good ol’ itunes…

i’ve used you since the day you became available to me. i’ve probably still got a copy of 4.1 backed up somewhere and the original ipod; the remnants of it anyway. it didn’t quite survive a friend of mine haphazardly introducing his jeep to my hapless messenger bag back in college.

i’ve been happy with you for a long time, it’s likely that i never would have made such a grand and articulate library of music had it not been for you. i hated winamp, and windows media player didn’t even have any real options at the time; though years later i still hate and refuse to use it. you were the first reason i opened up and no longer scoffed at “apple”, but now that i’ve gone through my honeymoon phase i’m beginning to find things… little things, that i’m just not able to overlook anymore.

your store sucks now, completely. it was bad enough that i couldn’t download mp3 files from you before, but now i can’t stand to even navigate you. that’s not what i want to complain about though, i didn’t start this relationship because i cared about your store, it was your wonderful display and organization abilities. sure, i may have always been against letting you organize my files for me and chose to handle that myself rather than have you bury half a million folders within each other, but you didn’t force it on me, and that’s one of the things i’ve always liked about you; options.

that’s why i now complain my dear itunes. i want the simple option of telling your system of alphabetical ordering to go to hell.

more simply, i want you to stop putting “the beatles” next to the “beatsteaks”. i know a lot of people don’t, but i do. you see, my head happens to word either correctly or incorrectly, but one way or another, i always look for bands that start with “the” in the “t” section, and bands that start with other letters where they belong. my mind is capable of remembering that metallica isn’t “the metallica”, and that the beatles is indeed “the beatles”.  [see also thee, as in the one and only, as in part of the damn name]  you also exemplify this habit for the word a, and while i don’t have many artists or albums starting with the letter a, i assure you if i ever do add some music by the band “a time to remember”, i don’t want to see that band listed in the t’s anymore than i want to see “the aspects” listed in the a’s.

if the band’s website looks like www.thebeatles.com or www.aperfectcircle.com, it’s probably safe to say that the word isn’t arbitrarily used and open to interpretation as to whether it belongs as part of  the name.

it doesn’t make any more sense to omit these words than it does for me to add some in and say “a steve jobs owns the apple and makes a macbook that comes with the osx”.

it also doesn’t make sense that i should have to try reprogramming my brain to look for something like snoop dogg’s album the last meal in the l’s, only to discover it’s not there because it’s spelled “tha last meal”.   if you’re going to annoy me with this, at least go full force and use the retarded spelling of our intellectually and illiterate musicians too.

while you’re at it, why not put 50 cent in the f’s so his work doesn’t show up next to my three hundred and eleven tracks, this is an absolute travesty having to differentiate between 5′s and 3′s rather than f’s and t’s.

actually now that i think of numbers, if we were dealing with them; your ignoring the words “the” and “a” would be akin to numerical lists suddenly ignoring the number 4.

1
2
43
5
48
9

aerosmith
the beatles
a perfect circle
tenacious d

yeah… it’s hard to get more alphabetically or numerically ordered and clear than that.

i suppose you could say that my brain just can’t get used to your ‘proper’ sorting habits, as i’ve no doubt that’s what you’d call it, but i have no interest in getting used to looking for names that begin with t in 25 places that don’t.

i know you’re involved with more people than just myself; i’ve never insisted upon monogamy, but i also know i’m not the only person annoyed by this.  what you and your other others don’t understand, is that “we” don’t care about pretentious notions of proper, we want our t’s in our t’s and our a’s in our a’s.  we understand easily enough that in alphabetical order, when there are a bunch of names starting with the word “the”, we simply look to the next word over to scan a-z, and our eyes adjust to that without a hitch.

so here we are years later in our relationship, and despite how much i might consider myself not to be superficial and have never complained about your lack of visual customization, i must inform you that i have a disappointment with your  “t and a”.

all i want is a simple option to tell you “alphabetize without ignoring the information i painstakingly add to thousands of songs”.  i don’t want to add more information, i don’t want to go through hundreds of songs to update an extra “sorting” dialog only to find out i’ve missed some of the entries, i don’t want to click through context menus and constantly have to update and worry over adding new music if it dares to start with the word “the”.  this is no more of a solution than naming my laptop ibook was when you didn’t like me using a pc.

i want… i don’t know, maybe just one checkbox that lets me choose between you sorting my music according to the letters a name starts with, and an adverse checkbox for other people who do enjoy it when you mix up my efforts in organization worse than a dyslexic with tourettes.

it doesn’t just piss me off to need to go looking in the 25 letters a band’s name doesn’t start with in order to find it, it pisses me off to look in letters other than t and have bands that start with the word “the” littered all around it.

p.s.

could you please get your arbitrary nonsense out of the frame that holds my library and playlists?

l j holbrook