Is it possible to use Tellico to make a collection of CDs of Classical Music? Problem is, in Classical Music we don't have artist, album and songs. We have composer, work (which may have several movements), Orchestra, conductor and soloists.

I have a collection of about 4400 albums of which perhaps 1/3 are classical music. Although not perfect, Tellico mostly meets my needs.

You can define custom fields, which I have done. I have fields named Composer, Conductor and Ensemble for each album. There is already a Performer tab where featured soloists can be listed along with their instrument. There is also an Artist field in which I put the composer. It would be easy enough to add an Album Artist field which could be used for the featured soloist.

There are still some glaring weaknesses. I think some of these can only be fixed by a completely new application which has a relational database underneath. Others might be handled by some custom fields.

"Work" or "Opus" is an unknown concept. As an example, Beethoven's Piano Sonata #14 is a single work composed of three movements, each of which is generally one track on a CD. Tellico can store the individual tracks but has no idea that they comprise one work. That makes it impossible to find all performances of a work. In some cases the name of the work can be included in the track name, but that is clumsy and error-prone.

There is no ability to have different ensembles and performers for each track. The tracks table has fields for only track name and artist.

Likewise there is no ability to have several ensembles and conductors for an album. Multiple composers can be handled because the Artist field is a multi-value.

Albums that contain multiple disks are not handled well. I have, for example, an album of the entire organ works of J.S. Bach on 18 LP records. I can put all of the tracks in as if they were on one disk, but that makes for a big mess trying to find which disk has a particular track. It is possible to put in 18 different disks each with a set of tracks - but then EVERY album in the entire database has 18 disks. Tellico puts a tab for each disk on the data entry screen, and having 18 such tabs makes for a big mess. Image the complete works of Mozart. There is a CD set with over 200 disks sold as a single SKU. You either put in 200 individual entries or you have 200 tabs on every data entry screen.

Way back in the old days I used a music database called CATraxx. It was only for Windows. The underlying database was Jet (also known as MS Access). I really liked its schema. Unfortunately all development ceased many years ago, and since I now use Linux exclusively I have no good way to run it. Warts and all, Tellico is the best music cataloger I have found for Linux.

Bill Gee