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Stupid Intelligent Software

Okay, my first legit gripe with the Switch came up today.

In the past few days, I've been methodically going through my CD collection, re-encoding them due to the iTunes debacle. Now, I put the blame on that incident on the RIAA rather than Apple because I could clearly see the hand behind the puppet.

But my new gripe with iTunes puts the onus solely on Apple.

I happen to like my mp3 collection filenames in the "Artist - Song Title.mp3" format. On the Windows side of things, this seems to be a fairly common way to name an mp3 file, and it's the way I've done it since I started encoding mp3 files back in 1997. iTunes imposes a directory structure based organization, which is useful if you know that the files will never be taken out of the context of that directory structure. I don't have that kind of faith in myself, in technology, and in future standards. I want the artist and song right on the filename. So instead of letting iTunes maintain its own library structure, I take the files out and rename them (thank goodness for batch prepend in File Buddy), and put them into one big directory.

All this would be quite enough trouble to have to go through to do things my way. But to make it even more annoying, Apple renames the ID3 "Title" field when you rename the song. I haven't pinned down if this happens within the Finder, iTunes, or (Heaven forbid) HFS+. But I do know that whether I rename the songs in File Buddy or in the Finder, the next time I pull up iTunes, the Title field will have changed.

Now here's the thing. At this point, I can rename the ID3 tag, and as long as I don't mess with the file any further, neither will Apple. So in the end, I do get what I want... but it makes an already tedious process twice so.

But then what's even more frustrating is that there doesn't appear to be any way to remove this behavior. And what's even more more frustrating is that things are being done to my files without my consent. This is just NOT right.

Look, I am all for intelligent software. When automation is done right, it's awesome. I love it when my computer anticipates what I want, asks me if it's okay to do it, and then does it. What I absolutely HATE is when my computer (or hell, anybody, for that matter) tries to guess what I want, and then does it without teling me. This is really bad. Really, really bad. I cannot stress how bad this is.

If anybody out there at Apple reads this, PLEASE do something about this. I am really losing faith in iTunes big time after these two, in my opinion, HUGE setbacks.

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Comments

Although I understand the desire not to have those subdirectories, I would maintain the directory structure of iTunes. If you decide to go with some form of MP3 audio server to your stereo like Tivo Home Media Option or several of the others, they are not smart enough to recognize MP3 tags and rely on the directory structure...