I see what you are talking about now. I never clicked on that explorer button to show the “top list” that you guys are talking about. I only use the song list.
To find all pieces on a particular album, I sort by album and scroll down. To find all pieces by a composer, I sort by composer and scroll down. For anything more complicated I use playlists.
Most of the album database software programs I’ve seen in my past years of cataloguing albums were geared towards pop / rock albums: Group / Album Title / Individual songs.
I’ve never found a program that works well for “classical” albums: conductor, orchestra, composer, star performers (for opera), several pieces divided into movements, several composers per album. Which program handles that well?
If the whole CD is a single composer’s work, you can do it all in one step. Otherwise, yeah, it’s time-consuming. At least it fills in the full name for you after you’ve typed a few letters of it. That helps.
I feel your pain on that one. I want to pull up all songs on which a given artist performed. That takes a lot of monkeying around with comment fields and either the search box or a smart playlist.
The one thing I hate about iTunes, and iPods, is this reliance on ‘artist’ as already identified. I’ve ended up manually editing every file, often taking the information from the ‘artist’ field and putting it elsewhere to make way for an itunes-friendly composer-based entry.
I also hate iTunes. Pushy imperative know-it-all software that thinks it knows better than I do how to manage my music. Klunky interface.
I use Audion as a playback and conversion app, and FileMaker to manage my music files. I do a Find for what I want to hear in FileMaker and then a FileMaker script tells Audion to create a playlist composed of the current found set and play 'em.