iTunes for Classical Music

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iTunes for Classical Music

iTunes manages classical music very badly in my opinion!

The whole mindset behind iTunes seems to be oriented towards popular music which is fine, - except I don't list to popular music much any more.

A few of my annoyances are as follows:

My main classification in listening to music is music by a particular composer - not artist!

There is no allowance or distinction between soloist, conductor and orchestra!
If I listen to a symphonic work I refer to the tracks as movements (not songs!)
I sometime find that imported CDs become fragmented for no apparent reason and appear as different albums!
Operatic works, which often span several CD's should more logically be grouped into acts and scenes (as in the opera itself). It should also loose mention of the disk as a means of classification in iTunes (although it is still useful if wanting to refer to the libretto documentation that came with the CD set).
Probably the most annoying of all is the way that tracks are renamed with the album name and artist as prefixes to the track name when shown listed. Again this renders the clever interface on an iPhone virtually useless as a means of playing specific tracks in a symphonic work or opera.

I have tried editing the individual track names in accordance with various alternative schemas that have been mentioned on the internet, for example using the artist field for the Composer name. Also removing the album and artist name manually from each track. But with over 600 CDs it's not feasible.

I have looked for some way of switching to classical mode but there doesn't seem to be any. I would welcome some thoughts or suggestions on how it can be improved.

There are some fundamental limitations in the mp3 tagging system which doesn't cater for classical music. However I don't see why they can't be added and then users could select whether they wanted their music classified by popular or calssical methods.

I really like the means of being able to import and store music in a compact format of an iTouch or iPhone. However I wouldn't recommend iTunes as a means of storing and navigating classical music because of the fundamental flaws listed above.

I would welcome any comments or suggestions.

iPhone 3GS, iOS 5.0.1

Posted on Dec 22, 2011 2:17 AM

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Answer 1

turingtest2

Level 10

273,033 points

Dec 22, 2011 3:51 AM in response to cmulloy

I have some general tips on getting organized here: Grouping tracks into albums. In particular I deal with the problems of albums splitting into multiple parts. The contention that iTunes isn't really suited to classical music is fair comment, but I don't think that Winamp or Windows Media Player are any better. I suspect if you looked hard enough you would find that the ID3 schema probably does contain enough suitable fields to support classical music however most of these are not exposed in current media playing applications like iTunes. One could also argue that the past practice of shoehorning classical pieces into semi-fixed length formats such as LPs, cassettes and CDs often means that a "Work" is either filleted to make it fit or presented on an "Album" with other unrelated material to pad it out.

I think it is unrealistic to expect iTunes to get a "classical mode", though by all means feel free to suggest it at iTunes Feedback. In the meantime you should find a way to work with what you have. For classical works I treat the composer as the artist, rather than the performer. I generally discard the performer details, but these can be placed in the Comments field (max. 255 chars) or Lyrics field with as much detail as you care to enter. iTunes groups tracks into albums on the basis of Album title and Album Artist. I have, for example, a 4 CD set of Dido & Aeneas, The Fairy Queen & King Arthur. While I could have left this as a single 101 track collection, judicious use of tag editing tools has converted it into three separate "Albums" in my library, one for each work.

tt2

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