iTunes vs the Music app

[gastropod]

There is no “album” object in the system at all. Albums
are presented in the UI (pretty much) as just predefined
sort/group options.

A big part of the problem isn’t Apple’s fault. Digital music metadata
tags were a disaster from the start. The guy who did it meant well, but
knew very little about music, databases, or cataloguing. So there are
umpteen thousand ‘genres’ for modern western pop music, and one
‘classical’ genre that’s supposed to cover almost 1000 years of western
european music, highbrow to lowbrow. Track based, not piece based (a
track can be part of a piece, or hold several pieces). World and
traditional musics? Not on their radar. Hierarchies and/or keywords?
Nope. Performer and publisher info? Nope. Then the data entry was
‘crowd sourced’ and became the de facto data for anyone who didn’t
painfully do it themselves. Errors, conflicting choices of fields to
try to coerce the system to manage more that it’s capable of, yet more
errors. A few more tag fields got added over time which helped, but
with such a flawed underpinning and so much momentum, there’s no leeway
to properly fix it.

For many years (late 80s up), I did my own metadata in Filemaker, but it was by album, not tracks. Eventually it got too time consuming to keep up even with the album schema so my database never got converted to a track based system. Then I subscribed to emusic and had to throw in the towel. When I started using iTunes (couldn’t find anything I liked better and still can’t) I just made sure that the album field was correct, set albums (and some tracks) to sensible genres, turned off compilations for everything, and added my CD index number to the Description field so I can easily find the album notes. Every now and then I’ll do some fixing, such as moving composer from an album title to the composer field, but as I get older, I don’t care as much–time flits by too fast, and it’s uncommon to not be able to find something fairly quickly.

As long as iTunes or Music can recognize that an album is an album. the column browser is a great way to find what I want and play only that. For multi-cd works just select all of the albums. I do have playlists for a number of things, but I don’t use them all that much these days.

For music metadata done right, the Naxos Music Library is quite good–not just classical, but jazz and more. Many public libraries subscribe to parts of it (usually at low bit rate) so it’s worth checking just to enjoy the database. I’m hoping that the new classical music app will be even a fourth as good.

I do keep my own music library separate from Apple Music. Music on catalina (screenshared) is allowed to do Apple Music, but my own stuff is on my el cap fileserver in iTunes 12.6.n. On my primary sierra mac, I home share from the file server or have Music play via airplay to airfoil satellite because Music refuses to share Apple Music even though all machines are authorized with the same apple ID. Maybe because I don’t have iCloud turned on?

I’d love to know of a better mac program than iTunes. I’ve tried many over the years. Clementine wasn’t entirely dreadful and had the nice feature of letting me download from Magnatune, but it’s been abandoned. There were one or two other things over the years that might almost have been ok, but were so buggy I tossed them. So maybe the problem is that iTunes is still too good - most people swear at it but manage to use it anyway so there’s not enough market for commercial competition, or even an open source project to gain traction.

[mark4 (mc38)]

@gastropod

I’d love to know of a better mac program than iTunes.

I’m not asserting that it’s better than iTunes (especially since I still use iTunes!) but you might consider taking a look at Swinsian, which I don’t regret buying even though I’m not using it currently.

[jeff1 (Jeff Hecht)]

@jk2gs

If the software is the issue, then use something like Audacity to digitize. You can split the tracks after both sides have been recorded. It is a bit more work than some other programs, but when you split the tracks yourself, you can also do things like fade-outs if needed due to excess noise on a record.

Audacity also can play mp3s as well as music it has recorded in its own format. I’ve been recording old reel-to-reel audio tapes, and it can clean up problems from low-level recording and off-balanced channels. It takes a little learning, but you can get help online from volunteers who know the software very well.

[Shamino (David C.)]

@gastropod

A big part of the problem isn’t Apple’s fault. Digital music metadata tags were a disaster from the start. The guy who did it meant well, but knew very little about music, databases, or cataloguing.

The “standard” never was one. It was a hack in order to hang metadata off of MP3 files so people trading files over file sharing networks could have more than just the filename for identifying the contents.

As such, it was designed around what people were mostly sharing at the time and was later patched and hacked for additional features. But it was never designed to be a proper music indexing system.

Likewise, music player software based around playing MP3 collections (including iTunes and Music, even though other file formats are also supported) have inherited the same limitations, because they were designed to index the ID3 tags in the music files.

See also: ID3 - Wikipedia

[gastropod]

re: Swinsian

That was one that I almost liked (couldn’t remember the name), but it didn’t seem to be able to handle large libraries (1500+ albums), or maybe something else caused problems. It was several years ago, so I’ve forgotten the details. I should probably give it another try, though even if it’s now perfect it’s not going to help with the whole stupid tag thing, and I’m kind of ok even with the poor Music interface (can’t click in the scroll bars?!! sheesh) since I don’t have to do more than select an album and play it.

[mark4 (mc38)]

Tags is tags, so we have to live with 'em no matter what player we’re using.

For iTunes, and now as I understand it, the music.app, Doug Adams put together an outstanding AppleScript package called “Multi Item Edit” which helps deal with tags, and I’ve had great success with a program from the App Store called Meta, which also helps.

Not that either of these solves the fundamental problems of music tags, but they do help in a lot of cases.

[jajvj1 (Jeffrey Jones)]

@gastropod

So there are
umpteen thousand ‘genres’ for modern western pop music, and one
‘classical’ genre that’s supposed to cover almost 1000 years of western
european music, highbrow to lowbrow.

You can add any genres you want. Just type in the name. For example, I added “Classical early”, “Classical Late Romantic”, “Classical 20th Century”, etc.

@gastropod

Track based, not piece based (a
track can be part of a piece, or hold several pieces).

Instead of Track “Title”, classical pieces can be tagged as “Work” and “Movement”.

Look at David C.'s screenshot for Beethoven’s 1st Symphony. Where it says “title”, there are up & down arrows after the word title; it is a pop-up menu. You can change “title” to “work name”. A new set of fields appear for movement information. For example:

[gastropod]

Yes, but that hack (1996) became entrenched, along with the dismal data entry, years before Apple bought SoundJam (2000) and renamed it to iTunes. There’s a lot I don’t like about the way Apple, iTunes, and Music do things, but for that part of it, which strongly impacts how easy it is to find and play what we want, they’re innocent, aside from not trying to do something sane and push it as a standard.

Having Music.app not follow even the basic standard Mac interface is definitely their fault though. So glad I’m not on the update treadmill and still have plenty of old macs lying around…

[gastropod]

You can add any genres you want. Just type in the name

IIRC, adding your own genres was an iTunes innovation. I do that extensively*, and use groupings and the other fields including ratings** in what some might consider inappropriate ways. It misses the point though. By the time I fix genres, move some data in various fields around, and check to see if any of the other data is wrong as it so often is, I’ve wasted a lot of time. If I were a good typist (and liked typing), I could do it all from scratch in the same time. If it were well structured and correct metadata instead of ‘anyone can contribute with no adult oversight’, there’d be no need for each individual to do all of that work fixing each album. If a mere million people spend only 20 seconds each fixing any one album, that’s 5555 person-hours. If they enjoy it, that’s fine. If it raises their blood pressure, not so much.

• At least I used to; it seemed kind of pointless after awhile. I have a lot of hobbies and data entry is not one of them. I still do some, mostly setting genres, but less and less with time.

** another of my pet peeves - there’s no easy way to rate a piece as opposed to the performance of that piece.

[Shamino (David C.)]

@jajvj1

Look at David C.'s screenshot for Beethoven’s 1st Symphony. Where it says “title”, there are up & down arrows after the word title; it is a pop-up menu. You can change “title” to “work name”. A new set of fields appear for movement information.

Thanks for that reminder. I remember seeing those fields years ago, but I never touched them because I wasn’t sure how this would cause my classical albums to sort/group with everything else.

I just switched those fields over for my Beethoven and it seems to work well. When viewing in Song view, the “Title” column becomes a composite string: Work Name: Movement. Name.

Applying it to the track I used in my example, it now is:

• Work Name: Symphony no. 1
• Movement: 1 of 4
• Title: Adagio molto - Allegro con brio

And when in Song view, I see the string “Symphony no. 1: I. Adagio molto - Allegro con brio”, which is almost exactly what I had created for myself (but using Roman numerals for the movement number).

Placing the conductor in the Artist field messes up how I want everything sorted, but I could still put “Ludwig van Beethoven” in the Album Artist field, which seems to do the trick.

When in a view that shows albums (Artists, Albums, Composers), tracks with movement information together with the composer and artist shown and both the composer and artist are shown with the work, not the track:

But note the last track (Overture from “Fidelio”). It isn’t stored in work/movement format because this particular track is not a multi-movement recording. As such, it doesn’t show the composer - Music is treating it like a pop track.

To fix that, there is the “Show composer in all views” checkbox. This makes that field appear even if the track isn’t storing movement data, which is quite appropriate for most classical works:

It looks great on my Mac. I’ll have to sync it to my iPod and see how it presents itself over there. If it looks good, I’ll go ahead and do the same for my other classical albums. If not, it’s back to what I was doing.

[NiklasB]

On the iPad I am using right now it works fine. It is also an album that is available in HiRes audio so the sound quality is excellent.

[tommy (Tommy Weir)]

The amount of time I used to spend organizing my iTunes Library… I can’t go back there. I have a huge amount of music and films on our server, available to us all but… we just stream now in this family. Songs and albums we know of course but also grateful for the independent curation which brings a steady stream of new music into the house.

[MMTalker]

This is the reason why radio DJs, MTV, etc. very rarely played full albums; classical music being the exception. And it’s why record stores quickly became extinct.

Apple introduced “Complete My Album” in the early days of iTunes. You do have to jump through a few hoops on iPhones and iPads, but it’s still there.

[chengengaun (Eng Aun Cheng)]

Hopefully the classical music discovery and listening experience will start to improve soon.

Apple Buys Classical Music Service Primephonic

Originally published at: Apple Buys Classical Music Service Primephonic - TidBITS Apple has bought Primephonic, a classical music service. Apple will be shutting Primephonic down soon but promises to create a new app just for classical music fans.

[dougeddy (G. Douglas Eddy)]

Excellent explanation and very helpful. Thank you David!

I use the excellent Fission app to adjust my music to my personal sorting. I stopped using iTunes when it would “lose” or delete CD imports from my collection, especially when it started messing up careful changes I made to those. I also keep all my music transfers on a separate backup disc clean and untouched by Apple before I install them in Music - that way if something happens I can reinstall them in my format.

[mark4 (mc38)]

@dougeddy

I stopped using iTunes when it would “lose” or delete CD imports from my collection

While I’ve extolled the virtues of iTunes on this thread, that doesn’t mean it didn’t/doesn’t have significant problems itself. I’m in a long term project to carefully restore my libraries because at some point, iTunes started balking at importing complete selections from CDs, with no indication of why. I’d just try to play an album and find that it had only 3 of 12 tracks, for example. So as I restore, I go one by one, checking proper file transfer of each track. Time consuming, yes–but I also add album art as necessary using Meta to bypass iTune’s storage method (Meta attaches tag info directly to the individual file), and can add composers, etc. and other info that may not be on the CD.

The iTunes to iTunes library transfer is very convenient, but files can be “lost” that would not be if a different transfer method were used. And good backups are essential!

[jk2gs]

Yes, Audacity has many uses and I’ve also used it for reel to reel tapes but not as much now as I’m working on some records. It can open many formats, even some that iTunes should open such as AIFF files made on a System 9 computer from way back.

[jk2gs]

@mark4

Time consuming, yes–but I also add album art as necessary using Meta to bypass iTune’s storage method (Meta attaches tag info directly to the individual file), and can add composers, etc. and other info that may not be on the CD.

iTunes does attach the metadata to the file such as album art etc. so unless Meta does something else, it isn’t needed in that regard.

[mark4 (mc38)]

@jk2gs

Tunes does attach the metadata to the file such as album art etc. so unless Meta does something else, it isn’t needed in that regard.

Not if iTunes is air-gapped and unable to connect to the internet (as I’ve said previously my setups were), and no art has yet been attached to the recordings. With no ability to find and download art, iTunes will present only generic icons. This depends, of course, on the source of the recordings–which can vary widely.

Meta allows editing all tag categories quickly and easily. So does Doug’s script “Multi Item Edit,” with a different interface. I use both.

And as a follow-on, I’ll point out that iTunes (infrequently) would/will download the wrong album art.

[Shamino (David C.)]

@Shamino

It looks great on my Mac. I’ll have to sync it to my iPod and see how it presents itself over there. If it looks good, I’ll go ahead and do the same for my other classical albums. If not, it’s back to what I was doing.

It comes across well on the iPod as well:

I still occasionally see listings in an album where my “grouping” text (which I use for sub-genre keywords) appears where the title/work text should appear:

But that is an old problem that has nothing to do with the issue at hand - it happens to some of my pop tracks as well as some of the classical ones. And the data that appears on the playing-track is correct despite this:

(If anyone knows why this happens - to only some of my songs, not to the overwhelming majority, and only on the iPod not in iTunes or Music - please feel free to suggest an option in a new discussion thread.)

Thanks, @jajvj1 for the tip.