To continue the iTunes ranting, it hit me today that it drives me crazy that iTunes isn't normalized to third normal form, heck, even 2NF! We've got a lot of repeated entries in there, namely music that's been released more than once.

Let's say I've got Between the Buttons and Singles Collection: The London Years. Well, now I've got two copies of Ruby Tuesday in iTunes, don't I? iTunes keeps track of number of times played, date last played, personal ranking (1-5 stars), playlist "parents", and all sorts of other info on each single track. I don't really want to keep the numbers separate for the two copies of the same song.

What needs to happen is to have a many to many relationship between songs and albums. Sites like FreeDB and CDDB need to have a concept of what's a verbatim repeat (like the example above) and what's not (like the pretty decent live version of Ruby Tuesday on Flashpoint). Then we can have an mp3 player that's worth its salt. Search for everything on Rolling Stones, the original version of Ruby Tuesday's there. Search for everything in Between the Buttons, you'll get that same entry. Same for The London Years. Not the same, obviously, for Flashpoint. And you'll get all your settings and properties for that entry in all [of the first] three listings.

Right now you could delete copied music, but then you lose the ability for the track to pop up in all of the first three search examples. It'll only show up in two.

Think Different, Apple, and normalize. ;^)