[slaymaker1907]

I still think it's pretty bad for classical music. An important question for various pieces is who plays a particular instrument, but there really isn't a nice way to encode this in the metadata (encoding the relation of both person and role where role could be anything).

I also usually want to know who the conductor was and what was the orchestra

[inopinatus]

I'd expect publishers of classical music to know the difference between a composer, a conductor, a soloist, and an orchestra, but no, apparently not. They freely mash them up across fields. The difference between a symphony and an album is often mangled too, especially on releases containing multiple works. And for fuck's sake, no, a movement is not a song. I don't play, "like", flag, list, cross-fade, or reshuffle them independently.

Music metadata has been optimized to suit the marketing preferences of contemporary record labels. But more general classes of music won't shift units on Spotify so the message is loud and clear, a resounding "get fucked" from the assholes that run this industry.

(One side of my family is in the recording business. I can confirm the whole thing is run by assholes.)

[efitz]

I like being able to address and like/favorite individual movements. Beethoven Piano Sonata #14 (“Moonlight”) is a masterpiece, but the second movement is <expletive>. I don’t know if I could listen to it hundreds of times like I have the first and third movements.

[8bitsrule]

Many classical works have more than one 'track'. Musicians, critics, etc. usually refer to them by the tempo marking text. A lot of music software just doesn't get this. These tempo markings (by the composer; often in italian) are the track names. So Moonlight has 3 movements:

I. Adagio sostenuto

II. Allegretto

III. Presto agitato

[inopinatus]

This is perfectly highlighting that we've got no way to express our actual preferences, and are stuck treating something as a song when it isn't, but it's the only paradigm offered to us.

[hulitu]

> Beethoven Piano Sonata #14 (“Moonlight”) is a masterpiece,

Which one ? Played by Kissin ? Or by Rubinstein ? Or by ...

[8bitsrule]

Most consider the composition to be a masterpiece.

Artists/conductors 'perform' 'interpretations' of works. Whether any interpretation is 'masterful' or 'virtuosic', etc., is up to the critical listener.

Three recordings by Horowitz may have been released ... which one is 'best'? Depends on the phase of the moon and your playback equipment!

The 'quality' of a particular performance may depend on the instrument provided to the artist. The year of recording can be very important (reflects techology used). The acoustics of the recording venue are also inherently part of the performance ... e.g. too much reverb.

[azalemeth]

This, many times over. Id3 tags are one thing but all decent classical record labels (most of whom have always been drm-free) like Hyperion or Naxos give you a pdf cd jewel case booklet. I've got recordings of many friends and it's always a pleasure to see their names in this. I don't use streaming services and one of the unexpected joys of iTunes is that the album art can contain a pdf with a cover image. The rest of the UI mostly assumes that you're listening to non-classical music though. I'd love to able to search for e.g. "Victoria's Requiem" and get albums with sensible names, even if they're in Latin, seemlessly grouped by performance.

[eliaspro]

A few years ago, we started working on a platform for classical music [1] and took great pride in our metadata and our underlying schema which basically covered 99% of all the weird edge cases classical music has.

Unfortunately, we couldn't make it work economically even though we tried several approaches for monetization and had to shutdown a while ago.

[1] https://grammofy.com/

[wolverine876]

Might you release the schema into the public domain? I know that's much more easily said than done, and it's your hard work and you deserve the benefits, so no argument from me if you don't.

Or maybe share some tips on what works with the corpus of classical metadata?

[eliaspro]

While I'd love to see some of the quite spectacular internal tooling + data to be released under an open license, put to use for enhancing MusicBrainz' existing data etc., I doubt it's going to happen.

All team members have started new opportunities since quite a while and untangling all this, filtering out potentially copyrighted/licensed material etc. would take quite some effort.

[999900000999]

I primarily make hip hop music, but I would absolutely love a platform like this where I can listen to a classical piece, and download the score and MIDI files.

Are there any legal reasons preventing this ? I don't have the ability to play classical music myself, ( my weighted 88 key sits taunting me), but I'd love to be able to take these compositions and integrate them into my own music.

[colejohnson66]

IANAL, but in the US, copyright on classical pieces tends to apply to the performances, not the music. For example, a Bach piece is in the public domain (the score and probably the MIDI derivative[a]) just from being old enough, but a recording of that public domain piece may be copyrighted itself.

As always, this isn’t universal. Check your local copyright laws to be sure.

[8bitsrule]

IANAL either, but. For MIDI, a public-domain work might be just mechanically converted into notes of a 'MIDI score'. Probably very flat-sounding, but technically that transcription [0] may (probably) be PD.

(E.g. My handwritten copy of a PD short story is probably PD. But my reading of it isn't.)

BUT if some famous piano player performed for the MIDI recording, then you've got tempo changes, timing, attack velocities, all that data in the file as well. Probably not PD (best to ask). (As with piano-player rolls.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_(music)

[999900000999]

Sounds like someone needs to be awesome and release midi files of classic compositions.

You have the rare hip hop song which samples classical music directly, but I really want to learn music theory, like understanding how the notes work.

[8bitsrule]

The classics are out there, but often they've been performed by someone. Easy to strip down to the notes with a good MIDI editor.

It's been a long while for me, but a search on 'classic midi files' turned this up. (Hard to tell if it's crap without a listen.) https://www.midiworld.com/classic.htm

[gvurrdon]

This is also important for jazz. Should I wish, for example, to find albums where a particular bassist is playing then this would be rather difficult unless they happen to be the leader for that particular recording. Also, it would be particularly helpful to have subgenres, e.g. jazz -> post bop, jazz -> free, etc.