It was a close call tonight. I almost had a heart attack, or might have spontaneously combusted, if what I had seen were true. Fortunately for me, it was merely a head fake by the King of Head Fakes, Apple. I've always hated ripping my CDs to iTunes. Not because it's hard to do - insert, rip, done.
The problem is the aftermath that remains. iTunes often has problems finding artists and artwork, a problem which only seems to happen when one rips one's own CDs to iTunes rather than downloading. So, I often have to select all, type in the artist name, then all the track names, then copy in the artwork (I suppose I should just rip the metadata from AWS or a similar source, but on principle I don't want to give in, and implicitly endorse iTunes' mediocrity).
To be fair to Apple, and let you know just how anal I am about my music, I don't have a single track out of over 10,000 that is entitled "Track __", nor do I have any songs named "Unknown Track" or any bands named "Unknown Artist." I also don't let iTunes find song titles for me, because I've discovered over time that some people actually upload to discog and other services, as source material, all words in lower case, as well as misspellings, unneeded abbreviations, incorrect labels, etc. Not coincidentally, the aforementioned are all very high on the list of things that annoy the hell out of me. So I keep it organized myself.
Anyway, I was ripping a couple CDs tonight, and lo and behold, iTunes ripped the first CD, but had no track names or artwork, so I typed/pasted them in, then hit Import CD and then went to find the songs in my music library (since I've also learned that you can never be too sure what iTunes just did with your music; better to check while you can remember what you did). Either iTunes never imported the CD without track names, as it had indicated, or it actually replaced all the tracks with the right names. Which is actually shocking for iTunes, to actually recognize that two songs are exactly the same, off the same CD, and rename the ones that are wrong. But it appeared to have done just that (I still had to copy the artwork again, from the import page to the library, as it wouldn't transfer from the import page directly).
On to the second CD. Initially, this CD ripped just like the other, so I put in the track names, artist name, artwork (just a note - I also had to put artist name in for the first CD. I've included a screenshot of the results (the second album shown is actually the first CD I ripped; the first album shown is the second rip):
The good news is that my breathing quickly returned to normal, as I realized that Apple is still working hard to make things unintuitive and with bizarre "auto" choices. By that I mean the results of the two CDs were dramatically different, but the only algorithm I could imagine coming up with those results is called "random chance," considering that it replaced some tracks, while leaving others as remnants. Meanwhile, though iTunes has trouble with a minor subject that is apparently of secondary concern, MUSIC, it did take the time to add the column label 'Price' to my library, and then it even decided to check it for me so it would be there when I browsed my music. I'm positive I didn't do it, because that label is about the most worthless one I could think of for a music library, and I sure as hell wouldn't have checked it to be visible. It's also a little sad, since every setting that can be manual in iTunes, I have set to manual, so by default I am the last person who wants iTunes deciding the organization of my music library for me.
Autocorrect, don't even get me started on autocorrect. Pretty sure Apple's version was written by programmers who are not only non-native English speakers, they actually don't speak English at all. I tremble trying to think of some other explanation for Apple's bizarre autocorrect results, that doesn't involve the supernatural, trolls, elves, or clowns.
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