Why is iTunes so user-unfriendly to classical music lovers? If you're an iPod user, or even if you just use iTunes on your Mac, you will know what I mean. The whole system is set up solely for rock and pop music. That's fair enough in one sense, given the relative size of the pop and classical markets, but modern technology ought to be -- and is frequently promoted as though it is -- user-centred. It is central to the iPodeology that you - not they - decide what music you want to listen to, in what order and so on. Except that in the case of classical music, this isn't nearly as easy as it should be. For classical music, it's they, not you, who make the rules.
Look at the categories that iTunes imposes on your library: Name, Time, Artist, Album, Genre etc. That's absolutely fine for rock albums, jazz albums and most of the other pop genres. For classical music, it's crap. Classical music categorisation requires something like: Composer, Work, Section, Artists, Genre, Time and maybe some others. Maybe you can come up with better categories that this, but the object of the exercise has to be to allow you to sort by composer, genre, performers and, above all, subsection. At the moment, if you put Don Giovanni on to iTunes, to take a piece at random, the current iTunes format is just useless. For a start, where does Mozart go? He's not the name, the artist, the album or the genre. It's an incredibly laborious business to re-label the whole work into all its different arias and scenes. There simply isn't room to list all the different performers who are singing the different sections. And then on top of that you've got the problem of conductor and orchestra. And you still haven't solved the Mozart question even then. If what you want to do is listen to "Il mio tesoro", it's like looking for the proverbial needle in the proverbial haystack.
Of course Apple aren't the only sinners. On Amazon the other day I came across an album of Tristan und Isolde which said: "Lauritz Melchior - Vocals". But I'm shocked that they have got away with this shabby treatment of a significant section of the music-loving public for so long. It is surely time to start a lobby for Apple and these others to give classical music its own user-friendly library cataloguing system. Or maybe we could devise one for ourselves here?
