[doglesby]

That doesn't support cross-cutting aspects. I tag tracks using the comment field. That allows me to specify that a piece is Choral and Orchestral and Baroque, whereas other pieces are Instrumental and Baroque or Instrumental and Romantic. I use those tags to build smart playlists. A true tagging system would make that easier (yes, I can create a playlist for each keyword and build smart playlists based on the other playlists, but that's more dragging and more playlists that I'm not interested in actually playing).

I don't know how grouping is "supposed" to work, but the iTunes Store uses it to group movements of a larger work together (sometimes). This fits with the iTunes option to shuffle groups as a unit. So I have a Beethoven Symphony No. 9 group to which I assign the four individual movements. When I put iTunes on shuffle (sadly the iPod doesn't do this), it will play the movements in sequence when that symphony comes up and then skip to a random other track (or group, which will then play in sequence).

[mdawson]

I am not questioning how you have organized your library; I am just trying to get a picture of what you are doing and thus have issue with based on your posts. Re-reading your post it is not clear if you are talking specifically about iTunes or the iPod/iPhone interface when you state, ?When I select the Classical genre, I get a screen with the title ?Classical? and a list of artists.? I assumed that you were talking about either selecting the Genre column in iTunes lists or selecting Classical from the iTunes Browser.

[mdawson]

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doglesby wrote:

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That doesn't support cross-cutting aspects. I tag tracks using the comment field. That allows me to specify that a piece is Choral and Orchestral and Baroque, whereas other pieces are Instrumental and Baroque or Instrumental and Romantic. I use those tags to build smart playlists. A true tagging system would make that easier?

I can see your point here. Unfortunately iTunes feature set, while much improved does cater more to the general populace and the average person, let alone teen and twentysomething, is not as organized as people like us. Given that iTunes is not professional level software, its organizational features are rather extensive as of version 7, as it now has more extensive tagging including sort tags that differentiate between the visible info and how it should be sorted. Unfortunately, as I stated previously, like in many consumer-based music management applications, the needs of classical music collectors has been treated like an afterthought.

You also bring up a very good point about how features do not necessarily translate to the iPod. I have an extensive folder/playlist structure for organizing my music, but whereas iTunes recognizes and treats folders as playlists, iPods do not recognize folders at all.