ipodistry

I'm primarily a Window/Media Player guy (although I use iTunes to put it on my iPod). Those two environments inherently organize the file structure differently. I think the typical Apple mentality is that it doesn't really matter how the files are organized as long as the UI layer can present it in an understandable way. My mentality is that for reasons that border on OCD, I care how the files are organized. In my opinion, iTunes loses a certain sense of album-ness. Take the "Magnolia Soundtrack" album featuring Aimee Mann in an iTunes environment: 10 tracks are under ".../Amiee Mann/Magnolia" but two tracks are by Supertramp and they're under ".../Supertramp/Magnolia" and another track is by somebody else and is under "Whats_Her_Name/Magnolia". In the Windows world, The album would be under "Various Artists/Magnolia" and all the tracks would be in one place and each track is tagged with a "Contributing Artist" tag which would be "Amiee Mann" for ten of them, "Supertramp" for two and "Whats_Her_Name" on one. I recognize that I probably should let the software worry about the organization of the files but.... I've also seen this manifest itself in the iPod where under the Greatest Hits album will be all the tunes from all the albums titled "Greatest Hits" regardless of artist. That just feels wrong. I think that it ultimately comes down to a tag that Apple doesn't really implement: "Album Artist".

The Media Player environment can take an album such as "Richard Greene - Duets" and recognize that on every track, the "Album Artist" is "Richard Greene". That allows it to create the Richard Greene folder and a folder inside that called "Duets" and put each track in there and on each track fill in the "Contributing Artist" field with Greene/Grisman, Greene/Rice, Greene/Douglas, etc. as appropriate. The Apple world really seems to look only at the "Contributing Artist" field and so, under the "Greene/Grisman" folder, iTunes would create a "Duets" folder and then puts a track in there. It repeats the process for every unique "Contributing Artist". This gets particularly weird for me on the iPod when I go to "Cover Flow" and the same album keeps coming up over and over because cover flow is in "Contributing Artist" order. Arghhhh... OK, I can live with the iPod being like that... it bugs me but I deal.

My primary focus is that the library on the entertainment center PC makes sense; that's the "master repository" in my world. iTunes and the iPod are slaved off of that and home music listening is typically via Media Player.

I think the Media Player 11 interface is a better than iTunes, but maybe that's just brainwashing.

My practice is that I rip and listen to music at home with Media Player and periodically I drag the whole "My Music" folder to iTunes and it adds any new music to the iTunes library and then I can sync the ipod. It feels to me like I get the best of both worlds this way. The directory structure makes sense to me AND i get to have it portable. Of course a person can get used to either UI and many of the advantages I see in Media Player would be considered trivial to most folks but for me they add up and more than offset my minor workaround. I know some folks use playlists in iTunes to dictate what goes on the iPod but I say "Put everything in iTunes on the iPod. If there's something that I don't want on the iPod, I put it in the "My Music non-ipod" folder. I set up Media Player to look at both "My Music" AND "My Music non-ipod" so at home, everything is available and on the road there is just the important stuff.

Playlists do represent a challenge because they don't move easily between Media Player and iTunes. For reasons that I can't fully explain, I like the auto/smart playlists. Possibly because both interfaces are looking at the same .mp3 files and so the tags are common to both, if I create the same rules in both places, I should get the same results. So, if I was only in one environment, the difference between dragging a tune into a manual playlist versus setting the correct tag values so that the tune appears in the desired auto/smart list is 6-in-one-hand, half-a-dozen in the other. But if I have the same criteria in both environments, then setting one tag on a track would make it appear in the desired playlist in BOTH worlds at the same time.