Brendan Quinn and Margaret Hanley (learned BBC colleagues, both) point me to an interesting discussion around classical music metadata, or rather the lack of it, in iTunes etc., over at the TidBITS Talk list.
As a classical music listener, of a kind, and a heavy-duty iTunes user, I’ve long struggled with this. iTunes4 did begin to add ‘composer’ tags etc., but I’m then forced to put lots of other info in to the ‘comments’ box (conductor, soloist etc.). The track names vary massively – I don’t have a consistent format (that I can remember, anyway) for marking out movements, suites etc.
We built a separate interface to our classical artist/album database at BBCi Music, based around Amazon’s existing design pattern (and the advice our ‘classical experts’ at BBCi Music) here (please ignore the visual design; needs a facelift). Check the advanced album search.
This doesn’t even touch things like ‘movement’, which the TidBits discussion refers to. It’s a fiendishly complex area.
We have a product that does all the things you talked about where iTunes lacks in the classical music categorization department. All our music is classified by, and easily searched through by composer, conductor, ensemble, venue, performer, and much more. The best part is that all the data is consistent, meaning that you don’t have to deal with misspellings or composers being classified under multiple names like “Beethoven, Ludwig Van” vs. “Ludwig van Beethoven”
The music can be looked at and played in three differnt ways; the CDs, the works or the tracks, so the grouping issue that you were talking about is no more.
We’ve also got all the CD artwork, including cover art and liner notes and the music you hear from our player is exactly the same as what you hear from the CD, so it sounds good, unlike most compressed classical MP3s.
Check us out… http://www.fortunclassical.com