I have a lot of stuff in my iTunes library that doesn’t easily fit in one tag. For example, I mentioned in a Macworld article about tagging in iTunes, published today, that there’s an album by Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane which poses problems for tagging. Which artist do you use? Thelonius Monk, The Thelonius Monk Quartet, or Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane? If you’re a Monk fan, but not a Coltrane fan, you might want one of those. But what if you’re a die-hard Coltrane fan? Perhaps you want to say John Coltrane with the Thelonious Monk Quartet.
And that’s the problem: creating artists with multiple names is messy. It would make a lot more sense to be able to apply multiple artists; in this case, one Artist tag would be Thelonious Monk, and another would be John Coltrane.
This would be especially useful with classical music. For any opera, you have the following artists:
- The orchestra
- The conductor
- Perhaps a choir
- Each of the solo singers, generally four or more
So, you may tag an album – such as a recording of Berlioz’s Les Troyens available from the iTunes Store – with the following “Artist”: Berit Lindholm, Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Jon Vickers, Josephine Veasey, Sir Colin Davis & Wandsworth School Boys Choir. Now, that’s a very long artist tag, and it’s one that’s hard to read in iTunes; even more so on the iOS Music app.
But what we should be able to do is have one tag for Sir Colin Davis, another for the Covent Garden [Orchestra?], another for Jon Vickers, etc. I should be able to click on any of those individuals and find all the music they’ve recorded that’s in my iTunes library; I shouldn’t have to perform a search to find them.
And going back to Jazz, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to list as Artist each of the sidemen on albums? So you can not only have Miles Davis as Artist for Kind of Blue, but also John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the others?
Movies and TV shows would benefit from this too: you could add the names of actors and directors to the Artist tag.
What about genres? I’d love to have more variables there as well. How about Baroque Sacred Vocal; or Romantic Opera; or Contemporary Piano. All of those would be possible if the Genre field allowed multiple entries.
For this to work, there would have to be a token system, where keywords would show up as they do in Finder tags; see the screenshot to the left. It’s not a big deal to add that to iTunes, though it would require a new paradigm. Perhaps there could be a setting for users to choose whether to use basic or extended tags?
Lots of users would like to see this feature in iTunes. Many don’t care, and they could ignore it. But those of us with big media libraries would be delighted to see it.