I'm not going to hit you

[mmcirvin]

None of you are dumb enough to put the names of the movements in the "Artist" field and then upload the track data to CDDB, right? Right?

(Putting the name of the composer in there is only a minor offense.)

Comments

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I run into that so much that I guessed it must be some kind of ID3 tag interpretation glitch -- that either iTunes mis-interprets some other program's tags, or some other program uses non-standard tags. Because it's just dumb.

I don't rip that many CDs nowadays, since most of my collection is already MP3, but I did two CDs recently and both were screwy that way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I figured it was the following:

1. Many computer jukebox and CD player programs (written, as they all are, for pop music listeners) only display title/artist/album, in that order, either by default or at all.
2. Many geniuses who use such programs decide that their classical albums look nice on the screen if they put the name of the piece in the Title field and the movement in the Artist field. The composer is in the album title already and who cares about the name of the orchestra, anyway?
3. Enjoy!

Which can be shortened to something well-known:

1. Entering metadata well does not come naturally to human beings.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Similarly, if you have an MP3 player which, like most of them, displays title and artist lines when playing a song, you might well reason that putting the piece and the movement in there is a clever hack for the classical music enthusiast, one that everybody else in the entire world will surely appreciate as much as you do.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

You use iTunes, right? Highlighting the offending tracks and running the following script in AppleScript Editor will put the Artist information in the "name" slot, and move the "name" slot to the "Grouping" section (or, with self-evident changes, to "Album" or wherever you want it).

tell application "iTunes"
set t to the selection of the front browser window
repeat with i from 1 to count of t
set a to artist of item i of t
set n to name of item i of t
set name of item i of t to a
set grouping of item i of t to n
end repeat
end tell

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I just modified that into a Dmitri Shostakovich Spelling Regularizer.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

The world will forever be in your debt.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

If you like lots of Russian composers, it presents extra sorting/searching problems because of variant transliterations. Of course you get last name/first name ordering difficulties in any event, and some people append birth and death dates...

I may reorganize the composers last-name-first by some automated means (I'm pretty sure the various iTunes script archives have solved this problem already) just to make them easier to browse on the iPod. That's how Sam's got it.