Composer

Classical music is composer centric.
Pop music is not (if you listen to a couple of compositions you know why).
When I started ripping my CDs in 2007 this created all kind of problems.

Most of the time the composer tag was not populated.
The composer was stored in the Artists tag and who performed this piece was anybody’s guess.
Today the support of the composer tag is much better.

Spelling is still a problem.
According to the pop-model it is Ludwig van Beethoven or simply Beethoven most of the time.
In classical we use Beethoven, Ludwig van.

Best practice when doing bulk ripping is simply to accept the values as they come.
Later you can use the tree view to inspect the different spellings and use drag/drop to unify.

The tree view is also an excellent place to correct.
As you can see, I added the year of birth/death.
A big manual job. Today I use MusiCHI to generate the right information.

Timeline

The years can be used to generate a timeline ordering the composers by their birth year.

1- Create a calculated field in the library.

The trick is this Regex
Regex([Composer],/#(\d*\d)#/,-1) [R1] [R2]
It simply scans for a series of numbers.
By making it a calculated field it is not stored as a tag and will adept itself the moment a year is entered or edited.

2 - Make a custom sort using Composers by birthday