An unbearably long, vaguely geeky post about music
This is the old Moorish town in Granada, as I saw it from atop an ancient tower at the Alhambra. Standing on a street corner in the center of the photo are two musicians, wee specks, playing guitar and violin. We could hear their lively tunes from where we were standing -- it felt like we were miles away -- and I wished I could capture the music to take home with me.
I like to make soundtracks. That sounds cheesy, but I do. Music is an important part of any experience to me and just as I take zillions of photos (1,098 on this last trip), I like to capture the atmosphere of a trip or a race or a special occasion with a lovingly planned playlist.
We had already arrived in Spain when I realized our collection of Spanish music was pitiful. All I had was some Andres Segovia classical guitar and a few Middle Eastern tracks that could pass for North African. I didn't even have any flamenco. Not nearly enough music for a nice collection of Spanish stuff to listen to in our hotel room or on the plane coming home.
But it was hard for me to figure that out, because anything in my iTunes library that might have been Spanish would have been lumped into the "World" genre. Unless it had been stuck into Classical or Folk. Or Rock or Electronica, if it were fairly contemporary. This too-broad genre classification becomes a problem when you have approximately 22,000 tracks to navigate in iTunes.
I download a lot of music from both the iTunes Music Store (when necessary) and eMusic (which I prefer, because the tracks are MP3 format and DRM-free and cheaper and it has way more indie cred). As I searched for flamenco, Spanish, Moroccan and Roma (gypsy) music, the limitations of both services became painfully obvious to me.
iTunes sucks if you're looking for anything specific within a genre. If you browse into the World music section, there is a subgenre for France, and for four different types of Celtic music, but the rest falls into a catch-all "Europe" subgenre. Not helpful at all. And if you search for Spain, you get only tracks with "Spain" in the artist, album, or track name. Again, practically useless. If you're lucky, there will be an iTunes Essentials playlist with Spain in the title, and it will showcase a few artists, and that will give you a head start.
eMusic is much better. If you browse into their International section, they have subcategories for both genre and region (and many more regions than iTunes has). There's "Spain" and there's also "Flamenco/Tango." (How and why a piece of music's country of origin is used as its genre is a whole separate frustrating discussion.)
But what I want to do on both sites is to be able to search for Spanish Roma music. Or Jewish music from Spain. Or Moroccan pop. I want to search for combined genres, and genres combined with countries. And I'd like to search my own iTunes library this way, too. I want to tag my music far beyond what the basic ID3 tags currently allow.
My own collection of international music is categorized badly. It's all lumped into "World" (with exceptions noted above) except for the Celtic. I have a lot of Celtic music, so I label it that way. But it would be nice to be able to note the Scottish, Irish, American and Spanish music separately so I can browse those subdivisions easily. Like when I need a playlist for my next Burns Night. And along the same lines, I'd like to be able to search for all of my rock, classical guitar, flamenco and Celtic music from Spain.
If anyone has any ideas on how to do this, please chime in. And cramming this data into the comments field is a kludge, so don't even suggest it.
I used to think that having a single subgenre field would fix this problem. But that's not nearly enough. It would be helpful if iTunes (or, more specifically, the ID3 standard) allowed for one-to-many track-to-genre relationships. Essentially, I'd like to be able to select multiple genres for a single track. I suppose having a country tag in addition to the genre would solve a few of these problems. But I don't think I'm going to see any of these changes any time soon, and it's a constant source of frustration.
In my search for Spanish music I discovered the delightful National Geographic World Music site. It's not flawless, but it's a very well-designed archive of traditional and contemporary music spanning regions and styles. If you're into international music, or if you'd like to take some music along on your next multicultural adventure, check it out.
November 20, 2007 9:04 PM
Nice work hitting several of my personal pet peeves in a single post.
I hate the designation World Music. I bought a Rachmaninoff piece the other day that was labelled "World". Meaningless and unhelpful.
Manual playlists are the only way to segregate the sub-types in iTunes that I am aware of. To me that is more trouble than it is worth.
And the single-category thing really bugs me too. Always has. I think of this as a difference between "categories" and "tagging", though that may be a semantic distinction only in my own head.
And while we're at it, how about tagging the artist field the same way? I'm sick of seeing XYZ listed separately from "XYZ w/ QWERTY" and "XYX feat ASDF".
P.S. Granada is great. Mountains, ocean, what else is needed (except perhaps an economic base)?
I barely scratched the surface with my tagging and classification pet peeves. And yeah, the "feat XYZ" in the artist field drives me nuts, too.
The manual playlists do seem like a lot of work (and a lot of playlists). If you put this info in the Comments field, you can't search for it in iTunes, but you can make smart playlists that look for it. But still, that's a lot of playlists.
Every single track of "international" music I've downloaded from eMusic has come labeled as Reggae. Makes me snicker every time.
Hey! Great view - I looked at it in detail and it's fabulous! Makes me want to go, really, particularly as it was 28°F for my ride home from class this evening!