Except that in this post, I’m talking about iTunes on my Mac, which very much exposes a filesystem (thought maybe that’s why the MacOS finder is so bad, to progressively have us give up on looking at the filesystem…)

hey, don’t you know it’s a waste of your day
caught up in endless solutions
that have no meaning, just another hunch
based upon jumping conclusions

* Poptics are a sect of SubGenius who believe that nature of the divine best reveals itself through the lyrics of insipid pop songs.

In that case I think you’re confusing the way that the data is stored with the quality of the data.

(I am sympathetic – I use tools to get my MP3 ID tags all correct – and then another tool renames all the files accordingly. Best of both worlds for me.)

“File formats die”
Very true. But, like sporobolus said in the previous comment, iTunes (being the subject of your ire) does give you a file that most people consider fairly open. An XML file. I don’t see text files going away any time in the next 50 years.

“Applications have a tendency to muck with metadata without asking you”
This is a bit of a stretch. Sure, I’m sure some applications do (you mention an example ” SOME image manipulation applications MAY strip”), but to say they have a “tendency to muck with…” is taking that concept too far, I think.

Having said all that, your simple needs are perfectly met by your method.
I also understand the Luddite stubbornness. I didn’t even consider the idea of buying a ebook reader until about 4 years ago. “I like the physicality of a REAL book!” Haha!

Interesting discussion. Thank you for sharing.

i _am_ a photographer & i can’t imagine trying to find one of my photos without multiple non-hierarchical categories; today’s image tools are tremendous aids, but not without metadata…

also worth noting that iTunes maintains an XML version of the metadata stored in the id3 tags, which i see as an automatic non-format-specific backup; more than once i’ve hacked that XML to save a lot of time & hassle, and if iTunes along with every id3 tool disappeared tomorrow I’d still have everything

Ditch iTunes IMO.

Can you use strict; using automator?

Although I do like the standardised layout of files (music > artist > album) and choose to have text files of lyrics with the same name as the song (file extension txt instead of mp3 of course) and the appropriate album art stored there too.

It means my music is easily found, problems easily solved, different standards could be quickly accomodated.

Trusting the likes of Apple or Microsoft to stick to standards seems foolhardy considering their history (embrace, extend, extinguish) so belt and braces seems a good idea and I have some sympathy with Mr Vambenepe.

I am also intrigued that he chose Automator over Applescript, but he’s got the job he wanted doing done and learnt something too!

All that being said, iTunes (application and store) doesn’t have a good inherent structure. It uses too few metadata so finding stuff and imposing order is far more labour intensive than it should be.

Anal? OCD? Perhaps – but it’s my stuff, my computer and I want it the way *I* want it.

iTunes extracts the metadata from the ID3 container, stores it in it’s database as individual metadata items and allows you to sort or otherwise organize your music based on the values.

I wish more file types had standardized metadata like this (and jpeg’s Exif) and I wish more filesystems and data storage interfaces leveraged metadata to help you find stuff. We will get there, but legacy habits die hard….

– mark