CDDB is absolutely atrocious when it comes to classical music. It’s not that the albums aren’t there, but the track information is completely screwed up. The most common screw-up is using the “artist” field for the expression marking on the movement of, for example, a piano concerto. The net effect of which is to introduce 3-5 spurious artists into your mp3 library who have names like “II. Molto Adagio.” Now, maybe there’s a famous sackbut player named II Molto Adagio, but I doubt that he would be the priciple artist on Schoenberg’s piano concerto.

Normally it’s not such a big deal, but since the iPod doesn’t have a convenient search feature, scrolling through all the different movements while looking through the artists is a pain in the ass. It’s almost faster to type in all the album information by hand, but not quite. Damn you, CDDB.

The Duma wants to censor an opera called The Children of Rosenthal:

The opera tells a tale of a meeting in Moscow of clones created by a Russian scientist of five great classical composers — Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Verdi.

I dunno about you, but that sounds like a hilarious premise. And it’ll be all avante-garde too — even better!