Display composer information on the iPod?

April 2, 2008 4:57 PM

How can I get my iPod to display the composer tag?

About half of the music on my iPod consists of classical music, and because I sometimes pick up artist compilations and some weird stuff that I didn't perform back in High School, sometimes I don't know my Bach from my Haydn, much less the names associated with the Kronos album I picked up last week. So I click on my iPod, and find that I can get just about all the information about a song except for the composer.

Is there a way to hack the iPod to show composer information? And if that fails, I notice that I can see podcast notes as a text document by clicking the select button a few times is there a way that I can add that information (perhaps using an applescript?). Would that be the comments or lyrics field?

posted by KirkJobSluder to technology (5 answers total)

I don't think there is a way. With classical music, it's preferable to just enter the composer's name in the "artist" field, since the composer is the most important person involved in the music. I'm much more interested in browsing through "Beethoven," "Mozart," etc., than "Pollini," "Brendel," etc.
posted by Jaltcoh at 5:40 PM on April 2, 2008

I concur with Jaltcoh.

Hardly a hack, but but could you just put the composer info in the song title field (after the title)?
posted by Utilitaritron at 6:03 PM on April 2, 2008

If you don't want to have to go through tons of tracks to re-do the artists, you could easily create playlists by composer: a playlist of all your Haydn works, one of all your Bach, etc. Or do playlists by era or style - Baroque, Romantic, Minimalist, whatever you listen to.
posted by bassjump at 6:47 PM on April 2, 2008

Make the composer the Artist, and make the performer the Album Artist. You may or may not have to check the "Is Compilation Field", but what this will yield you is whole albums by the same performer accessible through the Album field with each Artist displaying the original composer.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:20 PM on April 2, 2008

I installed Rockbox in part so I could display the Composer field, but that's an extreme solution.
posted by dfan at 7:53 AM on April 3, 2008