or is it just me? Too mild for The Pit, but I’m reeling from the one-two punch of iTunes and the CDDB, and I need to have a rant.
I’m in the midst of ripping some of my CDs to iTunes, and the following things have been going wrong or ticked me off -
On one of its updates, iTunes reset the format in which it stores music from ‘lossless’ to ‘AAC’. I don’t know if I have time to re-rip the 20 or so albums I ripped in the crappy format before I go away for a month. Grr.
I basically have to re-enter all the information that it downloads from the CDDB. Am I the only one who still files everything by last name of composer, last name of band leader, but leave band names intact? The following list is the way I want it -
Johnny Hartman
Joseph Haydn
Terra Hazelton
Jeff Healey
Jimi Hendrix
Jethro Tull
so I have to re-enter the names of every artist.
Then there’s the charming problem of what artist means - the name of the composer is how I want to file classical music, not the performer. I don’t want to have to look for my Haydn under Alfred Brendel, Amadeus Quartet, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (and that’s not sorted properly, either!!!) I want it all under ‘Haydn’, and then filed under Piano Sonata, String Quartet, Symphony.
Which brings me to the stupidity of the names of the tracks. If it were done properly from the start, I’d know the composer’s name and the artists’ names from the other fields; I don’t need them in the name of the piece. I’d like the name of the piece to tell me something useful in the first 4 words, like what the bloody piece is!
Then I discovered that iTunes will only sort by the first ‘word’ of the name, so that for some baffling reason, 45th Symphony came between the 42nd Piano Sonata and the 48th Piano Sonata, with the 81st Symphony trailing after. WTF!?!?? Now, after renaming them all once, I have to go back and rename them again, then delete all the old smart playlists (Name Contains 48th Piano Sonata, H XVI/48 in C Major so it gets both movements; the smart playlist isn’t smart enough to figure out that you mean the same piece when you change the name to Piano Sonata 48, H XVI/48 in C Major so you get an empty playlist…)
Genre has always pissed me off, but in iTunes/CDDB it is at its dumbest. The genre is either wrong or redundant; if you can’t tell that Freddie Hubbard is Jazz, you don’t deserve the privilege of listening to him.
And where, pray tell, does one go to find out about sidemen? Is this one of the J. J. Johnson recordings where Kenny Clarke played, or is this from the day that Art Blakey played? Oh, I need to go to Wikipedia to find that out. Why, then, can I not just GO TO WIKIPEDIA FROM THE BLOODY START? WHY MUST I DEAL WITH THE INACCURATE LEGACY OF A THOUSAND MONKEYS?
Why is the IMDB so fantastic at allowing one to follow the career of someone who has never had more than six lines in any one of 200 films, and yet the CDDB can’t tell me if the bass player is Doug Watkins or Reggie Workman?
I’m sorry; I feel much better now. I’m much less likely to dismember the next person on the street who ticks me off. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
And now to tackle those complete Fauré, Poulenc and Debussy song collections, where each piece was recorded by a different singer and pianist, and where I’ll have to cut and paste every name to get the accents right, and where the Opus numbers are off by three for the entire third disc, and where each of the four discs has a slightly different name… I feel that tic in my cheek coming back.