iTunes Problems

I have a fair-sized collection of music on my ipod. A little of everything, but a lot of Classical music. Ipods are great for everything except Classical music.

If I want to hear David Bowie, I can search by artist. If I want to listen to a jazz album, I'll search by album. But how do I usually want to search for classical music? By composer. Go look at the composer category on your ipod. It's a mess of names you wont recognize. I had about 900 composers on there.

Still, being patient, I would scroll through (not really so hard to twirl that dial around). But say I wanted to hear an afternoon of Chopin. Here were my choices:

• Frederick Chopin
• Fridirik Chopin
• Chopin, F.
• Chopin, Fryderyk
  

You get the idea. Total mess. So being the obsessive-compulsive type that I am, I've now spent hours standardizing all my Classical composers. Then I went through all my rock, pop, jazz, soundtracks - and deleted each and every composer so they wouldn't show up on the list. Actually I pasted them into the comment section of each track. I'm still not done, but now my ipod is usuable.

And now if I want to listen to Chopin, I can select him and sit back - for 9.3 hours. Or Mozart for 18.5 hours, or Beethoven for 1.4 days.

Have you tweaked your iTunes to work better for you? I'd love to hear how.