Apple’s newer metadata ‘matching’ technologies-basically, the magic that makes iTunes Match work-tend to be relatively accurate for popular music.īut if you’re managing classical music digitally, all bets are off-especially if you’re dealing with someone else’s metadata. If you’re dealing mostly with popular music and have a library that only runs to 100s of albums, you may not know or care that you have a problem with inconsistent metadata. If you’ve downloaded music from another source, you’re pretty much at the mercy of whoever ripped the music in the first place, subject to their laziness or weird personal idiosyncrasies. Most people simply ‘live with’ whatever metadata came with the item they’re importing: if it’s from the iTunes store it’s usually pretty good, and if you’re importing your own CDs, iTunes often seems to just ‘know’ what it’s importing. Getting your metadata right in iTunes can be challenging at the best of times. Feel free to look around and see if something less navel-gazing catches your eye.

If you don’t really care about classical music, iTunes-or metadata, for that matter-you may lose interest rather quickly. Warning: This post is extremely nerdy and detailed.

New itunes sucks