iTunes - Two Faced
Why oh why does iTunes always do this? It pretends to be your friend, it lures you in with its nice looking interface and promise of easy reward. Then it kicks you in the nuts with its unexplained overloaded checkboxes, makes your current sort order affect its operation and just generally behaves how a piece of software shouldn’t!
Today I was trying to burn an MP3 CD for use in my car. I have a newish car and the CD player is capable of playing mp3 data cds and of traversing directories in order to make the whole experience nicer. So, I think, iTunes will do nicely; insert a blank CD, set up the playlist I want and click the burn MP3 CD button. The result being a cd with no directories and all mp3s in the root.
Attempt 2: Search the Internet and find a page that states that you need to click on the Album column heading until it says Album by Artist. Who even knew that happened when you clicked it? Anyway, I burn another mp3 CD and find that it did almost exactly what I wanted (apart from numbering all the directories, whats that about?). Expect, of course, for Compilation albums which are obviously special cases and which noone in their right mind would want sorting into 1 directory for each artist contained on it! At least this highlighted that the ID3 tag for 1 track on 1 album was wrong!
Attempt 3: So, I think, maybe I didn’t want to sort it that way, I probably want to just sort by album (not “album by artist”). And its almost correct now. Except I would like a combination of the attempt 2 behaviour for non compilations, and attempt 3 for compilations. It’s not hard because:
Next time I think I’ll just take the directory structure direct from the iTunes directory since under the covers the program can manage to sort things the way I want them on a CD, without numbering them to force an order I don’t want and which will presumably show up on my CD player display! Stupid, stupid, stupid program.