[sheilanolan]

No it's not just you. I clicked a link to free HD shows and got the "not available in the UK" message. It's annoying that we can't buy from one big itunes store, after all, I can order other things online from the US. Is there some technical reason for this, apart from copyright/distribution issues? This really decimates what overseas users get from the update.

[mdawson]

Yes adding items to the iTunes library and the user?s music is really simple, but that was not the gist of my original argument about Apple not correcting the organized iTunes music folder feature. macavenger kept insisting that the ?organize music folder? preference was responsible for the consolidation process. That is in fact incorrect and misleading to anyone unfamiliar with these settings that may be reading this thread.

[BenBoychuk]

What is it with iTunes and classical music? I wrote a piece for the magazine about five years ago in which I pointed out how classical music lovers got the high hat from ITMS. It's gotten a lot better since then, but along comes Genius. It's pretty smart with just about everything in my library EXCEPT my classical stuff. Possibility: Too many tracks that look duplicative. Lots of scherzos and adagios and rondos, for example. Hard to say. Any other ideas?

[whitedog]

On the performance issue, iTunes 8 launches much slower than earlier versions on my Mac Pro. Of course if it does other things faster, this is no real handicap.
Anyway, thanks for the feature summary. There really are a lot of changes in iTunes 8 to get used to.

[sheilanolan]

BenBoychuk said:

What is it with iTunes and classical music? I wrote a piece for the magazine about five years ago in which I pointed out how classical music lovers got the high hat from ITMS. It's gotten a lot better since then, but along comes Genius. It's pretty smart with just about everything in my library EXCEPT my classical stuff. Possibility: Too many tracks that look duplicative. Lots of scherzos and adagios and rondos, for example. Hard to say. Any other ideas?

Classical music fans seem to be in the minority everywhere which is funny as just over 100 years ago, we would have been in the majority (but iTunes wasn't even a twinkle in someone's eye then!). I'm hoping that it will improve once more classical fans get their playlists uploaded but I'm not going to hold my breath. At the moment, Genius does seem to be having a few teething problems, it finally recognised the first track in one of my Doctor Who albums and then suggested that I might like to complete the album when the whole thing was sitting there in my library!

[mathogre]

Genius Playlists

I agree they're not perfect yet, and I'd posit that classical represents its own challenges inasmuch as you could easily have genres within classical. In my limited collection of classical music I can think of a few pieces/movements that could be played well in a series, but mostly I can imagine many more horrible ways to combine them. Also, there are some works that only make sense played end-to-end.

That said, I'm currently listening to a very interesting genius playlist that started with a piece from Curve. iTunes added other music from Curve and music from groups such as Filter, NIN, Supreme Beings of Leisure, Garbage, Jane's Addiction, Electronic, and a couple free discovery songs I downloaded from Apple. A few times I said, "What in the world is that?" and looked at what was playing on my iPhone. I'm rediscovering some of my own music. Yes genius playlists are limited, but with this list I'm impressed.

[mdawson]

Quote

BenBoychuk wrote:

>

Quote

What is it with iTunes and classical music?

The same thing that is with most music database software. As sheilanolan correctly stated, avid classical music collectors are not the general music buying public and constitute a minority. Since the 1950s Western music has been increasingly dominated by what would be classified as popular music (e.g., Blues, Country, Dance, Electronic, Hip Hop, Jazz, Latin, Pop, R&B, Rock and their associated sub-genres and styles.). All (Western) popular music, those genres that have come about since the late-19th/early 20th century, can be properly cataloged and identified with the same few basic parameters: Artist, Title, Album, Genre, etc.

Western popular music and its international equivalents (e.g., J-Pop, Dancehall, Reggae, etc.) make up the majority of the world?s recorded music. As such, most music database programs cater to what is necessary for popular music to be cataloged. Classical music requires a different set of parameters to identify the music, but as avid classical collectors are a minority, dare I say an extreme minority, most music database applications do not handle classical music well. iTunes seems to have at least made some effort in this area and has perhaps gone further than other digital music jukebox apps.

Where a feature like Genius is concerned, classical music creates new problems. Compared to popular music, the number of classical pieces is quite finite. While there are popular songs that are redone or covered by a number of artists, the number of unique popular songs is infinitely large. Even when a popular music song is remade, numerous parameters may change. Unfortunately, I cannot think of a specific example right now, but there are songs that are strongly associated with a more contemporary R&B artist, was recorded earlier by another R&B artist, but started out as a Rock or Country song.

No matter the orchestra, Beethoven?s Fifth is Beethoven?s fifth. From what I have been told avid classical music collectors are inclined to purchase different performances of the same piece. (I on the other hand am far from inclined to buy the country version of an R&B song that I like even if it was the first recorded version of the song.) In such an instance only the classical performer?changes.

[Tid01217]

The new version of iTunes is fine, but it's not a huge change from the previous version. I don't understand why it requires a new release when they add downloadable video at a higher resolution.
On the down side, the new iTunes 8 has rendering problems on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I scroll the image in the main windows disappears or distorts and does not return until I stop scrolling. Oddly this does not seem to happen if you scroll in 1 page jumps, so perhaps it is a problem with smooth scrolling? Has anyone else experienced this problem?

[BenBoychuk]

Thanks. You're right, especially about the problem of owning multiple versions of the same composition. Every performance is different. I knew a guy who had 103 versions of Beethoven's 3rd.

[starstreamer]

I had to rebuild my libraries after switching using Multitunes. This happened on both my PPC and Inter units. If you switch to another and then back you get a "Can't open Itunes due to unknown error" and then I 5 digit code that I passed on to Multitunes.
This was with the most current version.

[Wizardling]

"You can also change files to audiobooks, either individually or as a group, which forces them to display in the Audiobooks library."
How?????? There's no way that I can see, just as there wasn't in iTunes 7.

[mdawson]

Go into the Options tab for the audiobook?s info and change the media type.

[Wizardling]

Thanks for that info [~39151] - I wasn't seeing it. BTW - is anyone else finding the edit link on their own posts just sends them to http://forums.macworld.com/index.jspa instead of allowing them to edit?

[sheilanolan]

Thanks for that info mdawson, now I've got my audiobooks imported from CD in the correct place. Nice one!