iTunes, the iPod, and classical music
It’s no secret that a bit of tweaking is necessary in iTunes to effectively manage a decently-sized classical music library. Being somewhat OCD, my initial imports of classical music into iTunes really put me in a funk, because the metadata imported from CDDB just made things almost impossible to sort through. After some thought about how I wanted to arrange the music, a good bit of trial & error on my iPod, and some help from more organized music fans, I’ve come up with a viable solution.
First, I needed to decide how I thought about my music. Classical music doesn’t lend itself to the same sorting rules as pop or rock, or even standards, because the artists tend to be of secondary importance to who composed the work. Thankfully, with the help of Smart Playlists, I was able to create a subset of my library, strictly for classical, and then change the View Options to see the Composer field first, rather than the Artist.
Another key issue is Genre. “Classical” is about as helpful in sorting classical music as “Music with horns” would be in sorting jazz. A good formula for classifying Genre is here, and although I don’t use it exactly as written, it has been a tremendous help. My “Classical” genres have been replaced with tags such as “Choral/Romantic/Austrian” and “Organ/Baroque/German.” I have Smart Playlists (in a “Classical” playlist folder) that show all the Choral stuff (called “+Choral” . . . the “+” keeps it at the top of the folder list and lets me know it’s a genre search), all the Romantic stuff, and so on.
Once you get these two figured out, it’s time to fiddle with the individual track information. I had a few rounds of trial-and-error with this on my iPod. One problem I ran into, which this particular scheme fixed, is having two works by the same composer on my iPod. I had a Shaw and Herreweghe recording of Brahms’ German Requiem that didn’t sort correctly; the first track of Shaw was followed by the first track of Herreweghe, then the second track of Shaw, then the second track of Herreweghe, and so forth. This scheme prevented that.
In the metadata fields (Command+I in iTunes), I have the following (found in both the “Info” and “Sorting” tabs). This is the metadata for the first track from Brahms’ German Requiem, performed by Robert Shaw & the ASO:
- Name: individual movement, track name, et cetera (”1. Selig Sind, Die Da Leid Tragen”)
- Artist: conductor: ensemble (”Robert Shaw: Atlanta Symphony Orchestra”)
- Album Artist: composer last name (”Brahms”)
- Album: composer last name: work (”Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem)
- Composer: composer first & last (”Johannes Brahms”)
- Sort Album Artist: conductor last name (”Shaw”)
- Sort Composer: composer last name (”Brahms”)
This particular scheme works for me. As with all personal library organization schemes, you may find that this is a good starting point, then tweak it a bit. No problem. The important thing is that your music is arranged in a way that makes sense to you.
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