Tagging Ogg Vorbis music files for classical music

Fifteen years ago, I started ripping my CD collection into digital form using the patent-free file formats FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. I used FLAC for the first stage of ripping, because it is lossless. But FLAC is also quite bulky, which is a problem when using the files on space-limited portable devices. So the next stage was to convert FLAC to Ogg Vorbis, which is compressed, lossy format similar to MP3, but free of patents and royalties.

Fifteen years ago I was using a fourth generation iPod as a music player, which did not support Ogg Vorbis. So I replaced the built-in firmware with Rockbox, which supports multiple music formats. It also provides gap-free playback, useful for long works like Pelleas et Mélisande and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that often have no gaps between tracks.

This system worked well until three years ago, when my ex-wife stole my iPod, along with thousands of dollars of other personal property. Since then I’ve been trying to use Android devices to replace the iPod. This process was made more difficult by the lack of suitable music players for Android that (1) supported Ogg Vorbis, and (2) had gap-free playback.

Eventually I found a few Android apps that did these two things, but there was another problem that I’d hoped to solve, and which Rockbox hadn’t solved either. That was the problem of tagging that supported classical music. Tags are bits of information that are embedded in music files that give the album name, date, artist, genre and track information. The problem with tagging conventions is that they were hardened by the early adoption of the iPod into supporting popular music, but were inadequate for classical music. The iPod seemed not to understand the concept of an album in which the perform and composer were different, or that might contain multiple works, each composed of multiple tracks, or that these works might have different composers or performers.

Eventually I found a music player for Android that supports classical music: Opus 1 Music Player. It has a companion Classical Music Tagger app that lets you add the appropriate tags to music files, and a Classical Music Scanner app that builds a database based on the the tags it finds in the device’s music files. I tested the tagger on some Ogg Vorbis files I’d copied to an Android phone, and then examined the files on a Linux machine to see which tags were used. I determined that these apps were using the following additional tags to support classical music:

• COMPOSER - the actual composer, not the performer
• GROUPING - the title of the work (e.g., “Symphony No. 4 in E minor”)
• SUBTITLE - the subtitle of the work (e.g., “Opus 98”)

The problem with using a tagging app on a phone is that it’s fairly cumbersome, as are most editing tasks on a crippled “smart” device with a tiny screen and no keyboard. So I wrote some Ruby scripts for Linux that make it easier to add tags to music files before they are transferred to the “smart” device. The idea behind these scripts was to use an album descriptor in plain text that is easy to edit (using one’s favorite editor). Then run a script to apply the tags specified in the album descriptor to a set of music files at one go. These are tools that only a long-time Unix/Linux command line user could love, but I find that they save me a tremendous amount of time and aggravation.

The scripts are oggalbum (which writes tags to music files) and oggmakealbum (which reads tags from music files). You can find them in my scripts source repository.