iPod Organizing classical music for iPod

[nutmac]

Let's face it. Although iPod is capable of playing classical music, its organization feature is not designed for classical music.

I rip classical music CD with sufficiently high bitrate (AAC 256 Kbps VBR) and tag as follows:

• Album: instead of the classical CD album name (e.g., "Artur Rubinstein - The Chopin Collection", I use the composition title (e.g., Piano Concerto No. 1)
• Make sure composer is not tagged with the artist(s) and ensure consistent spelling (e.g., "Sergei Rachmaninoff" vs. "Sergej Rachmaninov").
• Title: for compositions with multiple movements, I use <movement> - <tempo> notation (e.g., "I - Allegro"). for single movement pieces, I repeat the composition title (e.g., "Adagio for Strings"). For opera, the song title.

This scheme works pretty well when attempting to find a particular piece quickly. For instance, Music -> Composers -> Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -> Piano Concerto No. 20. (I really wish iPod can be configured to sort by last name.)

The problem is playlists. Playlists insist on displaying each music by title. So I get a series of meaningless mess such as "I - Allegro". So what do I do? I create a BUNCH of playlists to suit particular listening needs. This is obviously not ideal. I much prefer to create more generic playlists such as "Baroque - Instrumental" and still be able to make some meanings out of each playlist's contents.

Anybody have better workaround?

 

[killmoms]

I'm still a CD focused guy, so my classical music is organized a bit differently. It also helps that I don't have a lot of it at the moment (which I hope to change). For artist, I put the performer only, for instance "Herbert von Karajan & the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra." For the album, I keep the CD/set title, in that case "Beethoven: Symphonien 1 - 9." For the title, I do [piece in key, opus, movement - movementname], so: "Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, I - Allegro Con Brio." For composer, of course, that's obvious: "Ludwig van Beethoven."