Why I don't use iTunes.

Some of you know of my reasons for not using iTunes. It's not designed for people like me. The music player called iTunes is a database of information about your music, which it keeps in folders that it would rather you didn't fuck with. Within each folder are songs, and within each song is metadata about the artist, genre, track number, etc.

Maybe I think differently than most people, but I keep my music in folders. I don't trust tags or databases to keep track of my meticulously organized garbage dump of music. As a result, I have a large number of untagged tracks. This is a problem, because these all show up with the same name in iTunes. I have a lot of songs named "Track 01". Now here's the rub: even though iTunes itself relies on the underlying folder structure, it will not pass that information on to you. Or to me.

For millions of years, since way before cavemen first invented early iPods, all music players have supported the file system. It was a simple affair to browse music by artist, album, song name, or FILE LOCATION. I've said it before and I'll say it again: People who don't know where their data is don't deserve to have data, and truly, they have none. They are bodyless head-zombies, and they walk among us.

For the sake of evolution, please learn to think in terms of nested directories, people. It's important.

Anyway, I solved all my problems and eliminated poverty and disease when I switched to Songbird. Join me. Open source, lots of plug-ins, and oh look: Browse your music directories directly, without using the the library. Have you spent a lot of time organizing your music directory, but... are the id3 tags not all correct? Are you a social outcast because you trust a file system instead of a database?

Well listen unto me, collectors and completists. Name me one storage format that has stayed standardized for more than 20 years. What archive medium allows convenient portability among the widest variety of devices? What user interface has preserved the same exact paradigm since it's very inception? The hierarchical file system.

Why? Because it's a fractal. It's built in to us, and everything we experience. It's just a tree, but it's one of the most powerful ideas we have. Way more powerful than a music player.