n3wblog tech commentary and observations from the early 21st century

iTunes does weird shit like that by times. I’m pretty tolerant; the thing’s gotta manage 3700+ artists in 106 genres in my case, and I’m really pushing the ap past what it’s meant to do (what, it’s not a full 78rpm cataloguing & discography system?), so there’s bound to be the occasional glitch.

It really only works when you’re picky about your tagging. Fortunately, I’m OCD. Nothing enters my library without proper artist, title & genre tags, and I’m constantly checking for duplicates. Huuuuuuge nerd.

Posted by Rob Hutten on 26 March 2007 @ 1pm

Yeah, you gotta be diligent with this stuff, no two ways about it. I apply a healthy dose of OCD to my library too yet still managed to screw up a misnamed band in this case. There are fringe cases, usually when I get something from someone else or off of the internet (Note to RIAA: I’m not stealing! There are valid examples of legally downloadable music for free on the internet, Google “Brad Sucks” if you don’t believe me) that doesn’t mesh with my schema. Then I have to go in and manually update my most recently added music. It’s a huge pain, but the payoffs are humongous.

3700 artists is monstrous. How big’s your collection these days? You mentioned the other day in IM that your collection’s pushing double your 20GB iPod but you must have a ton of one-offs in your library to have that many artists.

Also, given the explosive growth of digital music in the past decade, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect people to have collections with these kinds of numbers in them. We’re going to be on the large size (or, even, “plus-sized” if you will) of the spectrum, but iTunes should still be able to handle it.

(a note to apple developers, I actually expect that this particular bug is in the list pane that’s displaying the artists, and not necessarily in iTunes. That is just what my gut is telling me and I have to listen to it)

Posted by boolean on 26 March 2007 @ 2pm