Do you have a multi-lingual music collection and how do you organise them?

[lanux128]

i sometimes feel that the current music players are not designed for listeners of multi-lingual audio (music/audio books/news clips). sometimes when i'm listening to music in one language, another will intrude with no warning. i tried separating them by different folders but many players don't understand the folder structure, placing importance on tags instead. but since there is no language tag, it is not of much use.

sometimes it's very troublesome that i resort to modify the genre tag using it as makeshift language tag. so i put my wonderment into words and invite all multi-lingual music lovers to give their input on how they organise their music.

i'm normally listen to music on my PC (WinXP) and my phone (Sony Ericsson) but i'm curious if there are dedicated mp3 players that are able to do a better job.

[mwang]

sometimes when i'm listening to music in one language, another will intrude with no warning.

I don't listen to audio books or news clips, but I do enjoy music of various languages (operas & pop songs for the most part). And yet I'm not sure I understand you here. You pick what you listen to, don't you? How does this "intrusion" happen?

[lanux128]

it's simple.. let's say you have albums by Alan Jackson (English) and Alan Tam (Cantonese), the media players will not know that they sing in different language. it can only separate by the respective genre (Country & Pop).

[nosh]

Lanux, using the Quicktagger component for Foobar2000 (there will be other tagging, etc apps that'll let you do the same) you can create custom tags and add pretty much any kind of info to them. I've made tags for tempo and personal rating, for instance.  I wouldn't want to have a separate tag for languages, everything non-English goes into the 'World' genre but you can add sub-genres to the main genre itself, Eg: "World / Portuguese."

Foo supports auto-playlists - Eg: I can have an auto-playlist for (pseudocode -->) Genre=Electronic & Tempo>4 & Personal Rating>=3 & whatever other criteria, which could be something like 'Genre HAS Portuguese' (though that wouldn't get me too many matches in 'Electronic' ) Any song that matches the criteria will be added to the playlist on the fly.

I tried a few media library apps a couple of months back before I realised Foo was one of the fastest + most powerful tools for the job.

Edit: You can also display any custom tag info in its own column so sorting on any field is as easy as clicking on a column header - and you can do cool stuff like start with the slow stuff and pick up pace, more info that you asked for but, whatever! 

[lanux128]

thanks nosh for the info about foobar2000 and your suggestion on custom tags is something which i haven't looked into.