Peeve Farm

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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Monday, March 15, 2004
14:40 - Classical Music Metadata Redux (hah! More like "incrux") http://alanlittle.org/weblog/ClassicalID3.html	(top)
Alan Little has picked up where I left off regarding classical music metadata organization in ID3 tags and iTunes-- and shown just how badly I underestimated the scale of the problem in the first place. And you know, I knew I was skipping a ton of stuff. I just didn't want to think about it. Alan is much more thorough, though. Using real data-modeling techniques, he pulls apart a typical piece of classical music and identifies all the pieces of information that get jammed together to make the title of a Beethoven quartet or Haydn symphony. So much of this stuff dates back to a time when musical notation itself was still fairly new-- let alone, say, works' naming conventions-- that it seems many people who have tried this before, such as those intrepid souls who came up with the "BWV ###" numbering system to formalize the cataloging of old compositions, eventually were overcome with despair and gave up their numeration effort before they even got around to doing Beethoven. I have to imagine that Apple's been thinking about how to handle this. Probably a lot of Little's ideas are already on whiteboards somewhere in the iTunes group, probably languishing under newer and sexier diagrams and drawings of cartoon characters, the edges of the critical listings of field names nibbled away by dry-erase rot and spritzed with a few mistings of cleanser. I wouldn't doubt it if they've been batting around ideas for how to make the classical music listening experience as fully digital as modern music from the CD age has so easily become; but as soon as they start to really embrace how big a project it is, it just rolls over and crushes them, and they go out for Thai. It'll involve a whole different layer to iTunes, frankly-- and a whole new ID3 tag version and set of fields that probably only iTunes will support. Yeah, once all those fields are in place-- imagine having a separate browser column for each of the six-plus fields in Beethoven�s String Quartet no. 9 in C op.59 �Rasumovsky� no.3-- iTunes will make short work of drilling down to the level where you want to start your playback. But the visual representation will look markedly different from what we're used to. Probably what Apple's waiting for is for the music-buying market to make more of a determined shift to the digital realm and away from CDs, where classical music was never really at home anyway. In fact, every form of recording ever available has been miserable for classical-- only modern rock and pop and such, the genres popularized in the vinyl era, evolved under the influence of mass marketing and tuned themselves to match the medium. Classical never had anything but the live performance to define its structure. And it's only now, with on-demand digital downloads, that a careful distributor can recreate the experience of a live classical performance with a delivery mechanism that approximates what the composer might have had in mind. If Apple reaches the decision point where it concludes that there's good money to be made on a sufficiently-sized market segment that's interested in classical music downloads (I doubt it'd be infested with file-sharing scofflaws, but that's just a hunch), then they might get serious. But it won't be easy. Nobody wants to tackle this. Otherwise there'd be third-party shareware MP3 players specifically designed for classical music already floating around the download sites, and if there are any, they haven't crossed my radar. iTunes wasn't the first application of its kind; it leveraged the work that many independent developers did before Apple ever took an interest in Digital Hub stuff. And I suspect they'll want to see if public interest, as indicated by the windsock of where third-party development effort gets spent, will support a classical iTunes before they commit to productizing the idea.