and as a way to group multiple tracks in other ways. For example in SongKong it can be used to store genres as a list of values because iTunes Genre can only see the first value, a problem if you want to categorize a song with multiple genres.
In fact until version iTunes 12.5.3 iTunes have always used this frame for the Grouping field. When you update to the version of iTunes your existing files will appear unchanged, but any grouping data that was stored in the TIT1 frame has now silently been moved to iTunes internal database only.
But when you import any new music that had the grouping field set you'll see it no longer shows in the Grouping field of iTunes but the Work field, and this also applies if you update any music outside of iTunes that is already in your iTunes library.
You can see this by going to the Songs view and enabling the Work column, and there are all the missing groups.
I created this test from SongKong very simply by - Ensuring Update Genres and Save changes to iTunes was enabled on the Basic tab
- Setting Grouping to Always Replace Values on the Genres tab
- and running against a folder of MP3 files
So you can't use the Grouping field anymore, right ?
Well no, once you have added your songs to iTunes you can enter data into the Grouping field and it will persist. But it's no longer actually stored in the TIT1 field itself. Instead it is only added to iTunes internal database. But the problem with this is you can only fill in the Grouping field manually from within iTunes after the file has been imported in. Then once done to get that Grouping data out you would have to use iTunes AppleScript (OS X) or the COM API on Windows, this makes it very difficult to use your organize your songs consistently in both multiple places, such as using with both iTunes and Sonos.
This is because for MP4 Apple has defined the following new fields: @mvn Movement @mvi MovemntNo @mvc MovemntTotal @wrk Work
So there are separate fields for Grouping and Work !
Why didn't they define a separate field for Work for ID3 ?
That is the question, by adding new the new frames MVNM and MVIN frames they are already not strictly adhering to the specification anyway so the argument cannot be they did not want to break the standard
What does this mean for me ?
It means that if you use iTunes that when editing metadata for files outside of iTunes you need to consider different audio formats differently.
If you have a mix of Classical and non-Classical and you use AIFF or MP3 then it may be wise not to use the Grouping field for anything other than Works.
One question that requires more thought is when importing MP4 does it make sense to add tracks with the same Work as part of the same Grouping or not.
We will be adding options to SongKong and Jaikoz to make this as simple as we possibly can
Within iTunes it is probably best to decide on a format and stick to it, transcoding different audio formats to a single format.
In the previous section we saw how that classical composers in centuries gone by often used the opus and ranking system to classify releases, we also saw they didn't do a very good job of it ! But in the case of the major composers after they died often a good soul came along and tried to catalog their works in a more consistent way. This is called classical classification and is an attempt to classify all of a composers works, it is completely separate from the record label catalogue given to a new CD release by the record company. Usually catalogues are in chronological order but sometimes they are a thematic catalogue. For example Johann
Sebastian Bach, uses the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis). The
BWV catalog is thematic so a lower number does not mean it is an earlier
composition, for example his cantatas are numbered BWV 1 to 244 and Violin
concertos BWV 1046 to 1051. There are no other composers whose work is catalogued using BMV numbers so it quite simple to extract them from the song/work title into the Classical Catalog field and that is what SongKong does. But things aren't so simple the following composers all use a H (Haydn uses Hob as well) prefix
Haydn
Hector Berlioz
Bohuslav Martinu
Gustav Holst
and of course there are song titles that contain H. without it signifying a classical catalogue no.
Luckily because the MusicBrainz database stores the composer separately SongKong only attempts to find a classical catalog no when it has identified the composer of the piece, and then it will search for the correct classical catalog pattern(s) for that composer. This ensures that when SongKong has extracted a classical catalog no it gets it right This field offers another way to organize works by the major composers.
Pleased to announce a new major version of Jaikoz, this release contains many improvements, fixes and some significant infrastructure work.
Mood, BPM and Key Tagging
Jaikoz Pro users can now make use of AcousticBrainz - analysis has been done on millions of songs that are in the MusicBrainz database, when Jaikoz matches a song to MusicBrainz that has been acoustically analysed it can be update with the AcousticBrainz metadata, and this is all easily visible in the Mood tab of the Detail panel
DSF Support
DSD is a technology first used with Super Audio Cd's (SACD), it uses pulse-density modulation encoding a diffierence approach to other lossles formats like WAV and AIFF. The signal is stored as delta-sigma modulated digital audio; a sequence of single-bit values at a sampling rate of 2.8224 MHz (64 times the CD Audio sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, but only at 1⁄32768 of its 16-bit resolution). DSF is a way of storing this format in files with metadata and is gaining in popularity on hi end audio systems. Jaikoz fully supports DSF, including acoustic fingerprinting and all metadata fields.
New Never Modify/Modify If Empty Options
Previously most fields had their own option that allowed you to configure Jaikoz to always modify, modify if empty or never modify the field, and the option was repeated for MusicBrainz match and Discogs match. But it was very cumbersome if you suddenly wanted to change the option for a number of fields. We have now replaced by a list of fields that you can easily modify for each option.
Performers
Jaikoz now properly supports editing of the Performer and Involved Person fields, these fields allow you to add additional people involved in the song whatever their role, be it musician or art direction
Classical Tagging
Jaikoz now supports many new fields including many new Classical fields, these Classical fields are all visible on the Detail tab. Auto population of the new Classical fields can currently be done with SongKong but will be added to a future release of Jaikoz.
