Not useable metadata goodies, unfortunately, but still, this is good to hear. Apparently, Gracenote — maintainers of the CDDB (which iTunes and many other audio players use to provide track information upon insertion of a CD) have many additional possible data fields that can be used, according to this comment sent to Macintouch (emphasis mine):
Classical music is a difficult problem for almost all digital media players. The rock & pop music world is much different than the Classical world – the data fields are not sufficient for describing Classical music. The Gracenote database has support for Composer, Ensemble, Orchestra, Conductor, and many other fields, but many applications choose not to support these fields. So over the years, the fields have been overloaded in meaning and in data. We recently re-wrote our Classical music standards so that existing applications can begin to be more consistent. But more importantly, Gracenote’s next generation database will fully support Classical music metadata like no other database. We are working to spread these changes out to our application developers, including Apple. Our editorial team is working hard to standardize the existing Classical data as well, partnering with experts in the industry. Look for big changes in 2004 and 2005.
Hopefully these extra fields trickle down to iTunes in a (near) future release!
iTunes: “1st Premonition (DBX)” by Giannelli, Fred from the album Sound of Superstition, The Vol. 5 (1997, 6:08).