turingtest2, thank you for your detailed and informative response. It was illuminating and helped me to fix the sorting problem in my first question.
I've never had luck with Gracenote's database regarding consistency with classical works, so when ripping my collection of CDs (over many months) I went through and manually entered all of the information from the CDs. There are over 800 of them, making my iTunes library close to 9,000 "songs."
Question 1. Regarding this Grouping problem, I learned that one of the two recordings (both on 2 CDs) I have of The Nutcracker Ballet had this sorting problem, but not the other. When you suggested the link entitled “Grouping Tracks Into Albums” I read through that and researched this one album. It turned out that I had neglected to fill in the “2 of 2” for the second CD. Duh! iTunes sorted that album based on incomplete information. Updating the information on those tracks solved the problem.
Question 2. All of the artwork was scanned manually and inserted into the appropriate field in iTunes on my Mac. The artwork shows up properly in iTunes on the Mac. It used to display on the iPhone until one of the more recent iOS upgrades. Maybe I should delete the iTunes database on my phone and download it from iTunes on my Mac again. (I am still running Yosemite because I have one program that still doesn't run properly with El Capitan. However, all of my Mac's programs are current.)
Question 3. There is the basic problem with iTunes for classical music: It's just not focused on providing the tools a classical music aficionado needs or at least might like. iTunes thinks of every track as a song with an artist.
When you have multiple recordings of the same piece with a variety of conductors, orchestras, and/or soloists, you need software to search by one or more of these fields. But, in general, classical music presents so many data problems.
As an example take Beethoven’s opus 58, the G major (Fourth) Piano Concerto. This work has been conducted by Haitink, Hogwood, Szell, Davis, Ludwig, Solti, Abbado, Rattle, Levine and dozens of others. It’s been performed by The Academy of Ancient Music, Cleveland Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw, BBC Symphony and dozens of others. Among its soloists have been Fleisher, Kovacevich, Ashkenazy, Pollini, Brendel, Lubin, Gilels and dozens of others. Sometimes these soloists have recorded the same work with more than one orchestra and/or conductor. To add to the complexity, cadenzas for the piece have been composed by Beethoven himself (2 sets), Clara Schumann, Busoni, Saint-Saëns, Brahms and many others. It would sure be nice to be able to compare the Andante performed by Pollini to that performed by Gilels. Or to be able to hear a specific cadenza played by a few different pianists.
And this doesn’t take into consideration things like opus numbers, catalog numbers (like Köchel-Verzeichnis for Mozart), tempos and keys.
Now, some of this is possible on the Mac, not on the iPhone. One set of recordings of the dozens of Mozart piano concertos (12 CDs), for example, just shows "Piano Concerto No..." on the iPhone, even though it shows "Piano Concerto No 23 in A, K 488: 3. Allegro Assai" in iTunes on my Mac.
With a fairly large collection of recordings, the idea of having to reduce the information in iTunes is daunting. I put all that information there so, I hoped, at some point I could search the database. Dumbing the data down by removing characters would probably make searching for some specific details difficult if not impossible.
However, iTunes, although free, is still a product by a company that has invested in its development with the goal of making profit. I have no idea what percent of music sold today is classical, but I would assume that at the most it’s in the very low single digits. Any corporation needs to look at ROI. Lots of bells and whistles for just a small portion of an already tiny market, doesn’t make much business sense. This is true for all companies. Apple is no exception.
Anyway, I’ve strayed considerably from the topic. There are few who take the time as you did to think about others’ problems and try to help. Thank you again, turingtest2, for taking the time to provide guidance. Best wishes.
