Work and Movement refers to classical music.
Many classical music fans prefer to use the additional tags available for any song (but one they use on classical music pieces), to identify the music they have in their library. If you edit a song in your library, you can see these extra fields. Here's an example (below), although it's not classical music (by any stretch of the imagination). You don't need to do this yourself, you only need to read the steps that I've taken, that show you what the Work and Movement tags are:
- select a song and tap on Edit/Song Info
- on the Details tab (shown below), tap on Song
- you can now see the Work field (tag) and the Movement field (tag)
So that's what they are and where to find them.
There is a theory that when Apple introduced the Work and Movement tags, some songs had text added to these fields unnecessarily and that is what causes the re-Sync of certain songs. While I still don't know whether this is the cause, I have just discovered a song in my Library that possibly demonstrates the theory.
Here's a screenshot of track 9 on my copy of the Diana Ross album Touch Me In The Morning:
As you can see, the song has a "song title" of Medley: Brown Baby / Save The Children. If I tap song in order to change this track to use work name, what I expect to happen is for all four boxes under the Work and Movement section to be blank, as they were in the Luther Vandross song Never Too Much:
However, as you will notice in the screenshot above, once I select work name the song title is split up (due to the colon in the title I think) to have the work name as Medley (without the colon) and the remainder of the title in the Movement box. The other two boxes would be for numbers; something used in classical music but not used in non-classical music.
That's a long explanation, but at least you now know what people are referring to.
What do you do about it? My suggestion is: do nothing.
It has yet to be established, beyond doubt, that this Work and Movement phenomenon is the cause of re-syncing, so you could go through your entire collection in order to change anything that might be causing the issue, only to find your changes don't prevent the re-syncing, an exercise that you might then regard as a waste of your time.
Okay, so each Sync takes a little longer, because iTunes is repeatedly re-syncing songs it has already handled. But so what? A Sync is housework, just let iTunes get on with it while you do something else. Modern computers can easily manage working on iTunes while you use another programme on your computer, or walk away and make a cup of tea (coffee for those of you who prefer):
- if you do the housework in your home, do you really enjoy it? If not, why watch iTunes doing it?
- if you don't do the housework in your home, do you even know what is actually done, let alone watch the person doing it?
