Organising classical music

Question

I started to write this as a response to somebody else's query, but then I thought no, I'm asking for general guidance on the best way to organise classical music to be listened to on my Mac and on my iPod.
I know that classical music lovers are a (threatened) minority, but oh, how I wish Apple would heed these regular sounds of anguish from us.
*What we need*
The 'Song' is an almost meaningless concept when organising classical music; 'Artist' is not much better.
Classical music fans may want to:
1. sort by composer
2. within composer, possibly sort by type (eg symphony)
3. within type, sort by work (eg Symphony 1)
4. within work sort by movement.
*Nested folders?*
A pretty obvious case for nested folders? (Not to mention having a clear consistent way to order and group movements.)
Yes - provided you dont have an iPod.
Thus I can have a folder 'Beethoven', within that I have a folder 'Symphonies' and within that I can have a playlist 'Symphony 5' ( actually two playlists for my two different recordings, otherwise I risk hearing the first movement twice before moving to the second movement). To ensure the movements are played in order, I have to ensure they are listed in the right order in Names (ie have 1,2,3,4 in the title).
This cludge sems to work in ITunes (although how nice it would be if Names and Albums were replaced by something a bit more akin to the world of classical music, and how nice it would be if one could have an Opus field.
*Not if you have an iPod*
But then this scheme falls apart if I sync with my iPod, which can't handle nested folders.
I quote from my message of 21 October 2006:
+... is there any sign of Apple introducing nested folders for the iPod (as it did with iTunes) and if not is there any manageable workaround for organising large collections of music?+
If you have a playlist for every symphony within a folder called Symphonies within Beethoven, you end up with at least nine playlists to scroll through! (Imagine the effect on my 400+ Bach items.)
I have found the only two useable viewing methods on the ipod are Playlists and Composers and both have serious problems. This is how they seem to work:
Under Playlists on the iPod:
If in iTunes, you have a playlist Symphony 1, within a folder Symphonies, within a folder Beethoven,
on your iPod there will be an item for each playlist, ie lines for each of the nine symphonies And if you select one, you will get the four movements of that symphony.
If you had made a playlist Beethoven Symphonies, there would be just one item in the playlist - but then once selected there would be all the movements of all the symphonies.
Under Composers on the iPod,
everything by Beethoven is listed, with a line per movement! Things are better if you have sussed (as I did not) that if the Album name for All the movements of Symphony 1 was exactly the same, eg 'Beethoven: Symphony 1', then this particular item appears once in the list.
*So, what am I doing?*
When not cursing Apple, I have already grouped music in folders by composer/broad category of music (in the case of the main composers) and under one playlist for minor composers (ie ones which I dont have much music for).
I'm painfully renaming every Name of every piece so that the movements appear in the correct order.
I'm painfully renaming the Album name of each piece so that all movements have exactly the same Album name (starting with 'Composername: )
(By the way I tried and abandoned some people's strategies involving calling Composers 'Artists' and vice versa. Too messy, and besides, I do from time to time download the metadata from Gracenote CDDB - deeply flawed though it is - and don't want to have to do more editing than necessary.
So, for example, for the first movement of one recording of Beethoven's Symphony Number 1 I have the following:
Name-- Symphony 1 In C, Op. 21 - 1. Adagio Molto, Allegro Con Brio (crucial that the movements are numbered, to get them in the right order)
Artist-- Nikolaus Harnoncourt; Chamber Orchestra Of Europe
Composer-- Beethoven (I also put Bach for JS and only put the initials for the other Bachs)
Album-- Beethoven: Symphony 1 In C, Op. 21
*Is there a better way to do this?*
Wouldn't be surprised. But you don't expect Apple software to be so bad that simple users like me have to work out a logic to make things work on both Mac and iPod.

Answer 1

ed2345 wrote:
What, for example will you do with an albmum of Maria Callas singing arias from many composers?
I have indeed got an album of Maria Callas and I put each song under the composer. (I can after all select Callas under Artist and get all her songs that way.)
ed2345 wrote:
As a workaround for the iPod, I suggest to manually add the composer in to the Artist field (since the Composer field does not show on the iPod).
As I said, I tried that and, apart from finding it a messy fix, it means changing EVERY entry, whereas sometimes I get a semi decent one from the CD or the database. (Actually the Composer field does show on the iPod - the problem is that I scroll for ages to get through Bach.)
I'm pretty certain I sent feedback a couple of years ago, but see absolutely no signs of development of the metadata behind iTunes or the iPod. Sad. I'm an Apple user going back 20 years.