It's official: I f**king hate iTunes

iTunes how I hate thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Completely unintuitive music organization: iTunes does great with music you buy from the iTunes store, but anything you import from any other source usually has all the completely wrong information attached to it, and you have to edit it one by one. It also doesn't smartly connect artists, if there's a feature artist on one track on your album, then the song gets listed not under "Artist A" but under "Artist A featuring Artist B". What are you doing?!?! It's the same artist, list it with the rest of their songs!!!!

2. Randomly forgets your library or your iPod FOR NO F**KING REASON! Seriously, it's happened at least 3 times where I plug in my iPod and iTunes says "Your iPod is corrupted" then you have to reset it and it take an hour to reload all the music. Oh and even better, iTunes recently just forgot my library. I start it up one day and it says "iTunes library folder can't be found". I look in the music folder and it was right there! But iTunes forgot it! Cue another hour spent importing files and rebuilding my library.

3. Any file that wasn't purchased in the sanctioned iTunes store is handled weirdly: Sorry, not all my music was purchased from the store, I did have CDs back in the day, I've exchanged music with my friends, and I've bought music from other websites. But when I import none-iTunes store music, it duplicated the file, it also sometimes wants to convert it to AAC format, which make the file size bigger, and makes the file a slave to iTunes.

3. They secretly want you to not back-up your files. A few duplicates ended up in my library, so I deleted them, I also accidentally deleted a few purchased songs. Is there some kind of warning window saying "Oh, hey, you're about to deleted some purchased music, are you sure you want to continue?". Of course not, it just goes in the trash. So I realized I deleted 3 recently purchased songs, so I go to the store thinking maybe I can re-download the songs. Surely since they store every tiny bit of information about your purchase, and automatically know when the song is authorized on a new computer, they will let you re-download the song on the same computer you purchased and downloaded the song on to begin with, right? RIGHT?! Nope, no dice. Time to find the album on a torrent purchase the song again!

4. When you do back up your files through iTunes, they do a shitty job: I just got a new computer, so I do the ol' transfer of the files, and I backed up all my purchased music onto a DVD. I upload the music, it's working no problem, oh except the occasional song that just randomly stopped 45 seconds in. iTunes wouldn't tell me what was going on, so I installed a new music player which told me the file was corrupted. Oh, I see, iTunes, I use you to back up my music, and you can't even write it to a DVD properly. So what happens when the files corrupted because of something iTunes did? Well, since there's no way to re-download your purchases, you better just hope the file is still in tact somewhere (luckily I also has my iTunes music on an external hard-drive).

5. Rent movies from iTunes? How about no. $3.99 for new release rentals? You can rent 4 movies from Redbox for that, or just double it and have unlimited movies for a month from Netflix. I'm already trying to get away from iTunes for music purchases, no way will I start renting movies from them.

In short, I know it's a free program, but considering it's created by Apple which prides itself on creating attractive, user-friendly hardware and software, iTunes is remarkably frustrating and unintuitive. The fact that there's no way to recover an accidentally deleted or corrupted file is a flaw that competitors are already taking advantage of (see Amazon's new Cloud Player). I was recently suggested Songbird as an iTunes alternative, so hopefully my days of iTunes frustration are coming to a close. Good riddance.

Dazed and Confused by the Grammy Awards

I was looking forward to the Grammy awards since a) I hadn't seen them in at least 3 years, and b) the show's known to turn out some good performances. And there were certainly some interesting moments, but overall I was just really confused. And I only really remember a handful of things about the show, so let's talk about them.

The "Pay Tribute to Aretha Franklin" thing. I was a little confused by this, was she getting a lifetime achievement award? Eitherway, there was Christina "Don't Forget the Lyrics" Aguilera, Jennifer Hudson, Martina McBride, Florence Welch and Yolanda . . . something. I kind felt bad for Martina and Florence going up against three powerhouse singers like that (they're strong singers, but not in that soul sistah way). I enjoyed the Diva-off between Christina and Yolanda at the end.

Lady Gaga performs Express Yourself 2011 Born This Way. All I could think about was how sweaty those dancers had to be in those latex-y costumes, that stuff doesn't breath.

The throwback performance where it briefly went to black and white. I'm so out of the music scene! I had no idea who any of those singers were. But I think I'm a Janelle Monae fan now.

The Performance with Mumford and Sons, some other group, and then Bob Dylan: Wow, I have never seen a keyboardist rock out as hard and the Mumford and Sons keyboardist did. I liked the second group, will have to look them up. And then Bob came out, looked a little confused, stumbled around the cello that was randomly in the middle of the stage, then started singing or something, it was a little hard to hear with 14 guys shouting in the background. Oh, why was the camera angle like that?! Is that the "Dylan Angle"?

The random pairing of musical groups and various CBS stars to present awards. Maybe it was only Paramore and Paulie Perette, but still, what do they have to do with each other?! So confusing. I really wish Award shows would get rid of the scripted “banter”, it’s so awful. The Miley Cyrus and Green Bay Packers guy was particularly painful.

Bieber fights drumming Ninjas! Oh, God, I’m not sure what’s happening to me, but I don’t hate Justin Bieber. Don’t call me a Bieliber yet, I’m just saying anyone who has drumming ninjas as part of his act can’t be all bad. Also Jaden Smith showed up, but too bad Willow wasn’t there to whip her hair a bit.

Katy Perry performs. Another artist that I don’t hate. What can I say? Teenage Dream and Firework are really catchy songs, I wish I was in Japan so I could rock those tunes out at karaoke. Also, while I said before the random appearance of stars from CBS shows bothered me, the obvious exception is Neil Patrick Harris.

Cee Lo performs “Forget You” with muppets, while dressed like a peacock or something. I think you were outdone, Gaga.

Dear Ricky Martin, no one should wear pants that tight or that silver. No one.


Somewhere in there, the Best New Artist was presented. I wonder how many people even in the theater googled Esperanza Spalding on their phones when she won. While it’s great that such an underdog won the award against The Biebs, I was a bit bummed the award didn’t go to Florence + the Machine or Mumford & Sons.

At some point Mr. Schuester came out and started talking about Jazz music in schools or something, it bored me to tears and I spent the segment looking for Esperanza Spalding videos on youtube.

I liked Norah Jones, Keith Urban, and John Depp Mayer’s rendition of “Jolene”. But, kind of like the Aretha thing, this reason for this “tribute to Dally Parton” wasn’t really explained. Still sounded pretty.

I thought Rihanna looked very pretty and classy when she performed her bit of “Loved the Way You Lie”, and then when she did “What my name?” she wore a bikini made of ropes or something. Yesterday I watched her video “S&M”, that was a scarring experience.

Someone needs to have a simple explanation of the difference between “Song” and “Record of the Year”. I know one is for the writers, and the other is for the actual performers of the song. Or they can just keep it simple and give both awards to the same song, like they usually do.

Mick Jagger is like 100 years old and performs like a maniac. Barbra Streisand’s voice is like butter. Gotta love the classics.

Arcade Fire gave me motion sickness. Cameras on the bikes, constant strobe lights, it was a bit too much. There’s also like 5 songs from “The Suburbs” I like better than “Month of May”. Would have loved some “We use to wait”.

And then they won album of the year, which was pretty cool, but apparently a lot of people in the twitterverse didn’t know who the Arcade Fire is. I take back what I said before about being so out of the music scene, these guys are the ones who are out of it.

Arcade Fire comes back and performs again with no strobes or bmx bikes. Far less epileptic seizure inducing, so thank you for that, AF.

And there it was. Ryan Seacrest and some annoying girl at the commercials kept telling me I had just seen a bunch of “Only at the Grammys” moments, but I don’t know. The performances were so frantic, nothing really grabbed me and made me say “OMFG, this is amazing!”, mostly just a lot of "wait, who is that?". But now I'm ready for the "Award show where I haven't seen any of the movies" in two weeks. Bring it on.