Updating iTunes Work and Movement fields easily with SongKong

iTunes now supports movements and works for Classical music but does not provide any way to automatically add data to these fields. So if you are using iTunes as an editor it becomes very time consuming to add this new data.

The screencast below is a tutorial on the Mac, and the tutorial in this blog post is for Windows, steps are the same for both. 

 

Adding Only Works and Movements for iTunes

Luckily both SongKong and Jaikoz can now add this data for you totally automatically. This guide explains how this works with SongKong. In this walkthrough we are going to limit SongKong to only update the Work related fields. But of course it can be used to identify songs and add the full set of metadata   

• For the purpose of this guide I have created an iTunes database consisting of just three albums that we are going to update in one go with SongKong. Two albums are classical music album that we know to contain works and movements and one regular rock album. I have enabled the Movement, Work and Movement No columns in the Song View, and they are currently empty of data. 
  
• And the Album view does not look any different then it would for a Pop/Rock album
  
• Lets start SongKong and select your music folder.
  
• Start Fix Songs and ensure that Save Changes to iTunes on the Basic tab is enabled. 
  
• Go the Format tab, select Never Modify add add all fields to the Selected Fields list except Work, Movement, Movement No and Movement Total so it looks like the screenshot below and select OK
  
• Now lets go to the Classical tab, the defaults are tuned for iTunes. Most notably if you have files in the AIF or MP3 format you really need Copy Work to Grouping field to be set to MP3 and AIF (iTunes)
  
• Now press Start and wait for the identification and iTunes update to complete. 
• If we look at the report that is created we can see that the Movement and Work fields have been added for the Classical releases.
  
  
  
• Lets go over to iTunes, we can now see that the movement and work data has been added.
  
• But if we go the Album View the work and movement data is still not displayed.
• Now this is because of the one manual step potentially required. Sometimes we need to go back to the Songs View and sort by Work, then select all the songs that have a value for work, and select Get Info
  
• Now check the new Use Work and Movement option
  
  
  
  
  
• If we now go back to the Album View and look at these albums we see songs are now grouped by Work (e.g Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 80) and therefore can use the short Movement Name instead of the the longer Song Title (e.g III Andante instead of Sonata for violin & piano No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80: Andante). iTunes also derives a Movement No using Roman numeral notation derived from the Movement No
  
  
  
  
   
• For songs already added to iTunes before these new options were introduced into iTunes the Use Work and Movement option may need checking. For songs added since iTunes 12.5 it seems this option is checked by default so this extra step may not be necessary.

The reason we matched to three albums, was to show that the manual step can be applied to all albums with works in a single step, it doesn't have to be applied one album at a time   

So as you can see we can easily use SongKong to identify classical music and the work and grouping metadata, the process is very similar for Jaikoz.

And you can use an identical method on OSX and Windows.

All the new work and movement metadata is stored in the file themselves so you can also run SongKong without enabling the Save to iTunes  option. Then at a later date select all the files in iTunes and use Get Info to update with any changes made by SongKong