Since I got my iPod a few weeks back I’ve been busily uploading music onto my computer for transfer. One cool feature that makes this easier is the iTunes online CD DataBase, which fills in the album title, artist, song titles and genre automatically. I’ve only had the CDDB come up empty once so far, and that was with a self-released CD by a local band. (Although it did supply the correct info for my own self-released CD!) But today it threw me a bit of a curve. I was uploading a recording of Mahler’s 8th Symphony on Denon, conducted by Elihu Inbal, which happens to be a double CD with one long track on each disc. Now the CDDB seems to get a bit confused with classical music. When I put in disc one, it correctly identified the recording, but put “Hymnus” (which is part of the name of the movement) for the artist’s name, where you’d expect the composer. So that was simple enough to change. Then when I moved on to the second disc, which consists of a single 54:38 track, it identified it as Angels with Dirty Faces by the Sugababes.
CDDB is only as good as the people entering the data, and some of them is me and you.
I use iTunes to manage music on my Mac, and I have a lot of compilation albums of classical voice. I find all sorts of weird stuff - artist’s name in composer field, album name in artist field, entirely empty composer field, composer or artist entered by first name so the sort function can’t work, etc etc
Yes, there is a composer field. It’s not shown by default. And don’t put the composer in the artist field damnit, I keep fixing those. The artist is Callas, Maria and the composer is Bizet, Georges! Not vice versa. With purely orchestral works, I’d put the orchestra name & conductor in the artist field. It would be nice to have more than one artist field to allow for this kind of thing, but i can live with it.
So anyway, when I put a new CD in, i usually correct these things and then re-send it to CDDB.
The main thing I really wish it had is a main/sub-section division for the titles. Allowing symphony X/movement Y or Opera A/Aria B.
Is there a “composer” field in the MP3 file header (ID3 tag, or whatever it’s called)? MusicMatch and iPod (Windows) don’t seem to show it. I usually end up putting the composer in the “artist” field and add the performer name to the “album” field, but that’s hardly ideal.
Well I didn’t know about this until cajela helpfully mentioned it just now, but if you go to “View Options” in the Edit menu in iTunes, it lets you select a “Composer” field. On the iPod itself, you can add “Composers” to your menu by going to Settings -> Main Menu -> Composers and toggle it on.
Oh wait, my iPod does show the Compser field. I just never noticed it because it’s empty on all my mp3 files. :smack: :smack: :smack: Thanks Biffy and cajela. Now I’ll look through the MusicMatch documentation or just wait for iTunes for Windows. (The Japanese version isn’t available yet, and some of my files have Japanese titles)