Classical music on iPod Classic?

In the iTunes, will modify the chapter's name manually work?

I'm a classical music lover as well. It was quite some time before I put rock or anything else in my queue. I have something like 26 days straight of classical and romantic era music in my iTunes. Now, I don't yet have an iPod (seems impossible in this day - getting one soon), but the issue I suppose is an iTunes one. I'm subscribing to this topic to track the answers I hope you get. But alas I have no solution other than greater care than you're already surely taking...

Early on (back in OS9) I wanted to keep my music organized, preferably sortable by composer or opus or type (and work number within type). This would suffice. What I eventually arrived at was a 'taxonomy' that I apply to all things - well almost nothing escapes it. It's not a very techy solution but it has worked for me. What was a nice surprise: when 'smart playlists' came along my method fitted nicely. I have folders of composers, ancient music, concertos, just piano concertos, symphonies, you get the idea.

I noticed that iTunes always would organize things by 'artist' (and in the early days there was no 'composer' category anyway. So, the idea of putting performers in the 'artist' slot went out the window. What use is it really to a classical lover anyway; put those names in the comments, append a mnemonic to the end of the 'album' title if you like. The 'artist' is always the actual composer with me, in rare cases the arranger.

From here it gets lengthy.

I was going to attach a pdf of one of my composer folders, but I don't see a way to do that here. Is there a way I can get it to you? If not fine, but I have to go now. I could return and describe in post my conventions, but honestly it represents work. I understand perfectly if you haven't time or interest - I've been doing this pretty much all along, and can only imagine what it would be like if I hadn't and now had to go over everything... Yuck.

Best wishes.

Like Field Pi I use the Composer as the Artist for all classical music. See my recent post on Grouping Tracks Into Albums, in particular the topic One artist, many names. The post covers most of my personal conventions although I insist on Title Case for track names & album titles, replacing "and" with "&", a few standardised abbreviations and numerous other little rules that I'd struggle to list in full

tt2

I am unsure why you are joining tracks; doing so will eliminate the movement names (as you have observed). Since iTunes and the iPod now have gapless playback, even movements that play one into the next should play fine when playing a complete work. If you are trying to shuffle, then I would suggest shuffling by album - shuffling be track is certainly not suited to classical music. By using shuffle by album, you will still hear each album in correct order, will see the movement names (assuming tracks are NOT joined), and still be able to shuffle through your classical collection.

I have a mix of Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and some contemporary works in my library. As far as how they are labeled, I include both composer and performer (or conductor) in the artist field to better differentiate different performances of the same work on the iPod (Vivaldi, A./Christopher Hogwood). Each movement is appropriately labeled.

I also have a large collection of Classical & Opera. I do not use iTunes to convert my CDs to MP3s. I use Exact Audio Copy ( http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/) for that. To retain the gapless play back I rip just the individual tracks to ".wav" files, then use Lame's ( http://lame.sourceforge.net/download.php) gapless encoding to 'join' them together. After that I use Mp3tag ( http://www.mp3tag.de/en/) to tag and order my music the way I want them.

I would also look into these helpful articles about tagging and organizing Classical music on the iPod...

http://www.macworld.com/article/43791/2005/03/tagclass.html

http://www.macworld.com/article/43560/2005/03/classicalipod.html

http://www.mcelhearn.com/?p=347

Really the problem isn't to look for a work neither the way to classify all the works contained on the iPod. The problem consist in to see the maxime information of the music that is playing in every moment, as title of the work, movement's name, composer and every interpreter for the work.
We must not forget that in classical music is normal the participation of several important performers in a work. We must think, for example, in the Mozart's Requiem. Here are a lot of interpreter that should appear in the information: One sopran, one alto, one tenor, one bass, the choir, the orchestra and the conductor.

If you want to record a lot of information about a track you can place this in the Lyrics field. When playing on the iPod pressing the centre Select button a few times will bring this screen into view as long as it has some information. Not a solution to your long title issues I know, but the best I can offer.

tt2

I have mostly classical music on my iPod and it works just fine for me. You are right, all the nice details about composer, movement, artist, etc are missing from the iPod's screen. It would indeed be nice to have.

But I'm much less concerned with what's displayed on the iPod's screen (with CDs on a Hi-Fi, you get nothing of that sort at all, remember) and more concerned with audio quality (excellent with Apple Lossless) and ease of navigability between my albums. For that, setting up custom playlists and tweaking the fields in each track's Info panel does nearly all of what I want.