Apple doesn’t do Jazz

It’s a well known, and thoroughly lamentable, fact that kids rule the world. Nowhere is this dominance more visible, and more vicious, than in the world of music.

Almost 12 years ago, I started loading my collection of some 800 CDs—about 9/10th jazz and 1/10th classical—onto my Windows computer, creating a folder for each artist/composer and “ripping” each CD into the proper folder. I played the files using Windows Media Player. The Media Player is set up for you to access your albums, play lists, etc. directly through the player itself. Well, that works pretty well, I guess, if you have maybe 50 albums, 20 play lists, or whatever, all of it released after the invention of the iPod, but when you have 800 plus CDs, dating back 30 years, it’s a mess searching through all the album covers, which are always arranged heterogeneously, no matter how you try to sort them, because the digital labeling of the CDs, which you can’t see until you load them on the computer, is heterogeneous, done by dozens of different labels working independently, who never thought that consumers would be using this information in the first place.

For classical selections, the big horror is that so much of the material has been packaged and repackaged half a dozen times, so that a “set” of a dozen CDs will show up labeled half a dozen different ways when viewed on a computer. A fair amount of classical music was first released in Japan, so the listings will be in Japanese as well. That can happen in jazz, too, but the bigger problem is that semi-obsessive collectors like me end up with a lot of “unknown artists” from obscure labels.

Most though not all of these problems were addressed by my old-fashioned filing system. Just open a couple of folders until you get the CD you want and right click to send it to the Media Player. But then I got cool and got an iPhone.

You can just dump Windows music files into iTunes on your Windows computer and iTunes will convert them, and you can play them on your computer and also copy them onto your iPhone. But there are several major rubs.

First of all, Apple always presents albums according to album cover, instead of listing them by title (which would be far more compact) and, worse, does a terrible job of picking up album cover art for anyone less popular than Taylor Swift. Most of my albums show up as blanks, and this is true of both classical and jazz. Microsoft rarely turned up a blank. Apple is also far more likely to come up with “unknown artist” than Microsoft, which baffles me, because both digital giants are working the same web.¹ Are Microsoft’s algorithms like five times better than Apple’s? I thought Apple owned digital music!

Apple also assumes, in many though not all of its listings, that you’re a kid who only wants to listen to a few cuts from a CD, so that a CD that’s part of an opera will show about 25 cuts, including little bits of recitative, not all of them numbered correctly. If you look at all “Albums” they won’t be listed alphabetically, or according to any other pattern that I can discover. Furthermore , sometimes an album will be listed two or three times, with only two or three cuts per listing.

Most fascinating of all to me is Apple’s treatment of some early modern jazz albums dating from the mid-fifties. In the earliest days of LPs—roughly 1950-1954—jazz albums were released on 10-inch LPs. These went out of style almost immediately, and labels re-released this material on the now-standard 12-inch variety, combining earlier albums and, usually, filling them out with unreleased material.

What Apple does with these is use the 12-inch album art (sometimes) but listing them twice and allocating the material in the manner of the original 10-inch releases. Where is this information coming from? When the 12-inch LPs were turned into CDs, did the labels add digital information indicating the entire release history of each cut? And why did Microsoft never do this, always assigning every cut to the CD from which it was ripped, and generally doing a much better job than Apple? If Steve Jobs had been into Thelonious instead of Dylan, the world, my friends, would be a better place.