Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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My biggest complaint with iTunes was always it's mediocre metadata support when compared to Windows Media Player. However, sometime in the past year Apple quietly updated iTunes to support the last remaining critical meta data field, Album Artist.
Why do I care about Album Artist? Well lets take a look at the latest George Michael Twenty Five CD (yes, I do in fact like George Michael, it reminds me of being a child of the 80s).
Anyway, take a look at the normal "Artist" Field".
The problem with this is now when I look at my music in Cover Flow modeI see separate entries for:
However, this is not what I want. I purchased a CD, and I want to lookup and browse using the Album Artist: George Michael.
Well in prior versions of iTunes you were stuck with this lame behavior. However, in Windows Media Player, it does the right thing(tm).
Well the latest iTunes has an Album Artist field. Just go to View -> View Options and select Album Artist.
When you do that you can get this:
Now Cover Flow will work as expected and you won't see more entries than the number of CDs.
Unfortunately, the iPod does not support Album Artist yet, and as such iPod Cover Flow is broken in this respect. To bad. I hope that gets fixed.