Tweaking the iOS Music app for the Classical Listener

Setup so that a tap on album art displays track info

The best way to display full track title and artist info is through a Doug Adams script called: Selected Tags to Lyrics. After using the script and syncing your iPhone, the track and artist info is displayed just by tapping the album cover !

Apple has neglected the "Classical" music listener from the start  - especially in iOS.

On the iPhone Music app, most of the screen is taken up by the album image.  The track progress bar is so this as to be almost invisible.  The track name is below and underneath that is the artist name displayed in a tiny font.   Both these lines scroll and pause periodically making them harder to read and requiring a significant wait before you get the info you need.

iOS 9.2 release mentions an upgrade to Classical Music browsing which fails to address the key issue: Ability to display the Track name, Artist (and optionally, the Album name) in a stable, good size font.

Applescript: Selected Tags to Lyrics

The script is very simple to install (just unzip and place in your itunes scripts folder and it is immediately active.  When installed, you just select one or a thousand tracks and ....

You select which fields you want copied to the lyrics filed of the track:

I only want the Name and Artist, but many would want the Album name as well.

Then the script asks if you want to prepend (place at start) of existing lyrics, or replace.

As I have some opera tracks with librettos that I want to keep, and other tracks with notes, I always choose Prepend for safety.  (When I manually add lyrics, I also add the word "lyrics" to the grouping tag so that I can select or avoid selecting these tracks in future.)

Now, sync you iPhone and open the Music App to enjoy easy access to a static large display of the track and artist info just by tapping the album cover !

   

PS Doug provides these scripts free but asks for a donation to keep him working and feeling appreciated. 

See also: Tracksift 2 - Creates playlist from selected tracks where they have no lyrics and many other options.