When Itunes imports mp3s, it names them in a stupid way.

When itunes rips cds, it's default behavior is to name them:

artist name/album name/tracknumber songname.m4a

The information you want most is artist & songname.  But if you're looking at the file, the artist name is hidden two folders up.  That is dumb.  Why not use that wonderful invention - the filename?   For years the mp3 naming standard has been to include at least the artist and song name in the filename.  Storing the information in 3 seperate parts also breaks any application which uses filenames to share information.  For example, your eyes.

It also breaks sorting, because if you rip 10 albums you'll have 10 tracks named 01 - ~.mp3.  You will never be able to rearrange your directory structure again.

If you have only one mp3 by an artist, it's dumb to have to rely on 2 levels of folders to store info about it. 




Itunes also disregards ID3 tags.  It doesn't assign ID3 tags even when it knows all the info - instead it stores everything in it's own code as a comment in the ID3 tag  There's no possible reason to do this except to make itunes created mp3s not work in other programs that use the ID3 conventions.  So mp3s ripped with itunes contain no information outside of that program.

By default Itunes should:
1) name songs: "artist name - song name.mp3" or "artist name - album name - track number - song name.mp3"
2) fill in ID3 tags

Can not doing those two really fucking obvious things really be just an oversight?  No way.  They did it intentionally to make your life more difficult, and to not give you the freedom to ever switch away from itunes.  If you try to leave itunes and use another player, you'll be left with tons of ID3 tag-less, stupidly named, unsortable mp3s.

Do you like it when people intentionally inconvenience you in order to make more money?

How about when they give you something that is cool, but which has bad consequences when you try to stop using it?

It's just the same old bullshit - don't make things compatible with any other program, in hopes that it'll be too annoying for people to switch.  This sort of training people to be stupid prevents them from making advancements themselves.  People who only use itunes now have to rely on apple for all improvements - they can't make their own.

The conflict is between making general tools that are used because they genuinely help the user and making tools which do everything for the user, but also break if you try anything interesting.  Some people will use the specific tool and not realize what's happening until they're committed.  They'll know their dumbed down version of reality and will never be able to figure out what's really going on.  Their curiousity and creativity will be trained out of them.  On the other hand someone using general tools can gradually expand their understanding and improve their setup.  In a lot of ways UNIX or DOS users 15 years ago were way more powerful than even power windows users today.  Just getting a list of the filenames in a directory is a major chore for someone using windows... but it's trivial to anyone who knows DOS.

I use the program tag&rename to fix itunes named mp3s.  It's an awesome program.  It lets you either rename files according to the contents of their id3 tags, or fills in the id3 tags from the filename.  It's done in the right way.

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