iPodが大嫌い
Forgive my English, but I’m not sure if I can express this one quite how I want in Japanese. I might attempt to translate it once I’m done though. For now, I need to rant.
I use an iPod to listen to music. I use it all the time. I have a very large music collection, and though it used to be much, much larger, I’m still very anal about having my music properly tagged and sorted. So it’s naturally rather upsetting to me that using the iPod, it is simply IMPOSSIBLE to sort my music how I like.
iTunes offers several different ways to alter the natural sorting of mp3s. First, it offers the “Album Artist” tag, in order to group songs by multiple artists into one single album. Also, it has a “Compilation” tag, and setting it does essentially the same thing. Further, it offers “Sort” tags for all of the main tags on a song (Title, Artist, Album, etc.) It actually works perfectly, and in iTunes I can sort my songs perfectly. I can view all the songs by a single Artist, or I can group them into Albums by Album Artist. All in all, iTunes does pretty much exactly what I want.
The issue comes in because the iPod handles the tags mentioned above nearly 100% differently than iTunes.
Let’s begin with the Album Artist tag. The iPod, for some unimaginable reason, simply ignores this tag. I have no idea why. Good job, Apple.
Next we come to Compilations. This is actually the easiest way to accomplish what I’m trying to do, which is essentially to keep multiple-artist albums together without getting a million extra artists in the Artists view and without resorting to simply CHANGING THE ARTIST to the same thing on all the songs. I want the information to be there.
Compilations actually do work nearly exactly the same on the iPod as they do in iTunes. However, the album is simply removed from the Artists view and put into the Compilations view. This would be fine, too, if you could still sort by ALBUM ARTIST, but you can’t. You can only sort by album TITLE. which is retarded. I hate sorting by album title. So Compilations are out.
Finally, we come to the “Sort” tags. With the newest version of the iPod 5G firmware, 1.3, Apple finally implemented support for these tags, which they had added in iTunes a year or more previously. The only problem is that if you set the “Sort Artist” for a song on a multiple-artist album, it still shows up as multiple artists in Artist view. Say you have, on a multiple-artist album, the artists “A” and “B”. You want to group these songs into one pseudo-artist “C”, so you set the “Sort Artist” tag for the songs by “A” and “B” to “C”. In iTunes, this works perfectly, as far as I’m aware. On the iPod, however, you simply end up with both “A” and “B” artists, SEPARATELY, being sorted in the list as IF they were “C”. Separately.
I need a fix for this or it’s going to drive me insane. >_<
Anyway, looking back at this, I don’t think I can write this in Japanese. :/ Oh well, hopefully this will be my only English post.