Cataloguing
Muso
From time to time, I review the various music library management software available from the point of view cataloguing and playing classical music. Every time I have returned to Muso. It is amazingly good - by far the best and richest user interface of any library management software I have found (and the best partner for LMS). Cost (March 2017) is €20 from http://klarita.net/muso.html.
The notes below are describe how I configure it to get the results decribed in the illustrations.
In Tools - Options, go to the Classical tab and select "Specialised Classical Music Functionality". On this tab also, enter the names of the classical music genres that you wish to use. You can also add your own list of composers to the roster to enable sorting and filtering on periods (the common ones are already provided). These databases can then be used by the Classical Extras plugin for genre and period tag setting.
On the Import Actions tab, you will need to map the tags produced by Picard/Classical Extras to the Muso fields.
Note that the current (May 2018) version of Muso enables you to write tags to the underlying song files. This will only be consistent with this scheme for those tags which are completely unmodified on importing to Muso. Writing the other tags will either overwrite standard tags or create new custom tags. It is therefore recommended that you do not write tags from Muso - use Picard or another tagger to edit the underlying files directly.
I have made a slight alteration to Muso which I think marginally improves the display of albums containing a mix of (grouped) works and standalone recordings. This is done by modifying the CSS files (Options->Appearance->Manage themes) to include the following:
.track:not(.groupedTrack)
{
margin-top: 5px;
font-size: 110%;
}.track:not(.groupedTrack) .trackArtist, .track:not(.groupedTrack) .performer
{
font-size: 82% !important;
}.groupFiller
{
margin-top: 10px;
}
and to change the entry for .trackGroupHeader to set "margin-top: 10px;" rather than 6px.
The import actions I use to be consistent with the tags written by Picard are shown below.
Note that "stamp" is specified in the Classical Extras advanced tab and "profile" is written by dBpoweramp CD Ripper. I use "part" for the movement name rather than overwrite "title" as this leaves "title" to be used by the Squeezebox display (which doesn't have work/movement capability).