is great at
handling files, but its support for
is pitiful.
This page explains my scheme to make iTunes and
work for my collection, which is mostly classical but includes some
other genres.
I’ve set things up to access classical and non-classical
in the most natural ways that iTunes and iPod allow.
You might not use my scheme as is, but I hope it will alert you to the
choices and get you thinking about how to set up your own
collection.
“Your solution, while still a kludge, is an
elegant kludge that is about as perfect as you can get.”
&—Owen&Mathews
“Your tips are worth the price of any Apple
for Dummies manual.&... A godsend for those of us with hefty CD
libraries we want to import to iTunes as intact albums or audiobooks,
rather than a jigsaw puzzle of disconnected ‘songs’.”
&—Mary&Lou&Steptoe
Applies to:
iTunes&10;
iPod Classic, unofficially known as
iPod&5.5G and iPod&6G.
is still available for those
interested in earlier iPods and iTunes.)
Several readers have asked if I plan to update this page for
iTunes&11 or 12.
Though I have no direct experience with iTunes&11,
given what I’ve heard I don’t plan to install it any time
And iTunes&12 reaches new depths of
bloat, not to mention reports like
that it actually loses purchased music.
15 minutesof fame:
This page has
mentioned or quoted three times (that I know of) in the national media:
The Atlantic:
The New York Times:
24 May 2012 page B8
The Wall Street Journal:
4 Jan 2012 page D2
If you know of other instances, please
What’s Classical Music?
“Classical music” isn’t really the right term. “Classical” is
in the history of Western music.
Calling it all “classical music” is like using “England” to mean the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—people
usually know what you mean, but it’s not accurate.
I’ve heard “concert music”, “serious music”, “art music”,
“”,
“”,
and any of them would be better. But human language isn’t
logical, and so like everyone else including
I’ll continue using “classical music” as a catch-all term.
What’s the Problem?
What’s wrong with the iTunes and iPod experience, for the
collector of classical music? In a nutshell, they were
designed for pop music, not classical. Here are some
specific problems:
iTunes and iPod know about “songs”, and don’t
understand that multiple segments of a symphony or an opera
or a Broadway show need to be keep together, even in
Music is organized by artist, not by composer. This is not
such a problem in iTunes, but iPod playlists show Artist not
Composer; and so do submenus under Genre.
It’s hard to know what your iPod is playing.
The Now&playing screen shows Name, Artist,
and Album, but only Name scrolls: Artist and Album are
simply truncated after a few characters.
Automatic tagging on import is sloppy and inconsistent.
There are lots of misspellings, capitalization is silly,
“compilation” is often checked,
information is just as likely to be in the wrong tag as in the right
there’s just “Classical” for genre, and so forth.
(For these reasons, I recommend that you
from the Internet.)
I could go on, but you get the idea.
What Do We Have to Work With?
The searching and browsing abilities of iTunes, and especially
of iPod, inevitably drive my recommendations for importing and tagging
First, the good news.
In recent versions of iTunes,
browsing and searching are actually pretty good.
Unfortunately,
it’s a different story on iPod.
Browsing in iTunes
The iTunes main window lets you show almost any field.
Right-click on any column heading to add or remove columns, and drag
column headings left or right to rearrange them. Left-click on any
column heading to sort all “songs” by that field, in
ascending or descending order.
Filtering is convenient.
can turn on a browser at the top of the screen (Ctrl-B, or
View&» Column&Browser) for easy filtering
on one or more of Genre, Artist, Album, Composer, and
Grouping. (Grouping and Composer were added somewhere
between iTunes&7 and iTunes&10.)
iTunes Column B click to view the
iTunes search is one of its best features.
Type text in the
search window to search Name, Artist, Album Artist,
Album, Grouping, and Composer simultaneously.
presents the results in one list of all “songs” that have
the searched text in one or more of those fields. If you want, you can
then filter results using the .
I tested this by creating dummy entries with xy in one field
and zz in the others, then searching for xy.
The Album Artist
column isn’t shown in this illustration, but I know that iTunes
searched it because xy in item 3 occurred only in that field.
iTu click to view the
Shuffle in iTunes and iPod
iTunes offers shuffle by “song”, album, or
grouping, under the Controls menu.
(It used to be possible to control the degree of randomness,
but that was removed some time after iTunes&6.)
One nice improvement in iPod Classic over iPod&5G is that
you can turn shuffle on or off right from the Now&Playing
screen: just press the center button three times. But iPod shuffles
only on “song” and album, not grouping, so grouping
isn’t much help in planning shuffles.
When you shuffle by album in iTunes or iPod, tracks within an
album are kept in Disc Number–Track Number order. In my scheme, when
I want to shuffle a , I use shuffle by album.
Summary: When you use iPod’s Search
menu, it finds text within the Name, Album, and Artist
tags and presents those results in a
useful way.
My iPod&5G lacked a search feature. This has been added
to the iPod Classic, and I think Apple did a good job except that you
can’t search on numbers.
Search is in the Music if
it’s not there, go to the main menu and select
Settings&» Music&Menu&»
Search. (You can also enable search in the main menu by
selecting Settings&» Main&Menu&»
Music&» Search.)
When you enter text to search for, iPod finds it in Name,
Album, and Artist, and presents the results in a single merged
For albums that match, it displays the album title
(scrolling if necessary) and the number of
“songs” in the album, and when you select the album you get
a sub-menu for the “songs”.
For artists that match, it displays the artist (scrolling if
necessary) and the number of albums, and if you select the artist you
get submenus to select the album and then the “song”.
For “song” names that match,
the Name and Artist
fields appear directly in the menu. Name scrolls, but Artist
Now Playing on iPod
Apple gave, and A blessed be the name of
We gained a nice search facility, but the
Now&Playing screen has been degraded.
iPod Classic splits
the Now&Playing screen vertically, with an album cover at
the left and Name, Artist, Album at the right.
That might
make some sense when you actually have an album cover, though even
then it should be user selectable. But when there’s no album
cover—and I’ve got album covers for maybe five
albums out of my current
;iPod still wastes half the screen on a stupid picture
of two eighth notes. What were they thinking?
Artist and Album are thus truncated to
near-uselessness, though I give Apple props for choosing an eminently
readable font.
Name is also chopped, but at least it scrolls.
If there’s any way to override this idiotic screen
splitting, I’ve been unable to find it.
The iLounge thread
seems pretty definite that it can’t be
But if you know a way, I’ll
acknowledge and publish it here.
This misfeature has caused me to rethink .
I’m seriously considering
retagging all my music, by adding the album name to
though at this writing I haven’t yet
taken the plunge on what would be a massive effort.
Browsing on iPod
Summary: In iPod you can browse by these tags:
Artist&→ Album, Album,
Name (the Songs menu, pretty much useless),
Genre&→ Artist&→ Album,
and Composer&→ Album.
Here are the
Given that you can do pretty much anything in iTunes with
what can you do when you’re out on the road with iPod and
want to play something you didn’t plan in a playlist?
Browse methods under the Music menu are enabled or
disabled from the main menu, under Settings&»
Music&Menu, just like the aforementioned
Here are the relevant
submenus for browsing under the Music menu:
>Playlists menu">
Playlists has submenus for playlist folders, then for
playlists within each folder.
When you select a playlist, the
terminal menu entries show Name and Artist for each
“song” Name scrolls if necessary.
You can select a given
“song” and see (part of) the Album on the
Now&Playing screen, but that’s pretty
inconvenient.
My take: Playlists is fine for selecting a
playlist, but useless for selecting within a playlist unless the
playlist is very short.
>Artists menu after selecting an artist">
Artists shows an alphabetical list of each artist,
scrolling the highlighted artist if necessary. When you select an
artist, if that artist has more than one album you get a menu of
albums with “song” counts, as shown at right.
select an album (or if the artist had only one album), you get a list
of one-line entries for the Name tags of the
“songs”.
(No, it’s not the wrong picture.
For reasons that will
be clear , I’ve put the composer in
the Artist tag.)
>Albums menu">
Albums, as you might expect, gives you a list of albums
(and the highlighted album title scrolls if necessary) with each
>Albums menu after selecting an album">
Select an album, and you get a list of Name tags in
track-number order.
>Songs menu">
Songs shows all “songs” alphabetically,
ignoring The and other small words. Each entry has
Name (scrolling if necessary) and Artist—again,
you see composers in the screen shot because I
This is pretty useless for any classical library of more than a few
who’s got time to scroll through thousands
of entries, and who wants to sort all “Act I” together? For
this reason I disable Songs in Settings&»
Music&Menu.
>Genres menu">
Genres shows (duh!) all genres, each one with the number
of artists and number of albums represented. I don’t know
whether the Genre tags scroll, because none of mine are long
enough to need it.
>Genres menu after selecting a genre">
Select a genre, and you get a list of the artists, even if
there’s only one artist in that genre.
(Again, I have the composer in the Artist tag.) The
highlighted artist name scrolls if necessary.
>Genres menu after selecting a genre and artist">
Select an artist, and you get a menu of albums with the count of
“songs” in each. However, if the selected artist has only
one album in this genre, you never get the album title but instead get
a track list (last screen shot).
>Genres menu after selecting genre, artist, and album">
Select an album, or select an artist who has just one album,
and you get a list of the Name tags for the tracks in that
>Composers menu">
Composers gives you a list of one-line entries for
composers.
(Again, .)
>Composers menu after selecting a composer">
Select a composer, and you get a list of two-line entries, Album
(scrolling if necessary) and Artist (which for me is
composer).
Now that it’s clear what iTunes and iPod can do by way
of searching and browsing, it’s time to formulate some
goals for how I want to listen to music. Then I hope it will
be clear how to tag the music files to come as close as
possible to those goals, within the constrains of what iTunes and iPod
What Are My Goals?
Like most people, I imagine, I want to
future listening, but sometimes skip ahead or choose a specific work
without regard to the playlist.
In iTunes, that kind of
are easy, but
it’s a different story on iPod.
So the challenge is to
tag all my “songs” so that I can most easily access them on iPod.
Let me try to be specific about what I want to do on my iPod.
on iPod in these ways:
(A) Select a work by composer or songwriter—“Beethoven’s 5th”, “a George Gershwin
song”—and have iPod play it and then stop.
(B) Select a work by genre—“I’
in the mood for some chamber music—how about the
Romantics?—Brahms sounds good—how about the
Brahms opus&25?"—and have iPod play it and then
(You might prefer to select a piano quartet based on the
performers. Unfortunately, with
you can select one way or the
other, but not both, depending on what’s in
. If you use
suggest, at least you’ll be able to search on both.)
(C) Select a non-classical album, for
instance a whole , or maybe just one comedy sketch.
Second, I want to use standard or smart
on iPod in
these ways:
(D) Play the works in random order
while still keeping movements in order within a work. (This is how I
use iPod most of the time.)
(E) See what I’m listening to (composer,
work, and movement) on the Now&Playing screen.
(F) Skip ahead to select another work when
I’m not in a mood for the one that is next in the playlist. (Of
course I could just keep hitting the skip button, but that can take a
while. Also, having iPod fetch every track takes a bit of extra
battery power.)
How Do I Tag Everything?
Because this article helps you,please donate atOakRoadSystems.com/donate.
For effective browsing, you need effective tagging—that’s
the whole point of this article.
And it’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. I have to
admit, I had imported 6388 “songs”—about three fourths of
my collection at the time—with a growing sense of unease, when
finally I faced the fact that there were some flaws in my tagging. I’d
been doing it all myself, , so I didn’t have problems with inconsistency. But I couldn’t
do some of the searches I wanted to do on iPod. In
particular, I couldn’t decide on the spur of the moment to
At that point I stopped, did a lot of research and
experimentation and a lot of thinking, and came up with the scheme I’m
about to present to you. And I gritted my teeth and retagged those
6388 “songs” before importing any more. (It would have been even worse
without .)
So here’s my plan&...
Each classical work must be uniquely identified in the Album tag
non-classical album names must be preserved
I need my own set of Genre tags for
Artist must go in the Composer tag, and vice versa,
. (This one is controversial—if
you prefer searching by artist within genre then you would keep
the Artist tag for artist and the Composer tag for
composer.)
I don’t see a way to meet .
I’d have
to put a lot more in the Name tag,
and that would duplicate the Album tag and maybe others.
Consistency is paramount, and I need to
use every feature of iTunes that promotes consistent tagging.
The details take up most of the rest of this document.
I’ve organized my recommendations by tag.
You can click on a
particular tag name in the
, or just click in that tag’s area
in the illustrations below.
It’s best to tag
every CD track on the Audio&CD screen before you import
the CD. Here’s my advice on importing, along with general
labor-saving tips for tagging: .
“Classical”—movement marking
&or& cuing &or& full title
Other—title (performer)
1. Allegro non troppo
II-4. Mon c&ur s’ouvre & ta voix
Symphony #7 in C in one movement, op 105
A room with a view (Coward)
The Hobbit
Bearing in mind that
will hold the work title, what goes in the Name tag?
For a work of multiple movements, the Name tag
contains the movement marking. For something like an opera, Name
gets the act number, sequence number, and first few words of the track.
One-movement works tend to have long titles. In this case,
I abbreviate the title in the Album tag (which doesn’t scroll on
the display) and put the full title in Name (which does).
For non-classical music, Name is the song title,
in parentheses by a short form of the performer’s name. That way I
to find everything I have
that a given pop artist sang.
(Classical performers will be in
and therefore will also come
up in a search.)
I usually have the book in one file, and Name is the title of the
book. Really long books are in several files, and then Name is
something like “The Lord of the Rings: Book II”.
By the way, current iTunes and iPod are smart enough to ignore
leading “A” and “The” in alphabetical lists.
iTunes does have sort-as fields, but I haven’t needed to use
them so far.
This use of the Name tag does leave a problem: on iPod, a playlist shows only
Name and Artist. Since Name is just the movement or cuing in a
larger work, it’s effectively impossible to know what’s
coming up or select a particular work
from the middle of a playlist: which one of dozens of
“1.&Allegro” is that? That prevents
attaining my . The only solution
I’ve thought of would put the work title as well as the movement
title in the Name tag, but then all my Names would get really
long and I’d have to wait for them to scroll.
So this is just
something I have to live with.
Artist and Composer Tags
In the Artist tag: composer’s last name, first names (dates)
In the Composer tag: soloists, conductor, orchestra
As mentioned , to meet my
I have to lie to iTunes.
(I first read this suggestion in the column
Granted, this is controversial—maybe the only
controversial section on this page.
It’s obvious from the
some people go one way and some go the other.
Whether you follow this recommendation or not, you’ll gain some things
and lose some things, as shown in the table below.
It all comes down to how you prefer to work.
I search iPod (within a genre) by composer more often than by artist,
and I browse iTunes by composer more often than by artist. I want to code
things to make composer searches easier, and therefore I have to code
the composer in the Artist tag and the artist(s) in Composer.
If the performers are more important to you than the composers, you’d
do it the other way.
How&do&you&search and browse?
More often by composer
More often by performer
How&to&enter&metadata
Put composer in the Artist tag and performer(s) in Composer
Put artist in Artist and composer in Composer
In Column Browser, you can include Artist, Composer, or even both.
See composer within genre (e.g. oboe concertos&→
See performer within genre (e.g. string quartets&→
Browsing&iPod&by&composer
Browsing&iPod&by&performer
Line 2 performer(s) probably at end of album title (line 3) and therefore invisible
Line 2 shows performer(s); composer probably at start of album title
Artist tag:
Haydn, Franz Joseph ()
Composer tag:
Alfred B Claudio Abbado, Berlin PO
In the Artist tag, the composer’s last name needs to come
first: this is essential for browsing in
for using the .
I add the composer’s dates, since I only have to
Abbreviations for Performers
ASMFAcademy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields
ChamChamber
COChamber Orchestra
EnsEnsemble
FestFestival
NatNational
OOrchestra
OrigOriginal
PhPhilharmonic
PhaPhilharmonia
POPhilharmonic Orchestra
RSORadio Symphony Orchestra
SOSymphony Orchestra
StrString(s)
In the Composer tag, I list the conductor and orchestra. (I use the
performing ensembles.) When there’s a soloist, I list the soloist
there are several soloists, I put the principal one or two
in the Composer tag
and the rest in Comments, and I use the
below to distinguish multiple
Logically, performer(s) should be entered last name
first, but I use first-last order for two reasons. First, it’s easier
to read when there are multiple performers.
Second, even with last-first order I still couldn’t browse by
performer, not effectively anyway. Why? There are multiple performers
for almost every work (conductor and orchestra, vocalist and
accompanist, etc.). So Abbado will come first when he’s conducting
a pure orchestral work, but not when he’s conducting a concerto.
an iPod search for ABBADO will pick up everything he conducts.
Of course I could also set up a smart playlist, “Composer
contains Abbado”.
For non-classical music, I follow the same pattern.
Otherwise I’d have Gershwin and Bernstein and others as Artist for
their “serious” music and Composer for their popular songs. The
consequence is that if I want everything performed by Glenn Miller, I
have to look him up as Composer and not as Artist, or do a
The Album Artist Tag
“Classical” — (blank)
Other — main performer
Simon & Garfunkel
Andrews Sisters
Clooney, Rosemary
this tag isn’t for display but for file storage. If you
don’t care how iTunes stores your music files—and
you probably don’t—just ignore this tag.
But here’s how I use it.
iTunes wants to use a folder structure of
Music\(artist)\(album).
For classical music that
works well: my files are arranged in album folders under composer
folders. But for pop music it works poorly: with
iTunes would scatter the
songs from a Rosemary Clooney album under a bunch of folders including
“Unknown Artist”.
For popular music, I like to have
one folder per album under one folder for artist,
not a bunch of folders
for the same album scattered under a bunch of artists.
(I don’t know of any p it just nags at my
sense of order.)
the Album Artist tag is filled in, iTunes uses that for the folder
name instead of Artist and organizes my pop-music files in what
seems like a sensible way to me.
As far as I’m aware, iPod doesn’t use this tag.
(According to
iPod Touch and iPhone do use it.)
But iTunes does use it, if instructed: View&»
Column&Browser&» Use&Album&Artists. If that
setting is checked “songs” with a non-blank Album Artist
tag will appear in the Artists column of the Column
Browser under the album artist rather than under the artist.
This is a mixed blessing.
With that setting unchecked, I have
666 composers
of the browser.
(That will get some weird hits in
Google searches!)
With Use&Album&Artists checked, that
drops to 182, much more manageable.
I lose a lot of one-off
songwriters, but I also lose entries for composers like
Gershwin who wrote popular music as well as serious stuff.
haven’t decided yet what to do about this.
If I know the year the work was composed, I
otherwise I leave this tag blank. If the year of performance has some
special significance, I put it in
; otherwise I leave it out or
maybe put it in the Comments tag.
Album Tag (Classical)
Abbreviations for Works
CtoConcerto(s)
mvtmovement
OvOverture
SerSerenade
SinfSinfonia
SymSymphony
VarVariation(s)
Abbreviations forInstrumentsand Voices
brbaritone
ccontralto
clclarinet
clavclavier
fh(French) horn
hcharpsichord
msmezzo-soprano
“Classical”—composer work
"subtitle" (performer date)
Other—see
Bach Brandenburg cto #1 F (Pinnock, English Concert)
Beethoven Sym #1 C (von Karajan, Berlin 1963)
Brahms Q5-p op34 f (Eschenbach, Amadeus)
Corelli Cto grosso op6: 7 D (Marriner, ASMF)
Grof& Grand Canyon suite (Bernstein, NY)
Mahler Sym # 1 D "Titan" (Walter, Columbia)
Mendelssohn Cto-v-p in d (Kremer, Argerich, Orpheus)
Rossini Barbiere di Siviglia (Callas, Alva)
Schubert Son-p D959 A (O'Conor)
Coding album titles for “classical” works is
complicated, because there are so many variations. But you have to do
it, not only for works with several movements but for one-movement
works, to make
work right on iPod.
Here are the parts of my Album tag:
Composer: last name only. The composer’s full name is
in , but the last name is
needed here so that Beethoven’s symphonies sort together and not
the symphonies #1 of all composers.
Work: enough to identify it, bearing in
mind that album titles need to be short because iPod truncates them on the screen that
shows what’s playing.
For standard categories of works like symphonies and quartets,
I use the , followed
either by a # sign and the work number or the catalog number, then the
key signature.
Spacing: Usually I butt the number against the # or
“op” or catalog designation, but I always consider how an
alphabetical list will appear. Thus Beethoven’s first is #1
because his last symphony is number 9, but Mahler’s first is
#&1 with a space because his last symphony is number 10. In the
Corelli example, opus 6 number 7 is coded as op6:&7 because the
numbers within opus 6 go above 9, and I don’t want opus 6 number
2 to sort after opus 6 number 10. (If my Corelli concerti grossi
had opus numbers higher than 9, this one would be
Key signatures:
Capital letters mean major keys and lower-cas I
use # and b for sharp and flat.
After an opus number or other identifying number,
I omit the word “in” before the key—compare the
Mahler and Mendelssohn examples.
Capital letters take up more room than lower case, so I
capitalize only the first word of the title, as in the Corelli
example. Proper nouns are still capitalized, as in the Grof&
and Rossini. I omit articles (The, An, La, Un, etc.), as in
the Rossini example.
For a double or triple concerto, I don’t use those words
but simply designate the instruments, as in the Mendelssohn
example. In a similar way, a piano quintet is distinguished from a
string quintet by adding a -p suffix, as in the Brahms example.
shown at right are derived in part from my
memories of the program guide issued in the 1970s by the Cleveland FM
Subtitle: in double quotes.
Date: performance date, included only if I have more than
one performance of the same work by the same performers.
Performer: usually soloist, conductor, and ensemble. I make
a value judgment to list only the key players. For
operas I may list more than one soloist, and I omit the name of the
orchestra or chorus. I need this information where I have
more than one performance of a given work,
but I always include it for
consistency. (Also,
text in the Album tag, so if I want everything played or conducted
by Barenboim I can get it this way.)
You might be wondering where to code the actual
title of the album. If the album title actually matters to
you—and for art music I don’t really think it
does—you can always put it in the Comments tag. I
decided that I really don’t care about the original title of an
album, in general. I never want to listen to the album
Brahms Fourth Symphony and Tragic Overture as a unit,
even though that’s how the CD came—and if I ever
do, I can make an on-the-go playlist.
Album Tag (Non-Classical)
“Classical”—see
Other—performer album
Tolkien Silmarillion
Clooney Sings Johnny Mercer
Damn Yankees
For non-classical music and spoken word,
I put the actual album title, prefixed if necessary with the
performer’s last name. For these types, the album is often
arranged like a little concert (or may even be a recorded
concert), so the title is likely to
have some significance.
This lets me
listen to an album like Michael Feinstein’s Over There
(World War I songs) in CD order.
For Broadway shows and movie soundtracks, I code just the name
of the show, not the performers. If I had a particular show both from
Broadway and from the movie, I’d add (Broadway) or (movie) to
the title.
Track Number and Disc Number Tags
I can’t see any value to thousands of “1
of 1” in the Disc and Track columns of
the iTunes browser. (Yes, thousands, literally.)
Therefore, I
leave the disc number blank for single-disc works, and
similarly I blank the track number for single-track works.
For almost all “classical” music, I
renumber the tracks to start at 1, in addition to changing
the disc number to (blank) of (blank)
Example: My Beethoven Eighth is tracks 5-6-7-8
on disc 4 in my von Karajan set.
I renumbered it to 1-2-3-4 (of 4)
and blanked the disc number.
Example: In my Kert&sz set of Dvorak
symphonies, the Fifth is
tracks 5-6-7 (of 7) on disc 3 and track 1 (of 6) on disc 4.
I renumbered it to
tracks 1-2-3-4 (of 4) and blanked the disc number.
The main exception is
operas and other large sung works,
where disc and track numbers are keyed to a libretto.
For those, I keep the track numbers from the CD.
I blank the disc number
if the whole work is within one disc, but keep the disc numbers if the
work extends across multiple discs—again, for convenience in
referring to the libretto.
For non-classical music and spoken word other than
, I keep the
original track numbers (and original disc numbers, for multi-disc albums like
my Piaf Int&grale).
(By the way, you can’t edit the track numbers
you have to do
that after the import. The easiest way is to open the default
“Recently Added” playlist and edit the items there.)
Grouping Tag
“Classical” Music
Since the work is identified in
, there’s
no need to use the Grouping tag for art music.
(In any event, iPod don’ know nothin’ ’bout no
Grouping tag. Either this is just an entry in the iTunes database,
or it’s a real tag but iPod doesn’t give you any way to view it, much
less search on it.)
An alternative view:
Reader Owen Mathews suggests that the Grouping tag can have a use
even for classical music. He points out that shuffle by grouping is
fairly new in iTunes, and therefore there’s hope that it will be
added to iPod before too long. He proposes the idea of
strong and weak groupings. A strong grouping would be the
movements of a symphony, and a weak grouping would be the Brahms
Liebeslieder waltzes.
He proposes matching the Grouping tag to the Album tag
for strong groups, but leaving the Grouping tag empty for weak
groups. The effect is that he can shuffle by grouping (in iTunes) to
keep each symphony together but randomize the waltzes, or shuffle by
album (in iTunes or iPod) to keep the symphony and the waltzes together
in original album order.
This approach has much to recommend it, and it’s similar
to what I see immediately below.
All Other Genres
non-classical music and spoken word,
I used to use the Grouping tag under certain
circumstances, but later improvements in
have made what I
was doing obsolete. I no longer see a need for
the Grouping tag.
This is my free-form space for full performer or cast
information, recording information if it’s especially
interesting, and so on. I do this much more with my downloaded music
(a small proportion of the whole) than with what I have on CD.
AO/Baroque
AC/Piano/Classical
“Classical” Genres
(see musical periods )
AA/periodChamber music
AC/Harpsichord/periodHarpsichord concerto
AC/Piano/periodPiano concerto
AC/Violin/periodViolin and/or cello concerto
AC/*/periodConcerto for other solo instruments
AO/periodOrchestral music
AS/HarpsichordSolo harpsichord
AS/Organ/periodSolo organ
AS/Piano/periodSolo piano
AS/Violin/periodSolo violin and/or cello
AV/Choral/periodSecular choral work
AV/InstructionalRehearsal CD
AV/Lieder/periodSecular song for solo
AV/Opera/periodOpera
AV/Sacred/periodSacred solo or choral work
A/HumorHumor and parody (classical)
Other Genres&
B/BandBig Band
B/CountryCountry songs
B/HumorHumorous songs (non-classical)
B/NA&MixedNew Age instrumental
B/NA&PianoNew Age piano solo
B/PopTraditional pop, including swing and show tunes
B/Pop&EuropeEuropean pop
B/Rock60s&70s rock ’n’ roll
B/ShowsBroadway and filmed musicals
B/XmasChristmas music
S/FictionNovels and stories
S/HumorSpoken humor
S/InstructionalInstructional audio
You’ll notice there are three humor categories. A/Humor is
“classical” music humor: Anna Russell, for instance. B/Humor is
popular song humor, from Flanders&& Swann to “Monster Mash”.
S/Humor is purely spoken.
I tag “classical” music both for type of music and for
musical period
()—after all, a C.P.E.
Bach flute concerto is quite a different listening experience from a
Nielsen flute concerto. With
, it’s easy to select all
romantic music, or all piano concertos, and so forth.
From the list above you’ll notice that every genre of
starts with A.
I have a ,
“Art Music”
“NR&Classical”, to select everything in all the art
music genres that I haven’t listened to in a while.
Let me emphasize that I made up this list of
genres to match my own collection and tastes. It may not
be suitable for you as is, but you can use it for ideas
about how you want to categorize your music, bearing in mind what
sorts of searches you’ll want to do and what
Musical Periods
There is no perfect list of musical periods. Not only do
musicologists disagree, but many composers straddled two or more
periods chronologically or stylistically.
Also, one’s own taste has a lot to do with it.
For instance, I lump anything before the Baroque into one
period because it’s not my primary interest, even though in college I
learned to distinguish several periods.
For what it’s worth, here is my personal list of
musical periods: Antique, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Romantic Late,
Twentieth [Century]. I don’t always use the most natural name, but my
list has the virtue that alphabetical order matches chronological
Antique: Anything before about 1600.
Baroque: Roughly, ;1750. (Because I have very
little early Baroque music, I chose to treat early and late Baroque as
a single period.)
Typical composers are Bach, Corelli, Handel, Purcell, and
Vivaldi. I also include C.P.E. Bach, though a case could be made for
putting him with the classical composers.
Classical: Haydn, Mozart, Gluck, and of course
Beethoven.
Romantic and Romantic Late:
The boundary between the romantics and the late romantics is very
(I use “Romantic Late” rather than “Late
Romantic” so that the alphabetical sort of period names is also a
chronological sort.)
I use “Romantic” for composers up to about 1870,
including Berlioz, Brahms, Dvorak, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rossini,
Saint-Sa&ns, Schubert, Johann Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and
Weber. “Romantic Late” covers roughly ;1910 and
includes these composers suggested by
Donald Jay Grout, in A History of Western Music (Norton,
German: Humperdinck, Mahler, Richard Strauss, Wolf
Nationalist:
Balakirev, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov (Russian);
Janacek (Czech);
Grieg (Norwegian);
Parker, MacDowell, Ives (American);
Sibelius (Finnish);
Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Holst (English);
Alb&niz, de Falla (Spanish)
French new music: d’Indy, Faur&eacute, Massenet, Debussy,
Ravel, Dukas, Roussel, Satie. Debussy strongly influenced many
non-French composers in whom “the methods of impressionism were
relatively more conspicuous or lasting, such as” Loeffler, Bloch,
Griffes, Szymanowski, Delius, Scott, Bax, Respighi, and Schrecker
(Grout, page 604).
Italian opera: Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Puccini
Twentieth century: Again, a matter of style as much as
chronology. I think of Bart&k, Coates, Gershwin, Prokofiev,
Shostakovich, and Stravinsky.
Part of a compilation Tag
“Classical”—(blank)
Other—(checked for things like
Billboard Top Hits: 1963, Dr.
Demento 20th Anniversary Collection, and Perry Como Sings
Christmas Music; otherwise blank)
Since , by definition no “classical” album is a
compilation. If you’re using Gracenote—which
—you’ll need to clear any
Part of a compilation boxes that are checked.
What’s this tag for, anyway?
The idea is to keep a bunch of one-off artists (or,
, one-off composers or
songwriters) from
cluttering up the Artists column
of your iTunes browser. According to
with this tag checked, iTunes
“ignores the artist field for compilations in
its tabular format. This means every track that is tagged with this is
grouped together by Album rather than by Artist and all your
compilations show up in one group rather than scattered through the
huge table.”
Even if a “song” is tagged as part of a compilation,
iTunes and iPod won’t treat it any differently unless you turn
on compilations.
There are independent settings in iTunes and iPod,
and you can turn on one, both, or neither:
Checked or OnUnchecked or Off
iTunes View&» Column&Browser&»
Group&Compilations
(iTunes before 9.1: Edit&» Preferences&»
General&» Group&compilations)
In the Column Browser, “Compilations” is added at the top
of the Artists column. Artists
whose only tracks are in a single compilation are removed
from the Artists column. An artist who has songs in
multiple albums is listed, and if you click on that artist
then the Albums column shows all albums containing that
artist, regardless whether they’re compilations.
Artists are all listed, and the pseudo-artist
“Compilations” doesn’t appear.
iPod Settings&» Music&Menu&»
Compilations
(older iPods: Settings&»
Compilations)
In the Music
menu, Compilations is added. It’s not added to the
list of artists. Artists whose only
tracks are in a single compilation are removed from the
Artists screens. An artist who has songs in multiple
albums is listed, and if you click on that artist then the
next screen shows all albums or songs with that artist, whether or not
they’re in compilations.
Compilations is removed from the
Music menu. All artists are listed on the
Artists screens.
iPod Settings&» Main&Menu&»
Compilations This setting
controls whether Compilations appears in the main menu.
But iPod ignores this setting for the purpose of listings on the
Artists only Settings&» Music&Menu&»
Compilations affects which artists are
Apple’s help was no help, but I found some useful
references on the Part of a compilation tag:
is the best, and it has
been updated for iTunes&10.
It’s also very good on the
interaction between this tag and Album Artist.
—scroll
down to “Organizing Compilation Albums”.
Rating and Album Rating Tags
Album RatingRating
★★★★★
(not used)
“Classical” and shows: favorite parts within
3- or 4- pop and humor: favorite songs or sketches
★★★★and ★★★
Favorite “classical” works and shows
Favorite pop songs and humor sketches
★★
(not used)
“Classical” works I don’t like much
Pop songs I don’t like much
Implied Ratings
The Rating tag used to be straightforward:
you just rated each individual “song” as you felt moved to.
Then iTunes&7 introduced the Album Rating tag. If you set an
Album Rating, that implies a rating for all the tracks in that album
that don’t have a Rating fair enough.
But then came another instance of
What were they thinking?
The Rating tags of individual
tracks in an album are somehow used to imply an Album Rating,
which in turn feeds back to implied Rating tags for all the unrated
tracks in that album.
(Ratings you assign show as solid
stars&★; implied ratings show as outline
stars&☆.) So if you give multiple stars to one track in an
otherwise undistinguished album, suddenly all the other tracks get
good ratings too. Now you can’t assign your own
ratings to just some songs within an album: it’s all or none.
My solution to this was to abandon a straightforward scheme of
one to five stars in my ratings.
I’ve kept 1, 3, 4, and 5
stars to but I reserve ★★ to rate a pop or
humor album where I want to rate
just a few tracks (pop and humor). Then for that album,
Album Rating is ★★, the tracks I directly rated have their stars, and
iTunes assigns ☆☆ to the other tracks. ★★ is my
“neutral” rating, between ★ (dislike) and ★★★
or more (like better than most).
How to Set Album Rating
To set the Album Rating tag, I
think it’s easiest to select “album list” view
(se see the picture below).
Then you can click
the number of stars you want to assign to an album and see them
reflected in the ratings of the individual tracks. If you want to
override any individual track ratings, you can then do it easily.
Notice that when I assigned Album Rating&= ★★★★
to this symphony, iTunes assigned Rating&=
☆☆☆☆ to every movement. That’s
helpful, I think, in constructing
that use ratings.
had rated just one movement myself, iTunes would have assigned implied
ratings to the symphony and the other movements, which I find
presumptuous and unhelpful.
Hence my ★★
“neutral” rating for albums.
Rating “Classical” and Shows
Once somebody figured out the , it wasn’t too bad for art music, since
in my scheme.
To rate a work, I just assign the Album Rating and let iTunes
propagate that to the Rating tags.
And the same applies to Broadway shows and soundtracks, which are
usually packaged one per album anyway.
I rate each “classical” work as a unit, because I
usually play a work as a unit.
But within my 3- and 4-star works I do
rate a very few movements as ★★★★★.
Rating Pop and Humor
Pop and humor are the reverse of art music and shows: tracks
within an album are only loosely connected if at all.
For pop and
humor, I don’t really rate albums, but I use the Rating tag
on individual tracks—about 900 out of 2700, as a quick count
using a smart playlist revealed.
But if I stopped there, the iTunes misfeature of
would come into play.
To get around that, I assign ★★ to every
see above for .
Part of a gapless album Tag
People sometimes ask about using this tag for tracks that
should be played consecutively, with no gap between them. There is
because iTunes and iPod know when to play tracks continuously, without
iTunes Alternatives
I myself use iTunes (obviously!) and I’m pretty well
satisfied with it, despire a couple of “What were they
thinking?” but some people have asked me about alternatives.
I have not tried any of these myself, but they come from sources that
I’ve found credible in other matters:
from How-To Geek.
Here is a direct link to
(Foobar will manage your media but won’t connect to an
also from How-To Geek.
You’ll find a free version and a Gold version
with more features at
Simple Help gives a roundup of
The page is vintage 2007, so go to the programs’ home pages for
more up-to-date information.
In particular, some that were shown as
Linux only now also have Windows versions.
What’s New?
18 Dec 2016: Add another .
13 Aug 2015: Add The Atlantic to
, thanks to email from Jane
Connor, and
iTunes&12.
(intervening changes suppressed)
1 July 2012: A major rewrite for iTunes and iPod.
Outdated material has bee a lot of new material
has been added, and the rest has been thoroughly reviewed and revised
for clarity.
I’ve covered new capabilities of iPod and iTunes, changed
some recommendations, retaken
iTunes screen shots, and made quite a few new iPod screen shots.
I’ve also moved some advice on importing into a new page,
previous history.
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Updates and new info:}