Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday July 05 2015, @10:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-apple-can-do-no-wrong dept.

According to Forbes, Apple Music Could Wreck Your iTunes Library:

At its heart, Apple Music is a simple proposition. For your monthly subscription fee, Apple will offer you access to a library of over 30 million tracks. You can listen, explore, and discover to your heart's content, and you can take that music with you wherever you go. But subscribing to Apple Music and making full use of the streaming service requires a sacrifice.

You have to hand over control of your iTunes music library to Apple and hope that Cupertino's arrogance will preserve your music collection.

[...] The issue that is upsetting many Apple users is that moment when you turn on iCloud Music for the first time and your tracks are synced to the cloud. Apple's methodology on this is not clear, but from reports and feedback from users across the internet, it appears that Apple's view of metadata and what the 'correct' track is, will take precedence over your custom edits.

The Verge's Chris Welch highlights his preference of listening to early tracks from The Beatles in mono format (just as they were recorded) rather than the automatic matching services' preferences for stereo versions. Support forums talk of collections approaching 20,00 songs becoming corrupted and full of duplicate entries, incorrect meta-data overwriting current entries, album art switched out to show the wrong albums, and more stories of personal pain. 


Original Submission

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:33AM

    and yes I do have wifi, the wifi access point ethernets to an ancient imac, it uses internet connection sharing to route the dialup to the access point.

    So, on my macbook pro, I enable Apple Music just for grins and it starts synching over dialup.

    I have many other reasons to boycott apple music so I won't experience this problem.

    What really pissed me off was when I backed up my macbook pro, wiped the drive, installed a newever version of osx on it, restored my itunes folder and it lost all my playlists.

    Took a while to figure out: they are stored in CoreData, a complex, obfuscated and undocumented format. To enhance vendor lock-in, Apple regularly revised the format just in case someone might reverse engineer it.

    That MacBook Pro just dropped dead. My next notebook computer will come preinstalled with Linux. I haven't selected the vendor yet, but for sure, it will come preinstalled with linux, with all open-source drivers.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Sunday July 05 2015, @01:09PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday July 05 2015, @01:09PM (#205275)

      Apparently Apple music is also adding DRM to tracks you rip from your own CDs, etc, for some extra crispy lock-in goodness.

      I'm pretty happy with my System76 machine, btw.

      • (Score: 5, Informative) by zafiro17 on Sunday July 05 2015, @01:21PM

        by zafiro17 (234) on Sunday July 05 2015, @01:21PM (#205279) Homepage

        I truly fail to understand why the gum-chewing masses have suddenly decided they want something like this. Why pay month after month for music that disappears as soon as you stop paying?

        Clearly I'm suddenly in the minority (although potentially not, here on Soylent) for wanting access to my music, no DRM on it, and the right to back it up etc. as I please. I paid for an app that stripped the DRM from music I bought in the early days, and my local network server now has a full repository of music owned by my family, sorted and organized in ways I like (I've got a folder of some obscure stuff I don't want to lose but also don't want on my listening devices, for example). So when my daughter wants some track on her ipod, you know what I do? I give it to her. No, she doesn't purchase and download a copy through her own itunes account. Maybe that's anathema to the business interests these days, but fuck them - I think it's fair use.

        As for Apple mucking up your system, they did a hell of a job with iphoto. Iphoto used to be a decent photo organizer until one day they got tired of people poking around the internals, and sealed off the iphoto directory into a monolithic file (tech note: it's still actually a directory and you can get into it, just not using classic file browser tools). That sounds like good stuff until you realize that any little change to your photos now require you to resync or re-backup the entire multi-gigabyte beast now (unless you use Apple's own backup mechanism, which can sync only the minute, internal change). When Microsoft did this kind of stuff we called it bullshit. In desperation, I finally deprecated iphoto and went back to a tree of file folders. On Linux/BSD, digikam works with it perfectly well. And on Mac there's an app called Lyn that does well enough. Point is: Apple arrogance took a perfectly well-written and functional app and changed it in a way that made it unusable to any but Apple's file tools. Consider me pissed off about it.

        On that basis, they're not going to get anywhere near my itunes directory. And if it becomes obligatory somehow I am going to give up on itunes. Damn it apple, you still make great hardware, but the great software that used to accompany it is slowly turning into crap. Knock it off - I have fewer and fewer reasons to buy your stuff anymore.

        --
        Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:55PM

          by digitalaudiorock (688) on Sunday July 05 2015, @02:55PM (#205292) Journal

          Clearly I'm suddenly in the minority (although potentially not, here on Soylent) for wanting access to my music, no DRM on it, and the right to back it up etc. as I please.

          Same here, which is why I still prefer buying/ripping CDs.

          Both the music and movie industries (especially the latter) are hell bent against making it easy (or even possible legally) for you to own and play the content on whatever device you have, free of DRM, because their business model effectively becomes an honor system. Ironically they seem to be the only ones who haven't figured out that's exactly what they already have.

        • (Score: 4, Informative) by theluggage on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:59PM

          by theluggage (1797) on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:59PM (#205302)

          and sealed off the iphoto directory into a monolithic file (tech note: it's still actually a directory and you can get into it, just not using classic file browser tools).

          So in other words, it isn't a monolithic file - its just an app bundle - and getting into it in the "classic file browser tools" is a simple matter of ctrl-click or right-click and "show package contents": just enough to stop ignorant users getting in and screwing up the directory structure and metadata, without stopping anybody with a clue from getting at the original jpg files (iPhoto even maintains an .xml copy of the metadata file that 3rd-party utilities can read). Anything running at "Unix" level (e.g. rsync) just sees a directory, so there's absolutely no reason why a backup utility needs to back it up as a monolithic blob.

          Likewise with GP's complaint - iTunes is a very long way from perfect, but the way its stores "local" music is totally transparent and it maintains an .xml file (in an easily deducible format) mirroring most of the metadata and playlist info.

          Where I do agree with you is in the way you throw all of this away when you move to Apple's 'cloud' option - I gave up on iCloud ages ago because it was so "all or nothing". There's a place for streaming and a place for purchase (usually after you've streamed an album a couple of times and decided its a keeper) and I'd really prefer to keep a firewall between the two models.

        • (Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:09PM

          by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:09PM (#205305)
          I subscribe to Rhapsody because it's like Netflix for music. I'm not sure why that's so unappealing to you but I like to explore, especially the comedy albums.
          --
          🏳️‍🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️‍🌈
        • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:46PM

          by Gaaark (41) on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:46PM (#205314) Journal

          I truly fail to understand why the gum-chewing masses have suddenly decided they want something like this. Why pay month after month for music that disappears as soon as you stop paying?

          Same with Windows... at my work, the managers computer just got 'upgraded' to Windows 7, locked down. It can do nothing that couldn't do better with linux (we are even running linux programs (moved from SCO unix, lol) in an emulated environment!!!): our server is running linux with support, so why not just upgrade to linux with support if you are worried about support.

          All of the computers are now running Windows 7, when only the accountant needs it due to software (yes, I know it could be running in an emulator/virtual environment under linux, but don't tell me).

          We switched from Outlook to gmail, from Explorer to Chrome/Firefox. Then we upgrade to Widows 7?
            I. Just. Don't. Get. It. (but Microsoft did... the $$ anyways).

          "Cut your hours and customer support.... so we can hand money off to Microsoftie" just doesn't cut it with me. My 2 pennies.

          --
          --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06 2015, @11:57AM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 06 2015, @11:57AM (#205574)

          Why pay month after month for music that disappears as soon as you stop paying?

          I'm not a big music listener, but observing my kids and other people, "most folks" especially top40 types will not listen to or care about anything once its no longer new.

          That classic collection of Metallica CDs that I haven't listened to in approaching 20 years is extremely collector-ish behavior, but 99 out of 100 only want to hear the very latest Katy Perry or Taylor Swift song and by the end of the summer when its no longer the very latest, eh, something formulaic and new will be the only thing they listen to.

          Looking at the parody that is the Lego "everything is awesome" song, there really is no point in owning something that has zero long term value. Let me dredge the waters for a minute... How much would you pay for a copy of the Bangles Manic Monday from '86? Nothing you say? Wouldn't even want it cluttering up the collection such that owning it would have negative value? Well then streaming it would be the perfect solution.

          I guess another way to put it, is broadcast radio suicided by having only one major provider nationally pushing only hyper limited payola genre generally not matching what the listening public wants to hear anyway, aside from being 1/3 commercials, 1/3 DJ babble, and only 1/3 actual music, so streaming took the place of dead broadcast radio. Its like 80s FM, but with modern music and over the internet, kind of.

          • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 06 2015, @04:59PM

            by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday July 06 2015, @04:59PM (#205727) Homepage
            Perhaps the reality is that the Bangles song was actually worthless all along.

            I don't see anyone wearing bangles t-shirts walking around town. The kind of shit I listen to, contemporary to the Bangles or predating them by a decade or more, I still see t-shirts of. That implies there is still more of a market for my kind of shit than the Bangles.
            --
            Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
            • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06 2015, @05:12PM

              by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 06 2015, @05:12PM (#205732)

              More relevant long term, but in the short term top forty formula filler rules the music industry. In 30 years nobody will be listening to Taylor Swift and most people won't remember who she is without some prompting, but she sold 40 million albums, whatever an "album" means in an itunes economy, and in 30 years it'll be some new hot young woman selling 40 million "albums" or whatever. Also see madonna, katy perry, britney spears, ...

              • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday July 06 2015, @06:03PM

                by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Monday July 06 2015, @06:03PM (#205765) Homepage
                Indeed. Don't get me wrong, I do not underestimate the size of the extract-money-from-stupid-teenagers market. And lest someone misinterprets my stance, huge quantities of pop in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was cookie-cutter lowest-common-denominator shit too. Of course, we're more inclined to forget the immemorable stuff.

                Fact: if you play a Rick Astley ballad from an LP at 45 RPM (I know I'm speaking a foreign language to some people now), it sounds indistinguishable from a Kylie Minogue bubble-gum-pop song played at normal speed, and if you play a Kylie Minogue single at 33 RPM, and ignore the lyrics, it sounds indistinguishable from Rick Astley. I know this to be a fact because of science - I challenged my g/f at the time to do the experiment, and we both heard it with our own ears. Even after that, she refused to accept that she was just buying shit pooped out by a cynical andouillette machine. We weren't together long. Not long, but still too long.
                --
                Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @11:49AM (#205262)

    They will all keep using Apple stuff because it's easier to whine a bit and then sync to the next cloud rather than terminating this abusive relationship.

    Sad but true.

    • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:15PM

      Not long after we started dating, a former girlfriend was receiving text messages from "a friend" who alternately professed his undying love for her, then threatening to kill her or himself if she failed to return his affection.

      After a little while I realized that everytime I asked to visit, she would invite me, then later cancel because something came up. This went on for quite a long time until I caught a clue, raced over to her home and her stalker answered the door.

      Later he and I spoke on the phone. He refused to let me speak to her. I said put her on the phone or I will have the police kick in your door.

      Ten minutes later: "I'm OK Mike, don't worry about me."

      Three days later I call 9-1-1 again. Dispatcher says "We know that address". The cop that actually turns up complains that they are busy and don't have time for this. I point out that when this right chap refused to leave her home, my (now) ex-girlfriend punched him so hard she raised a big purple welt on her knuckle.

      "We will arrest her then, for assault."

      Unclear On The Concept.

      Later that evening: "They're lovebirds. Leave them alone or I'll throw you in jail."

      Eventually she tossed him out for good. I visit her, ask why she did so.

      "Mark had problems."

      Mark had problems, eh wot? That man is a serial killer of I am a monkey's uncle.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:26PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:26PM (#205269) Journal

    The "free downloadz" bay doesn't have these kind of upgrade or meta data problems.. :P

  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by number6 on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:36PM

    by number6 (1831) on Sunday July 05 2015, @12:36PM (#205272) Journal

    ______________________________________________________________________________
    __https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/08/11/1741221
    __by number6 (1831) on Tuesday August 12 2014, @03:50PM (#80560) Journal

    Recorded music is much more enjoyable and profound when I am not exposed to it all the time;
    I only listen to music at home, or as background in a shop when I am out and about, or in a gym.

    I never carry portable media playing devices on my person; I do not own anything like that. I find that the sounds of the banal and the rhythms of nature and the environment to be a form of music too, and tuning in to these things is a much more sublime experience than detaching from the world at the click of a finger via manufactured consumption devices.

    I have a pretty awseome listening setup at home and I get a very detailed, intimate and powerful listening experience no matter what genre of music I play (with a little bit of manual volume twiddling of the amps). The main thing for me is that the dynamic range be as good as possible; regardless of genre, if the music sounds brickwalled and hyper-compressed, I just cannot listen to it; it irritates me; all this unlistenable music-without-provenance being distributed in the mass market today...most of it is an unlistenable joke! you can still find 'listenable' popular music, but you need go underground and in far corners of the internet to find it. Classical and Jazz music are an exception; always produced and engineered properly with serious listening aesthetics in mind.

    My opinion on this research that music can invoke subliminal and poweful forces in listeners -- this is not a surprising fact to me; in fact I would say that my previous statements are more important to experiencing 'Perceptual and Behavioral Consequences of Powerful Music' than the research in the article.

    --

    At home, my computer room cum bedroom cum listening room is small with great acoustics giving me a super intimate, detailed and powerful listen. I have no conventional furniture; I sleep on a padded blanket in one corner of the room, this is also my sitting space for using the computer; the blanket gets pushed out of the way and is replaced by pillows. I sit in the corner facing the opposite corner of the room. The monitors are on a make-shift wooden top propped up by bricks to my required height (roughly 10 inches).

    Going further away from me to the other corner... directly behind the computer monitors is another make-shift table for my two amplifiers and a pair of nearfield speakers, these are roughly 1 yard away from my face, they are propped higher than the computer monitors using two milk crates and bricks and a scrap piece of wood for the top. I can easily reach forward and adjust the amplifier controls.

    At the other end of the room I have two 'Manfrotto Autopole' (Spring Loaded Floor-to-Ceiling Poles) placed at a distance along the two walls which meet the furthest corner of the room. I have a speaker hanging off each of these poles, as high as possible and pointing down towards me in the corner. The speakers are connected to the poles using climbing ropes and fancy knotting techniques.

    I play music in a 2+2 stereo fashion. The computer output signal is split to two and feeds two identical amplifiers. The main sound comes from the far speakers on the poles. I adjust the nearfield speaker volumes just so they add an intimate close-range filling effect without overpowering my sensation of the far speakers. The far speakers are big boxes and have got ballsy drivers and powerful dynamics. The nearfield speakers are of a bookshelf type.

    And when I am not in this room....I have no interest in joining the 'music consumption addict' club.
    ______________________________________________________________________________

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:59PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @03:59PM (#205301)

    HA HA!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:01PM (#205303)

    Well at least it is not like MS Media Player which just straight up corrupts MP3s that have the TXXX tag in them. A bug reported in 2009 is still there even in the win 10 preview. I even reported the bug with a video on how exactly to do it and a detailed step by step report. If you do not have the TXXX tags in your mp3s you are 'ok'. You usually pick them up if you used picard.

    I think I am the only person that likes actually media player. But I can not let it anywhere near my mp3 files.

    That would pretty much tick me off though. I have spent *years* getting those tags right. Never liked the way iTunes was laid out. Had some good luck with media monkey though.

  • (Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:37PM

    by mendax (2840) on Sunday July 05 2015, @04:37PM (#205312)

    You know, I have 90 gb of MP3s, nearly all of which are ripped CD's I own. The last thing I want is to lose them again. I lost the entire collection due to some foolishness on my part (let's call a spade a spade--a lack of a backup) and ended up having to spend a "very long time" ripping all the disks once again. Today, the collection is backed up on two flash drives and stored in my safe... AND I WILL BE DAMNED IF APPLE OR ANYONE ELSE IS GOING TO FUCK WITH IT. What Apple does with its new music service is essentially fucking with it. No, thank you!

    --
    It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @05:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 05 2015, @05:54PM (#205332)

    ah yes!
    1) magnets
    2)electricity
    3) sound waves
    4) ...
    5) Profit!!!

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by blackhawk on Sunday July 05 2015, @06:56PM

    by blackhawk (5275) on Sunday July 05 2015, @06:56PM (#205344)

    I've come full circle, from the very early days of encoding my own music from CDRIPs back when MP3 was still experimental (and often went very wrong). Well, not on the ripping part, I still do that, just on the software. I used to favour WinAmp, then at some point iTunes just barely overtook it. Then, iTunes slowly become the bloated sack of crap they always intended. Although they eventually gave up on DRM for music I got burned bad when I weighed up the cost and bought + DLed a series using iTunes only to find it was crippled beyond reason. Thankfully reverting to old software and a cracker broke the DRM for the small amount of stuff I bought. I then deleted iTunes and looked around for alternatives. WinAmp was still suckful.

    I found a very good software set though in https://dbpoweramp.com/ [dbpoweramp.com] It can "perfect" rip your CDs (mine stretched back up to 25 years ago, with mold and scratches) using an online database, provide graphics, track listings from multiple sources (and ability to select / correct) and encoding to multiple formats at once. All without an ounce of shitty DRM or conceits about formats.

    It cost $50 but now my entire collection is ripped to FLAC and MP3 / M4A at the settings I like with full metadata.

    I usually just play it via KODI, or a burnt CD in my car or let it sync the M4A files to my iPod. My amp is happy to play the FLAC for me over my DLNA server too...so, night night, Apple!

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday July 05 2015, @07:52PM

    by frojack (1554) on Sunday July 05 2015, @07:52PM (#205356) Journal

    Google Music (available free on any android, mac or windows, or Linux) is the same sort of cloud storage idea as Apple.

    Load your music once, and have your entire collection available anywhere on any device. You can always download your entire collection to your computer/NAS, (which wise people do occasionally).

    I buy or rip all of my music. I buy from several sources, but the download directory is always to the Google Music Upload directory, as is the rip target directory. So everything ends up in my Google Music. Even my old Itunes account went up there without a complaint, although I did pass some of it through a DRM removal process. I stopped doing any business with Apple a long time ago.

    Google Music (and I'm guessing Apple as well) are using massive data de-duplication on your music. If I upload an obscure track, I may have the only copy on their system, and it will remain exactly as I uploaded it.

    But If I upload anything remotely popular from the last 40 years, probably google already has it. And probably in better quality than my rip.

    So I might upload a rip as 192kbps (or something), and after a few days my track on google music will be 320kbps and perfect. If I then download to my computer or android devise I get the high quality version. No DRM is imposed.

    I suppose some purists will grouse about getting a high quality download, that won't be me.

    Like Apple, Google initially had some problems with their scan and match software, where it would substitute the G rated version of explicit songs. But that has been fixed, and if you really want that crappy old clicks and pops from a bootleg rip you did back in college, there is an option to force it to use your version rather then a pristine version.

    There are some trade-offs.

    Music organization: Standardized, not your bastardized organized by year and manufacture of the particular alto sax used. **Kid you not, I know a guy who had only sax music, and had it organized that way. It does not alter your local copy on your computer or your local organization.

    You tend to get higher quality rips at bitrates well above human hearing's ability to discern, which makes for larger files.

    Early adopters had explicit song substituted with the wrong versions, problem since fixed.

    Cover Art drifts. That is intentional and Google says they have no plan to change it. Recording are not released worldwide with identical cover art.

    Disclosure: I like Google music. I don't trust it as the sole repository for my music, but I do like having all my music available everywhere I go. I refuse to join their $10/month plan or their streaming radio plan. It annoys me that I can't remove these options from the menu.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:42AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @12:42AM (#205432)

    It is putting the music behind the walled garden. You should have expected this. Apple can't have you doing what you want with what you purchased. You have to follow the cult.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @02:59AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @02:59AM (#205461)

    The Verge's Chris Welch highlights his preference of listening to early tracks from The Beatles in mono format (just as they were recorded) rather than the automatic matching services' preferences for stereo versions.

    He's probably a major bore if you get him on the topic of drinking wine. I hope he's adding the appropriate amount of white noise and random clicks and pops too when he's listening.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @04:06AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2015, @04:06AM (#205478)

    Even from the grave, Steve knows what's best for you...

  • (Score: 2) by chewbacon on Monday July 06 2015, @10:44AM

    by chewbacon (1032) on Monday July 06 2015, @10:44AM (#205549)

    I recently discovered this prime benefit and started using it. I activated my trial Apple Music to compare. As far as new music (in genres I listen to), Amazon and Apple are about the same. However, Apple has more earlier albums from artists. I don't really feel the need to pay for both, so I'll likely drop the Apple subscription when the free runs out.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday July 06 2015, @11:47AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 06 2015, @11:47AM (#205569)

    I've been involved in a lot of stereotypical ETL and conversion type projects and what happens is all piles of data have a certain quantity of garbage. Now under normal states there is a complicated repulsive effect that resembles the field lines of about 10 magnetic north poles pushing against each other that makes the blame game calm, unmoving, statically stable. Lets say 5% of the data is garbage, and everyone has gotten used to which data is garbage, who makes more garbage or less than average, people have processes for dealing with certain forms of garbage from certain groups, etc.

    Anything that any ETL or conversion process does will dynamically change the layout and distribution of garbage. Even if you can prove that you're decreasing the garbage rate from 5% to 1%, everyone involved in the previous static system will SCREAM at the conversion team because they all had deals and understandings with each other and they have none with the conversion team so dogpile them. It can also be super disruptive to company operations because now you have a large cleanup team with nothing to do anymore, and a small undiscovered new source of garbage that'll none the less usually require more cleanup personnel and effort although some MBA claimed you'd save money in the long run, well, supposedly. You need a pretty thick skin in this line of work.

    This situation is just a personal version. Some moron has completely F-ed up metadata, well, so what, he's not going to complain about himself. Someone else overwrites his wrong metadata with metadata that is a hundred times less F-ed up, he's going to whine like a baby about every little mistake in the "other" metadata.

    This is all compounded by the effect that "my" stuff is a lot more important to me than a zillion people's "casual glance" opinion about the same stuff. If a hundred people don't care about something being screwed up and one does care, then its going to be screwed up. This is the well known "democratic STEM" problem where you can't figure out complicated STEM problems by doing something like running a popular election at Walmart.

  • (Score: 2) by Sir Finkus on Monday July 06 2015, @08:09PM

    by Sir Finkus (192) on Monday July 06 2015, @08:09PM (#205815) Journal

    I was just about to sign up for this and I've spent YEARS getting my metadata correct. I have hundreds of songs in other languages (Russian, Finnish, Faroese, Korean, and Japanese) and online databases can be pretty unreliable for them. Often the track names will be translated or romanized. Another problem I've had is with multi-disc albums. Almost nobody does this correctly. 99% of the time two disc releases are a single album, not two albums named "Album disc 1" and "Album disc 2" or about 400 variations of that. There's actually a tag in mp3 and every other audio format you'd be likely to use that will allow you to specify which disk a track is on, and how many discs are in the album. That's not even taking into account character encoding issues, conflicting and redundant tags (did you know there are like 3 different id3 tag standards? That means you can load an mp3 in two media players and have it interpret the SAME mp3 as having a different title) and downright MISSPELLINGS of track names.

    I end up using google music for music, and itunes for when I'm at home. I like the aesthetics of itunes, and google music doesn't touch my original files.