Putting all my filed* music on to my iPad and exploring it with the “Genre” navigator reveals to me the following:

• Alternative & Punk: 43 songs
• Australian Pop**: 165 songs
• Australian Rock: 622 songs
• Classical: 136 “songs” (really movements)
• Classical Crossover: 25 songs
• Comedy: 56 songs
• Country: 80 songs
• Folk: 104 songs
• Holiday: 15 songs
• Jazz: 20 songs
• Latin: 52 songs
• Musical: 304 songs
• New Age: 135 songs
• Pop: 280 songs (non-Australian)
• R&B/Soul: 20 songs
• Rock: 1059 songs (non-Australian)
• Soundtrack: 544 songs
• Steampunk***: 13 songs
• Swing: 46 songs
• World: 42 songs

I still have a bunch of CDs to rip which will add stuff, mostly in the Soundtrack and Classical genres. I prioritised ripping popular music when I started the long process. The iPad (and iTunes) has these cool genre icons for most of these, but very annoyingly doesn’t have one for Musical. Nor Swing. (Nor Steampunk, but that’s kind of understandable.) It’d be nice if there was an easy way to add custom genre icons (of which there are lots), but apparently you need to dig through the guts of jailbroken code to do so, which isn’t my idea of fun.

* What’s the right word here? It’s not “digitised” because music on CDs I haven’t ripped is already digital. It’s not “ripped” because I’ve bought and downloaded many songs that aren’t ripped from CDs.

** Yes, I sub-genre-fy my pop and rock stuff into Australian and non-Australian. It helps split up two large categories into more manageable and searchable chunks.

*** Yes, Steampunk! I grabbed a free concept album. Some of it’s pretty good. “Clockwork Heart” in particular is brilliant.

I’ve been adding a lot of music to my digital collection recently, both by buying some stuff and ripping CDs I own. And so I run into the same old problems with the way iTunes sorts music. Actually it’s even worse on an iPod, because there’s no fancy GUI that you can customise with different columns and views and stuff. You’re stuck with selecting your songs by artist, by album name, or by composer. The problem is if I select by artist, part of the “B”s looks like:

• Mike Batt
• The Beatles
• Bee Gees
• Jodi Benson
• Berliner Philharmoniker

Okay, The Beatles and Bee Gees make sense. However, Berliner Philharmoniker is a symphony orchestra. The two albums performed by them that I currently have on my iPod are Holst’s “The Planets” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. I also have some Beethoven performed by other orchestras. However, the name “Beethoven” is not on my artist list, because he’s a composer, not a performer! If I want to find Beethoven stuff on this list, I need to look up all the different orchestras that perform his work. And each different orchestra has an unrelated bunch of works by different composers.

Who are Mike Batt and Jodi Benson, I hear you ask? (Okay, some of you probably know already.) Mike Batt composed the stage musical version of The Hunting of the Snark, based on Lewis Carroll’s poem. It was recorded by several artists, and Batt himself performs one song on the album. The rest of the album is scattered amongst several other artists’ names on the iPod artist list. Jodi Benson is the voice of Ariel, The Little Mermaid, who performs two songs on the movie soundtrack album. Again, the other songs on the album are scattered through the artist list.

So, on a quest to find all my Beethoven in one convenient location, I switch to selecting by composer, where the “B”s look a bit like this:

• Mike Batt
• Garry Beers, Tony Bruno, The Matrix, & Shelly Peiken
• Garry Beers, Andrew Farris, & Michael Hutchence
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• Chuck Berry
• Berry, Buck, Mills, & Stipe
• Berry & Willis

There are about a bazillion composers in this list. Sometimes a rock album will have songs by a dozen different composers! Beethoven is there, but he’s surrounded by thousands of composers I don’t care about, most of whom have one songwriting credit on some rock album. That’s no good.

And how do I find the entire Hunting of the Snark or Little Mermaid, should I wish to listen to the entire albums? I have to switch to a third view, the albums view. This view is not so bad, it does list all the albums as whole items, but the albums by any given artist (or composer) are all split up.

The solution to this? Well, there doesn’t seem to be a good solution. There are web pages and blog posts and forum questions all over the net with people asking how to sort their music better in iTunes. And there are no good answers. One common trick is to move the composer of classical works into the “Artist” field, so you see Beethoven in there with The Beatles and Bee Gees. But then the actual artist has to be deleted, or moved into some other field. It seems nobody has come up with a decent solution to this problem.

I was lamenting this fact at work today, when Andrew suggested that iTunes needs a “Primary” field, which is the primary sorting field you want to use for each album. It can be a radio button that selects one of either the artist, the composer, or the album name. For most stuff it defaults to the artist; for music marked as “Classical” in genre, it defaults to the composer; while for compilations, musicals, and soundtracks, it defaults to the album name. Then you can have a list that uses the Primary field to index all your music, and you’ll end up with a list that looks like:

• The Beatles
• Bee Gees
• Ludwig van Beethoven
• The Hunting of the Snark
• The Little Mermaid

Ta da! All your music sorted into one list in a sensible way! You can find everything by the most likely name you want to use, and with no superfluous data cluttering up the list.

How about it, Apple?

Falling in love with Eurythmics all over again.

I can’t believe it’s been 26 years since they released Be Yourself Tonight.

Most of the people I work with use headphones to listen to music while they work. At least the engineers, coders, and researchers do – I suspect the admin departments don’t so much. I’m the rare exception who doesn’t generally have headphones on while busy.

Occasionally though I will take in my iPod and headphones – usually when I have a deadline looming and need to work solidly on something without being interrupted. Because normally I don’t have headphones on, I can hear everything that happens around me, so it’s fairly easy to overhear something and get distracted. That’s what I try to tune out by using some music so I can concentrate more solidly on my work.

But, doing this the past couple of weeks while working on some end-of-year reports, I notice that listening to music doesn’t really help me much. I find it distracting. I’ve never really used music consistently while I’ve worked on anything. I didn’t use music while doing school homework or studying or writing essays or any of that.

I brought my iPod into work because I figured it would cut out external distractions, but I find the music at least as distracting. I can’t help singing along (silently), or humming the tune in my head, and once I notice what I’m doing, my attention is fully on the music and not on my work.

Music has never been something I have filling the void of silence in the background while I’m doing other stuff. I like silence while I’m concentrating on stuff. I absolutely cannot read a book, for example, with music on. Music, to me, is something you pay attention to. Something you put on when you have time to sit on the lounge and do nothing else but listen. Or jump around the house like a rock star singing along to all the lyrics.

I like music, I really love some of it. But I seldom listen to it, because I find it so attention-grabbing. I think I’ve always been this way, but I only really noticed it in the past week while trying to work on that report at work, and finding myself distracted by the music. Despite deliberately bringing in an iPod to use while working, I found myself only turning it on for an hour or two a day, and getting more work done when it’s off.

I don’t know what it is. Music pierces my consciousness. I like it so much, but I can’t have it around when I need to concentrate on other things.