Why I don’t use iTunes metadata

I am taking quite a beating in the comments section of my previous post. Apparently I am a soon-to-be-crestfallen old man with OCD (if I combine Kelstar’s comment with the one from “Mr. D.”). Thankfully there are also messages from fellow Luddites who support my alternative lifechoice.

The object of the scorn I’m getting? Nothing to do with the Automator scripts I shared (since I am new to Automator I was hoping to get some feedback/correction/suggestions on that). It’s all about the use case that lead me to Automator in the first place, my refusal to rely on iTunes metadata to organize my music collection.

Look, I’m a software engineer. My employer (Oracle) knows a thing or two about structured data. I work in systems management, which is heavily model-driven. As an architect I really care about consistent modeling and not overloading data fields. I’m also a fan of Semantic Technologies. I know proper metadata is the right way to go. As a system designer, that is, I know it; any software I design is unlikely to rely on naming conventions in file names.

But as a user, I have other priorities.

As a user, my goal is not to ensure that the application can be maintained, supported and evolved. My goal is to protect the data. And I am very dubious of format-specific metadata (and even more of application-specific metadata) in that context, at least for data (like music and photos) that I plan to keep for the long term.

I realize that ID3 metadata is not iTunes specific, but calling it a “standard” that’s “not gonna change” as another commenter, Vega, does is pretty generous (I’m talking as someone who actually worked on standards in the last decade).

Standard or not, here are a few of the reasons why I don’t think format-specific metadata is a good way to organize my heirloom data and why I prefer to rely on directory names (I use the artist name for my music directories, and yyyymmdd-description for photos, as in 20050128-tahoe-ski-trip).

[Side note: as you can see, even though I trust the filesystem more than format-specific metadata I don’t even fully trust it and stubbornly avoid spaces in file and especially directory names.]

Some of the pitfalls of format-specific metadata:

• Metadata standards may guarantee that the same fields will be present, but not that they will be interpreted in the same way. As proven by the fact that my MP3 files carry widely inconsistent metadata values depending on their provenance (e.g. “Beattles” vs. “The Beattles” vs “Beattles, The”).
• I can read and edit file names from any programming language. Other forms of metadata may or may not be accessible.
• I don’t have to download/open the file to read the file name. I know exactly which files I want to FTP just by browsing the remote directories.
• I often have other types of files in the same directory. Especially in my photo directories, which usually contain JPEGs but may include some images in raw format or short videos (AVI, MPEG, MOV…). If I drop them in the 20050128-tahoe-ski-trip directory it describes all of them without having to use the right metadata format for each file type.
• File formats die. To keep your data alive, you have to occasionally move from one to the other. Image formats change. Sound formats change. The filename doesn’t have to change (other than, conventionally, the extension). Yes, you still have to convert the actual content but keeping the key metadata in file or directory name makes it one less thing that can get lost in translation.
• Applications have a tendency to muck with metadata without asking you. For example, some image manipulation applications may strip metadata before releasing an image to protect you from accidental disclosure. On the other hand, applications (usually) know better than to muck with directory names without asking.
• You don’t know when you’re veering into application-specific metadata. I see many fields in iTunes which don’t exist in ID3v2 (and even less in ID3v1) and no indication, for the user, of which are part of ID3 (and therefore somewhat safer) and which are iTunes-specific. It’s very easy to get locked in application-specific metadata without realizing it.

[In addition to the issues with format-specific metadata listed above, application-specific metadata has many more, including the fact that the application may (will) disappear and that, usually, the metadata is not attached to the data files. That kind of metadata is a no-starter for long-term data.]

So what do I give up by not using proper metadata?

• I give up richness. But for photo and videos I just care about the date and a short description which fit nicely in the directory name. For music I only care about the artist, which again fits in the directory name (albums are meaningless to me).
• I give up the ability to have the organization of my data reflected in metadata-driven tools (if, like iTunes, they refuse to consider the filesystem structure as meaningful). Or, rather than giving it up, I would say it makes it harder. But either there is a way to automatically transfer the organization reflected in my directories to the right metadata (as I do in the previous post for iTunes) or there isn’t and then I definitely don’t want to have anything to do with software that operates on locked-away metadata.
• I also give up advanced features that use the more exotic metadata fields. But I am not stripping any metadata away. If it happens to all be there in my files, set correctly and consistently, then I can use the feature. If it isn’t (and it usually isn’t) then that piece of metadata hasn’t reached the level of ecosystem maturity that makes it useful to me. I have no interest in manually fixing it and I just ignore it.

I’m not an audiophile. I’m not a photographer. I have simple needs. You may have more advanced use cases which justify the risk of relying on format-specific metadata. To me, the bargain is not worth it.

I’m not saying I’m right. I’m not saying I’m not a grumpy old man. I’m just saying I have my reasons to be a grumpy old man who clutches his filesystem. And we’ll see who, of Mr. D. and me, is crestfallen first.