I recently signed up for a free music tracking and matching service. Audioscrobbler is a plug-in you install into your media player that submits the names of the songs you play. Your listening statistics are collected on a website where you can view them and find new music from people with similar tastes.
The data Audioscrobbler sends comes from the ID3 tags on your MP3 files. The basic ID3 tags include Title, Artist, Album, and Track Number. These tags work well for modern pop music released on albums. But who is the "Artist" for a classical, choral, orchestral, or musical piece? The performers? The conductor? The composer?
The Artist tag doesn't seem well defined in these cases. I'd like to submit data as correct as possible to better use the Audioscrobbler system. But in order to have a proper Artist tag, I feel restricted to submitting popular music released on albums.
Ever since Napster, the standard for listing tracks has been a format of "Artist - Title". When used as a filename, this format can uniquely identify two songs with the same name by different artists. But in other kinds of lists, I prefer to refer to songs by their title alone (or at least emphasize the title). When I am scanning a list of songs, I prefer to know what the song is about instead of who it is by.
Ideally, lists of music tracks should always be represented in a table with rearrangable and customizable columns. That way I could move the "Title" column to the left, and put the "Artist" column after it. Additionally, a new tagging standard (or better use of existing tags) could provide new columns like "Composer" and "Performer".
Audioscrobbler
Audioscrobbler is a plug-in you install into your media player that submits the names of the songs you play. Your listening statistics are collected on a website where you can view them and find new music from people with similar tastes.
www.audioscrobbler.com
Last.fm
Last.fm is an alternative way to access your Audioscrobbler statistics. The Last.fm service is focused on the internet radio that lets you listen to songs that people with similar musical tastes like.
www.last.fm
BaviH www.audioscrobbler.com/user/BaviH/, my Audioscrobbler profile
BaviH www.last.fm/user/BaviH/, my Last.fm profile