A few posts ago, I mentioned I purchased (leased) my first BMW. A 2006 325i. Stuck to the basics. Leatherette! But, the car does come standard with a mini-audio jack for my iPod. And the stereo plays MP3 discs. Well, here’s my rant (this isn’t supposed to be a pundit blog, but, I need some workaround.) Since I have an iPod, I use iTunes as it is the only conduit to the iPod. iTunes is a good enough music player as well. I can create playlists. And from it I can purchase music (although tracks are $.20 more expensive than with Yahoo! Unlimited), download podcasts, purchase TV shows and burn MP3 CDs. Then comes the problems.
iTunes doesn’t do a very good job at tagging MP3s (perhaps that’s by design to keep the user in believing in the AAC format.) iPods though will play both formats. iTunes has gotten better at recognizing existing tags and allowing them to be passed to the iPod. However, it stinks at transfering this information to a CD. It also stinks at "super tagging", a process done well by Musicmatch, now owned but being phased out by Yahoo. So, the process of buying a song and then getting it on a CD to play in my car while being able to see the title is still multi-step. If I buy from iTunes, I have to convert the song to an MP3 format (I use 320kbs) and then either manually transfer the metadata or use Musicmatch to supertag it (I paid for the upgrade to allow Musicmatch to do this.) And then I use Musicmatch to burn my CD as it keeps the metadata there. Yahoo Music Unlimited is no better. Even worse. Once you download a song, you have to burn a CD and then re-rip the song back to MP3 and then import into Musicmatch to get the metadata.
The music player companies all claim this is due to the music owners. If so, they are stupid. If not, the music player companies must not use their own stuff.
