Like most other music players, Amarok is awkward at best for playing classical music, and many of its nice content-based features for generating playlists aren't applicable at all. I'd like to start a discussion here of how Amarok might be enhanced to make it the best classical music player on the Net. A player that handles classical music well will perforce work equally well for popular music, since just about all the requirements for popular music are special cases of the requirements for classical music. Structurally, a Broadway show is similar to an opera. There have been many isolated posts on how to deal with classical music in Amarok, but I haven't seen any on an overall view of the subject.

The main thing that's needed is the ability to construct a hierarchy of objects, with tracks at the bottom. One way to approach this would be to allow playlists to appear as members of other playlists, and to be able to attach the same characteristics to playlists that are attached to tracks.

The hierarchy is often more that two levels deep. For example: music by Beethoven, string quartets, early/middle/late quartets, individual quartets, movements of quartets. It would be great to be able to construct, for instance, a playlist consisting of just the early quartets, or of the third act of Gotterdamerung.

The other thing that's needed -- and it's almost there already -- is better tagging and displaying of track information. What makes this a nasty problem is that CD's themselves are tagged with little consistency, sometimes listing the performer as the artist and other times listing the composer, for example. Amarok can't solve that problem, but what it can do is to provide very flexible ways of displaying track/playlist descriptors and of making selections on them,

An example of a great thing to do would be to be able to apply Amarok's features for constructing playlists automatically to the nested playlists I suggested above. I wouldn't be interested in a mishmosh of movements from concertos or even adagios from concertos, but a playlist that mingled Romantic concertos, Bach cantatas, Bernstein Broadway shows, Beethoven piano sonatas, and Monteverdi madrigals while maintaining the integrity of each composition would be an utter delight.

Ideas, anyone? And is there anyone among the Amarok implementers who might be interested in running with this concept?

I definitely agree. I believe I posted a suggestion to the brainstorm forum to allow you to group certain tracks so that even if you have the playlist set to random tracks it would still play those grouped tracks in order, but that seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.
It would be nice to set up a playlist of these are all of the pieces that I want to play. These tracks belong to this piece (concerto, sonata, whatever) so make sure that they always play together and in order. That's one of a couple of major differentiators between classical and pop - with pop music each track is the complete piece (a song), with classical each track may be one movement from a piece or even just part of a movement of a piece (the CD I have with Beethoven's 5th symphony has it split up into about 8 tracks).
Another major differentiator is the prominence of the performer vs. the composer: In pop music it is the performer's music (the artist is the performer), and the song writers are the tools to assist the performer in their musical expression. In classical music it is the complete reverse - the artist is the composer and the performers are merely interpreters of that art. This of course leads to another difference in usage patterns: With pop music a listener is more likely to actually group the songs according to the album they were released on. With classical music, the listener almost never cares about the album grouping, but only the composer/genre/style grouping.

If there are any classical music lovers among the Amarok implementors and maintainers, perhaps something will happen. Otherwise, alas, it probably won't.

My vague impression is that other players do no better. I've heard some mention of Quod Libet, but among its other limitations, it can't handle Ogg Vorbis.

My two cents, as a classical AND pop music lover. It is quite easy to search for what you want to play, and move that to the playlist, via the right-click menu, click-to-select and drag, or use the PUD. The weakness is in playlist generation, which is up for a re-write. Please come up with some specific suggestions which might be useful. For instance, the possibility of choosing albums rather than tracks for generating playlists might be useful for both classical and pop music.

There is another concept, about which I'm a bit fuzzy, that of cue files. Since I know little about them, I'll not talk about it, but I think that should be brought into the discussion.

valoriez wrote:Please come up with some specific suggestions which might be useful. For instance, the possibility of choosing albums rather than tracks for generating playlists might be useful for both classical and pop music.

Albums might or might not be useful, depending on what's in them. For instance, an album containing two different symphonies would generally not be very useful.

But what would go a long way towards making Amarok good for C.M. would be the ability to group tracks into "compositions", and to enable a composition to have all the search and selection properties of a track. For pop music, a composition would often just be an album. (The name, of course is inessential.) Think of all the nice things you can do in Amarok in searching for songs, and extend them to searching for compositions.

It would probably be necessary to create and tag compositions manually, since it's not obvious how that process could be automated.

You might be over-thinking this. The search/sort is very powerful both in the collection, and in the playlist itself, so I think your energies might better be directed at making sure your tagging is GREAT, and then using that information to make your playlists.

Once you get a great Romantic playlist, for instance, just save it as such. There is not limit to the number of playlists you can save, and you can use playlists within playlists too. I think Amarok will do what you want, if you spend time and attention to your tags. Picard can be helpful if it knows about the music, and of course when there is badly tagged music -- you can help them correct the MusicBrainz database, and help all of us classical music lovers.

You said that it was possible to have playlists within playlists. I've wondered if that is possible, and if so, how to make such playlists. If I understand you correctly, playlists within playlists would do what I'm looking for, since a composition would just be a playlist. Suppose, for instance, I have two playlists, each representing a single concerto. How could I construct a playlist with two entries, each being one of the concertos? And how can I attach tags to a playlist?

By the way, a good first guess for the tag on a playlist is to set each field to the longest common prefix of the corresponding field of the components, For instance, if two tracks have the titles
Dvorak, Symphony No. 4, 1 Allegro
Dvorak, Symphony No, 4, 2 Adagio
then the longest common prefix would be "Dvorak, Symphony No. 4," (I could live with the extraneous comma at the end of the prefix.) This heuristic will be correct most but not all of the time.

Tracks are tagged, not playlists. Playlists can be titled whatever you like.

Once you have one playlist loaded, you can load other playlists also, change their order, queue them, whatever. Whether or not you can save the "meta" playlist with playlists within it successfully, I have not tested. Why not try it?

If you have lots of tags to fix, try Picard, EasyTag, PuddleTag, or Kid3. You use these apps outside of Amarok. If you want to be able to choose the orchestra or soloist, then make sure that you use the Composer tag for the Composer, and the Artist tag for the orchestra or soloist, depending on what you find important.

You can also use the orchestra name as part of the Album name, if you like. Also, the standard for tracks where a soloist performs a few of them in a larger work, is to include (feat. Artist Name) at the end of the trackname.

Find a scheme you like, and stick to it.

Have fun!

I tend to prefer setting up a playlist with all of the music that I am in the mood for in a given setting and then set it to random so that it mixes them up pretty well. If I set up this primary playlist composed of the various sub-playlists for the different compositions, is there a random setting that will play the sub-playlists in a random order? (I haven't tried it yet, but I know of only random track and random album)

Maybe. Why not try and see? I assume that when you load a playlist into a playlist, that what are listed are actually tracks, but I don't know this for sure.

If you test, tell us how that works for you.

To me, random and classical music means using one of the classical streams.

It would be much easier to add a label for the mood to a specific set of tracks, then you can simply search by labels. You can also use labels to generate playlists so it is much eaiser to handle.

I usually set the Concerto name as the album title, then add the movements as the track title. If a ripped CD contains more than one concerto for example, I split it in separate discs and add the original title to the comment.

The only thing I am missing currently is to have a possibility to add multiple artists to one track with separate id3 tags for each artist. id32v4 supports that, it is just not implemented in Amarok yet. There already is a wish in the wishlist for that.

What do you to to ensure that the tracks of the concerto behave as a single unit, even if there are similar concertos also in the database? That's what I've been looking for all along. If I have three concertos and want to play them in random order, I don't want the movements played in random order.

Well, if they are all labelled the same and you have done track numbers, you can just sort by label and track number (or album and track number) in the playlist. Then if you want random, you can do "random albums".

Here's a real example. I have the 5 Beethoven piano concertos on a set of 3 CDs; Nos. 1 and 2 on Disk 1, Nos. 3 and 4 on Disk 2, and No. 5 on Disk 3. So if the albums correspond to the actual CDs, how would I play the 5 concertos in a random order -- preserving the order of movements within each concerto? A possible answer is that each concerto becomes an album. That works only if I don't care about preserving the identities of the CDs.

Right, you will have to decide what's important to you.

Of course, since comments are searchable also, you can create a template for yourself for comments, for instance:

Album Name, CD 3 of 5
Symphony name, conductor name
Soloist, instrument
Other notes

So you will keep the information that is important to you.