Friday, December 30, 2005

Last Name First First Name Middle Name Last

Whose big idea was it to file all the music on the internet by first freakin' name? I don't know if it's Gracenote's fault, but they're the database that virtually everybody uses to fetch the data when you plug a CD into your computer.

I've just spent the last three days fixing the 60GB of music transfered from my CD collection to my in-house server, and I know I'm going to be continually frustrated by nearly every album I add.

You'd think some librarian's association would have had a fit over the Last Name/First Name crap, and for that matter, articles (A, An, The, Le, Los, Las, etc.) shouldn't be in front of titles and band names either (actually, I'm not so sure about some of those -- I still have Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys with the "Los" first).

At least give us a choice, please, perhaps add another set of tags, called "Album Artist The Right Way" or "Fileable Title."

My suggestion is, pick an album, and go to Gracenote (link above), and submit corrections. If everybody does a couple, we'll fix it all in a couple of weeks.

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