Wednesday, April 06, 2011

The "99 Darkest" collection

I was able to finally start listening to the "99 Darkest Pieces of Classical Music" collection, and so far this is the most enjoyable collection of classical I've listened to. And I've barely dented it. I was also pleased to discover that "Albinoni's Adagio" in G Minor is on here. That's another one I've been wanting to get hold of.

An important note: all tracks are properly tagged with the composer information.* So now I won't have to sleuth out the composers for all these. I'll only have to look each one up and find when he lived. When I do listen to classical, I like to have in my head when the composer lived so I can fit him into a kind of mental timeline based on what little I know of classical music (all learned in college long ago and mostly forgotten).

I fiddled around a little with MP3Tag and learned it can do yet another thing that my old tagging software couldn't: export file lists with all sorts of tag information. None of the included formats had composer information, but after a few minutes of reading I figured out what to add to the script to get it to do that, so I can now export the whole list for easy reference.

UPDATE 8:26 PM: AAAGGGHHH!!! VOCALS!!! I just can't stand operatic vocals.


*For example, I had always assumed the aforementioned adagio was actually written by Tomaso Albinoni. But no, it was written for him by Remi Giazatto, who, it turns out, was his biographer, and who lived in the 20th century. So my musical education continues.

5 comments:

  1. I just downloaded this from Amazon too, but I don't think they include any composer information. I assume you're talking about what is in the "Artist" ID3 tag field? That's the performer (and I assume director in some cases), not the composer, unless I'm mistaken.

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  2. No, there is a composer tag with the correct information. You need mp3 player software or tagging software that is compatible with the full tag. You can also see it if you play it in Windows Media Player by right-clicking the track title, select "Properties" and "Content." The composer will be shown in the list of tagged information.

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  3. Ah, yes, now I see. Mp3tag doesn't even display the "Composer" tag by default, which is why I couldn't find it. So it is all there then. That's very helpful, thanks.

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  4. One year later... I bought this compilation from Amazon MP3. The composers are actually tagged as "conductor", and some are not correct. They place David Parry as the conductor for the Carmina Burana (which he may actually be in this instance), but the COMPOSER is Carl Orf. It's a little frustrating that the tags are not completely accurate.

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    Replies
    1. Weird. In mine, all the composers are tagged as composers.

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