A Quick Rant About iTunes

I hate iTunes. It's official.

Organizing my digital music collection has always been tricky. Many of the recordings I own aren't commercially available so the data often fails to correspond to the tidy, pop music-oriented categories prescribed by the application.

But since my computer prompted me to download the latest version of the iTunes software a few months ago, the situation has become worse.

At least in the past I used to be able to search my iTunes library in a generic way using whatever term I thought might appear in a recording I wanted to access.

But now that the software seems to force users to search for tracks under the specific categories of songs, albums, artists, genres, videos, playlists and radio, I frequently can't find what I'm looking for. This is due to the fact that the data that goes with many of my recordings isn't categorized "properly" according to the limited iTunes classification system.

When it comes to looking for tracks in a genre like classical music, this has proved particularly frustrating. If I'm in the "song" category, do I search for the title of a complete work or an individual movement? And is the "artist" box filled by the name of an orchestra, an individual soloist or a composer?

In short, I feel like abandoning the latest version of iTunes and going back to the older interface, which at least didn't penalize me for having a non-conformist music collection.