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Beethoven was not the artist

— By Paul McGowan —
Another consistent error I see is listing the composer of classical music as the artist or album artist. If you have a copy of a recording performed by Ludwig Beethoven you probably have something worth a fortune since there was no way to record old Ludwig when he was playing the piano or conducting an orchestra. Keeping the composer field accurate is critical in classical music and not all that important in anything else unless you're a history buff in music or want to be able to hear all songs written by Lerner and Loewe. Again, make sure you're consistent in what you want. We get asked all the time what should someone put into the artist field on a classical album, since Chopin cannot be the answer if you have a copy of Polonaise. Here's what we recommend:
  • Artist: Conductor, orchestra. So here you have to decide last name first name or first name last name and then the rest. Bernstein, Leonard or Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic. I go this way: Bernstein, Leonard in the conductor field and New York Philharmonic for the artist.
  • Album Artist: Conductor.
Give some thought to how you would search for something. Then consistently tag everything that way. I have gotten a few notes that some of you are tiring of this subject and want some new and fresh meat to read. I too want to jump to a couple of new subjects, one of which is SACD and DSD - which I will gear up for and spend some time writing about. We also need to cover ripping CD's and SACD's and how to do it, so we'll certainly be back onto this subject in die course. In the meantime, I have been working on a new concept product that we want to launch this December and I thought it might be interesting to spend some time looking into the process of development of this new piece as well as cover some of the fundamentals involved with it. Tomorrow, a change of pace.

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