Kirk McElhearn: Manage classical music in iTunes 12

Writing on Macworld:

iTunes has always been designed for “songs,” and, for the most part, classical music isn’t a song-based genre. Because of this, organizing classical music in iTunes can be a bit complicated. But with a few workarounds, it’s possible to maintain a large classical music library in iTunes. Here’s how.

I’ve long since developed a system for tagging my classical music,[1] but McElhearn’s got some good pointers if your collection is as muddled as it will inevitably be if you don’t apply your own tags.

One other suggestion I’d add: iOS devices don’t like long track names, and some classical music tracks can have very long titles, depending on how you’re sorting them. I have some useful space savers:

• ♯ and ♭ signs rather than writing out “Sharp” and “Flat”
• Upper-case letters for Major-key pieces, and lower-case for minor
• Omit words like “Sonata” if they’re obvious from the album title or somewhere else
• Sensible punctuation: A colon looks better and is much more efficient than the weird space-hyphen-space that everyone seems to use

So the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight sonata is:

• No. 14 in c♯, ‘Moonlight’: Adagio sostenuto

rather than the more cumbersome

• Sonata No. 14 in C Sharp Minor, ‘Moonlight’ – Adagio sostenuto

That’s worked reasonably well for me, but it hasn’t been without problems.