[nerys]

Itunes does the same thing. Its a horrid way to organize music. At least I think it is. I guess the thing is I never want to listen to a "genre" of music I never want to listen to a "type" of music.

I listen to 2 types of music. My favorites (random songs that really grab me so they go into my favorites list) or A specific Album.

When you listen to music that way Itunes is horrendous - Itunes actually leaves your DISC structure intact. It does not change or alter your file hierarchy at all.

What it does do is create a database and they DISPLAY that music to you via that ID3 Database.

The problem is this requires your ID3 tags to be PERFECT or its a house of cards that just collapses as soon as you look at it.

Took me forever to figure out how to get it to do it MY way. ie I wanted my favorites album to be ONE ALBUM but in doing that it "ignores" the album art and displays the art of the alphebetically first song in the album. Finally I found out about this OTHER ID3 tag that itunes and zune software (even worse than itunes) pays attention to CLOSELY but NEITHER Is obvious about it and NEITHER lets you EDIT IT.

You have artists. you have album. if you make an album logic says ALBUM tag defines this right? well you would be wrong.

there is another LITTLE used tag that only few editors are even configured to let you see because its so rare. ALBUM ARTIST 99% of the time this tag is EMPTY but thats not good enough for itunes or zune. NO they FILL that tag you never hear about and never see with whatever is in the ARTIST Field. 124 songs 124 artists. See the problem :-)

and THIS is how itunes and zune organize albums.

if you have 2 songs BOTH with ALBUM TAG XXX but they each have a different ALBUM ARTIST tag the software will treat them as SEPARATE ALBUMS even though they both have the same album tag.

Not only that but its KEY WORDED if you use the WRONG WORD in the album artist box it will have odd effect. The solution for me was to use Various as the album artists.

now it treats them all as one album AND shows each of their album art properly. took me a YEAR to figure that out by pure dumb luck.

now people say why not just make a playlist? sure thats easy if the favorites album with 124 songs in it is the ONLY THING I put on the player.

the problem is "I WANT" to use the album view for my other ALBUMS alas now its cluttered with 124 SINGLE SONG albums that make the list insane to navigate. thats why I needed the 124 songs from 124 different albums to show up at ONE album. :-)

Alas I need the meta tag data. For in order to use Calibre's TAG function it has to "HAVE" a tag :-) I assume this tag is either FROM the metadata or I have to enter it manually ?? (most of my ebooks are pdf and txt neither of which have metadata at least my files so far don't)

ie its faster and easier to let calibre find the metadata than to EDIT the tag data spot and if i am going to do that work I might as well go all the way get good cover art etc.. for it. This takes a tremendous amount of time.

When your talking a few hundred books this is fine. a couple days hard work and your golden. but when you talking 10's of thousands Literally. well its just too much work. Even if I spent an hour a day it would take YEARS to process all the files.

When I want to read Flux by Stephen Baxter I am 3 clicks away from that book or about 10 seconds max from having it. Calibre won't even load in 10 seconds time it won't even load in 20 seconds. My 3 clicks are "Books Shortcut" - "Stephen Baxter" - "Drag Drop" Flux to Memory Card.

I can find my book load it to my memory stick and be walking out of the room before calibre has even shown up on the screen.

Again its not a bad program quite the contrary. its just not very useful for organizing my books for me. I got it for its impressive conversion abilities.

I don't know why I rub him the wrong way. Some people are just like that I guess. Some people just don't mix. If you don't bow to their will immediately they get very defensive and angry with you for some reason they think you are attacking them. I learned to just shrug it off. Internet Battles are simply a waste of time and energy.