My new filing technique is unstoppable : Cennydd Bowles

It should come as no surprise that, as both an IA and a music snob, I keep my ID3 tags pretty much immaculate. Correct spellings, title case throughout, even proper diacritics, until they were ruined by the iTunes v7.7 update.

As part of my curatorial approach, I classify for optimal findability – which means, since I have an iPhone, that I arrange my artists the proper/anal way – by surname for solo artists, and by name for bands. The definite article is of course excluded and appended as a suffix. Hence:

Mitchell, Joni
Smiths, The
Add N To (X)

But those last.fm upstarts think they know better than me. National, The “is an incorrect tag for The National. If this non-artist appears in your charts, do last.fm and yourself a favor. Fix your artist tags.” Also – the injustice – a big red image imploring me to adhere to their wrong-minded tagging policies.

Non-artist? The cheek! They’ll regret this, I tell you. Oh, and favor? They’re based in Shoreditch! Grr!

4 comments on My new filing technique is unstoppable

Paul Annett on 12 September 08:

Playing devil’s advocate, would you place Ben Folds’ solo material under F, but music by the band Ben Folds Five under B?

And would you adhere to the ‘title case throughout’ rule, even for a band such as easyworld, who spell their name with a lowercase ‘e’? If not, would the case dictate a different position in the alphabetical list, maybe uppercase before lowercase, putting easyworld after E-Z Rollers, The in your collection?

James Wheare on 3 December 08:

Also, isn’t the “The” reversal redundant as iTunes ignores it when sorting? Also, we’re working on artist name aliasing as Last.fm. Phase one is a little “did you mean?” yellow bar at the top: http://www.last.fm/music/National%2C+The

cennydd on 3 December 08:

Hi James, the reason I do it is to suit my own mental models. iTunes does accommodate the definite article, but not the reversal of Surname, Forename. Rather than have to remember which rules iTunes supports, I choose to encode my preference within the metadata. This probably stems from the days when I had great big CD racks; the physical retrieval made efficiency a lot more important.

There are also minor complication around edge cases. For instance, take Les Savy Fav. Should this be reversed to Savy Fav, Les? I don’t think iTunes reverses the French definite article. That decision is probably best left to the user, who knows the context and has a mental model already established.

Great that last.fm are looking into this. It’s an undoubtedly tricky IA challenge.

cennydd on 3 December 08:

Update to this: as it happened I stumbled across iTunes’s newish feature “Sort Artist” today. Allows you to manually force a particular sort order. So after some modestly tedious remapping and tagging, everything’s the way it should be.

I can sleep easy in my bed.

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