These players--and the digital music files that go on them--are optimized for pop, and, to be fair, optimized quite nicely. You rip songs off a pop CD, and (if your software looks them up on the Internet) they automatically get labeled by artist, genre, song and album. Put 10,000 songs on your iPod, and, with a touch of a finger, you can look at all your hip-hop, or all your Springsteen, grouped either by album or as an alphabetical list of songs.

Try that with classical music. Typically a classical piece has several movements, separate musical sections that show up on recordings as separate tracks. What you want, when you put classical music on your digital player, is to see the tracks grouped together under the name of the composition, and then all the compositions listed under the name of their composer.

But these digital gadgets don't think that way, and when you put classical music on them, the complications--trust me--can get truly frightening. The iPod, at least, has a separate "composer" category, which helps a little, though there's still no way to search composer tracks by composition, and if you buy a competing digital player you don't get any listing for composers at all. By some stroke of luck, I bought an iRiver player, which, I discovered, lets me treat it like a computer hard drive, organizing music by files and folders. That means I can give Beethoven a folder of his own, with subfolders for each of his works--though I have to type all the information in myself. Aargh.

Konzert für Klarine...
Konzert für Klarine...
Konzert für Klarine...
Konzert für Oboe u...
Konzert für Oboe u...
Konzert für Oboe u...