Because despite what everyone thinks again and again, music is not hierarchical, as a file system is. Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?
Does my album go under the composer, the conductor, the orchestra or the soloist?
This is one of my peeves with the 40's channel on Sirius. There could be the wonderful voice of a woman singing a song, but the display will only read "Benny Goodman Orchestra."
Seriously, I had my MP3s organized this way pre-iTunes. I get why that can’t scale to the general public, but I still think a tool could approximate it.
For one thing, even if this was a good idea, you would still need a tool to covert the meta information from the ID3 tags that come with your music from amazon, iTunes Store, or wherever into a myriad of hard links.
Further, it's hard to imagine how the hard link system could ever be as flexible as even an average music library program, where you can trivially find songs released between 1990 and 1995, with at least one play count, and then have them sorted by beats per minute.
Music libraries act as relational databases, which are a far more powerful data modeling tool than the file system.
Same as any other document on my disk: it doesn't matter. Just dump everything in there and let Spotlight index it.
(That's basically what iTunes does now, except the exact behavior is hidden behind a mysterious "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" checkbox, and the index is stored in big opaque XML files rather than Spotlight.)
My email has hierarchical folders, too, but I don't know anyone who worries about the folder structure of their email. All messages are indexed, and search is quick, so there's not much point.
The question is how you organize the albums, hierarchically. The easy case is when you have artist/album/track, like:
Music > Buckethead > Enter The Chicken > Funbus
But how do you file, say, classical music? Do I file this album under Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor? Do I file this under Bach and Beethoven, the conductors of various tracks? Do I file this under Wiener Philharmoniker?
In iTunes it’s irrelevant, because I can find the album by looking for Composer=Bach, Composer=Beethoven, artist=Wilhelm Furtwaengler, or artist=Wiener Philharmoniker. With a filesystem I would… use symlinks or something?
Beethoven goes under Beethoven. No one groups stuff by orchestra.
And just because a media player respects your filesystem doesn't mean you can't search by the metadata in the Mp3s. This is extra-helpful when you realize not all Mp3s have metadata. In that case, such search routines will just pass it by.
That was my point... you're not really using the filesystem. It's just a big pile of files if you stick it all in Albums. iTunes organises that because the filesystem can't.
This is one of my peeves with the 40's channel on Sirius. There could be the wonderful voice of a woman singing a song, but the display will only read "Benny Goodman Orchestra."