iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.
Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.
Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for classical music.
I pretty aggressively re-tag my classical collection, since AFAIK there's no online store or CD database which comes close to getting the information right on a consistent basis.
So, for example, right now I'm listening to the first movement of Dvořák's cello concerto; I've tagged the track as follows:
When I bought the CD years ago, of course, CDDB filled in the "artist" as "Antonin Dvorak".
Keeping all the metadata correct has been a royal pain, but worth it in terms of being able to quickly find things and generate playlists keying off things like the composer field.
As an aside, I notice that Amazon's MP3 download page for the above recording does actually seem to display the right data for at least some fields -- I don't plan to buy it again to find out whether they got the whole thing right, though. And sometimes iTunes gets the "grouping" field right for multi-movement works, though not with enough frequency to avoid the need for lots of manual re-tagging.
You have that. There is a tag field for composer. You can add a column for composers by right clicking (option click, I assume) the column headers, then drag and drop into the correct order.
I expect classical music is probably always tagged badly, which is why the composer ends up in the artist field. Also, am I supposed to enter for Radiohead: Johnny Greenwood, Thom York, et al. or, just Radiohead? I tunes tagging ability is weak in some places. Also it doesn't help when you have a non-ipod and want to remove some songs and replace with others.
There is a field for "Composer". You can add the column to any view though "View -> View Options (Cmd-J on a Mac)". The Grid view can also be sorted by composer.
Movements are often indicated by the "Grouping" column, or kept together my joining the tracks from a CD on import by selecting the tracks then "Advanced -> Join CD Tracks".
Sub-optimal, I know, but there isn't much more an application can do given the way CD metadata works.
iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.
Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.
Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for classical music.