The
latter task involves having to work with iTunes. This involves a great deal more work that the
good people at Apple originally probably envisaged.
Once I’ve imported my disc, I immediately bring up the tracks in my
library to edit all of the data provided that I simply don’t want. These include songwriters, music genres,
those annoying details at the end of tracks such as (album version) or (2007
remaster) and basically anything that could affect a true random shuffle other
than album titles, song titles and track lengths. What puzzles me here is that I can remove
these items from my music library so that it doesn’t show on my iPod but I can’t delete other things I
don’t want on my iPod such as the installed Games and all the other features I
never use and never will use such as provision to store Contacts, Photos, Video,
etc. I repeat something I wrote last
month; anyone who buys a 160GB iPod does so because they want as close to 160GB
of music as possible. Nothing else matters.
Then
I’ve got to edit artists and album titles.
Editing artists is an absolute must because even the most minuscule difference
will result in a new artist appearing on the iPod. For example, I don’t want my Neil Young
albums appearing in two separate artist lists, one for Neil Young and another
for Neil Young And Crazy Horse; all get attributed to Neil Young. I then need to make sure that artists are
sorted so that they appear in an alphabetical sequence by artist surname or
group name. Occasionally I’ll need to
sort or edit an album title especially when there are many albums released with
the same title such as Greatest Hits, Live, The Very Best Of, The Essential, or
Gold. And finally there are things that I feel I should correct. For example, today I imported The Jeffery Lee
Pierce Sessions Project album I played last month. This is actually the second album released by
this amalgamation of acts and so I think it should be listed as an artist. This means taking the individuals created to
each artist on the album into the song title.
(iTunes really doesn’t handle compilations all that well.) After this, I
will uncheck any tracks I don’t want, almost always to avoid unnecessary
duplication of tracks.
Next up is a task that I really think is really unnecessary. When you import your CD, iTunes gives you all
of this data but not the album artwork.
You then have to specifically take action to retrieve it. Why not give the artwork along with
everything else and let the consumer decide whether to keep or delete it? Finally, it’s time for the synching process, something
that Apple has considerably approved and it goes smoothly.
And so there you have it, a posting to disguise the fact
that today, I’ve played only one album and it was whilst writing this post.
(129) Tom Petty And
The Heartbreakers – Hard Promises
For a long time, Damn The Torpedoes was my favourite Petty
album. However, every time I play this
album the gap continues to narrow to the point where I’d say it’s now at level
pegging. This is strange because I can
remember being underwhelmed when this first came out. Anyway this has a cracking start with the two
singles The Waiting and A woman In Love (It’s Not Me). This is followed by Nightwatchman, one of the
few Petty tracks that could be described as approaching funky. Kings Road and A
Thing About you are first rate rockers, Insider is another good duet with
Stevie Nicks and You Can Still Change Your Mind is a fine ballad to close proceedings. 
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