In cele­bra­tion of having nothing better to do today, I converted my iTunes library and Last.fm profile to a composer-centric cata­logu­ing system (rather than the performer-centric one I’d used up until now). I’ve grad­u­ally come to the real­iza­tion that the iTunes ecosys­tem just isn’t designed to support track info for “clas­si­cal music”, where the “artist” and “composer” are differ­ent people. Even though iTunes does support the “composer” tag, it’s only useful for orga­ni­za­tion within iTunes, because no other programs recog­nize it.

In my re-orga­ni­za­tion, the name of the person or group most asso­ci­ated with the creation of the track goes into the “artist” field. For example, “Jean Sibelius” for Finlan­dia, not “Berlin Phil­har­monic”. For album-centric music, the primary creator can be the performer, not the composer: “Bill Evans” is the artist for a My Funny Valen­tine, even though Rodgers and Hart wrote the original song. Despite requir­ing me to make these judge­ment calls, I think the new way is more intu­itive. Also, my Last.fm profile will now tell me more about my listen­ing habits; instead of an incom­pre­hen­si­ble list of perform­ers and disem­bod­ied tracks, I’ll see a nice, clean stack of composers and pieces. My performer tags are now in the “comments” slot, and don’t get uploaded. A new year, a new profile.

Oh! This also gives me the oppor­tu­nity to recom­mend one of my favorite sites: Doug’s Apple­scripts for iTunes. Apple­scripts are tiny programs designed to automate repet­i­tive tasks; this is how I was able to re-tag 9,000 tracks without going through each one by hand (I don’t have that much free time). So, for instance, one Apple­script switched my artists to the “comments” field, then my composers to “artist”, and another one refor­mat­ted the composers to “First name Last name”. You can find a script to do pretty much anything you’d ever want, and they’re acces­si­ble from a menu right in iTunes— a huge time­saver for anyone with a big library.