Classical music tags handled badly by almost all themes

[ceratophyllum]

Classical music tags are nuts.  They're super long, contain nasty punctuation characters and spaces, and no one agrees on the best way to tag a large classical collection.  Everyone knows Beethoven's 5th was composed by Beethoven, so it is pointless to put this info in the "Album" and "Artist" tags .  If you have more than one version what sets them apart is who is playing, the conductor, maybe even the recording label.  Generally, rather than faff around with wacky tags like "Conductor" and "Composer" (which many players do not display) I think what is typically done is the information is all jammed into the "Album" tag.

So is the best solution really a scrolling marquee? I mean, in the best case, with tiny fonts on a large screen iPod like the Video 5.5, you get non-stop, huge lines of scrolling text doing the cha-cha.  It's almost tolerable if you slow down the scrolling speed, but there has to be some way to wrap long lines...hasn't there?

Btw, I don't mean to pick on RockBox: most players can't handle classical music tags very well at all. I 've tried Sony NW-AXX series, some of the cheaper Hiby players, and a tiny piece of crap by Hidisz.  At least RockBox gives people the tools to try to fix this mess.  Has someone already done it? A theme made to wrap super long tags with small fonts and no images wasting space on the screen?

[Frankenpod]

I experimented with breaking tags into multiple lines, but it's difficult as you have to pretty-much guesstimate how many characters will fit on a line, and if you want to work out how to put a line break in a reasonable place (i.e. not in the middle of a word) it would get even more difficult.

e.g. this one breaks the track title (and also breaks the 'comment' field in into multiple lines)

https://themes.rockbox.org/index.php?themeid=3178&target=ipod6g

You could try making your own theme with a similar approach, to show all the information as you want.

(I don't know why, if the tags are so long and complex, they don't just do them as an image and make that the album art.  Or put them in the comment field?)

[ceratophyllum]

Thanks for the theme. It looks like a reasonable start for customization.

I thought about using images, but I think ipod screens are just too small for easy to read text in a picture. Unless you use the whole screen for the image.

Another really irritating thing classical music stores do (worst case with opera) is tag tracks on the same album with different artists: the ARTIST tag varies depending on which people are performing on that particular track.  So if you sort by ARTIST, the opera is scattered all over the place under the names of a bunch of singers you've never heard of.

I think the album concept is not a good fit when you've got wildly differing time lengths.  There really is no reason to chop everything up into 80min CD-sized pieces anyway when hardly anyone wants CDs.  I don't think that album was ever a good fit for classical, but stores are still hanging onto it regardless.

 Nevertheless, it seems like better ideas fail to take the over the world: BIS once made a 4-hour SACD  https://bis.eclassical.com/label/bis/dowland-the-complete-solo-lute-music.html containing all of John Download's lute music by not including the 5.0 surround (kind of a waste for one guy with a lute) and using the whole disc for 2 channel stereo data. I would have liked to see more things like this especially with opera, but I think this was a one-off.