i complained about iTunes' crappy data management before. the root of the problem is that i keep my music and pictures on an external hard disk, and this apparently is too complex for iTunes to manage. over the course of the past months, iTunes has managed to download podcasts to three different locations (two on my internal disk, and the external disk, if it has a really good day), and regularly loses track of these files. it then downloads podcasts repeatedly. which means that in the end i can either waste gigabytes of disk space due to iTunes' crappy data management, or i have to clean up the mess by hand, checking one by one which podcasts i can see in iTunes, and which ones are not visible in iTunes anymore, but still exist in one or more places.
recently, iTunes topped that by automagically resetting the iTunes music folder to he internal disk. it took me a while to figure that one out, and now that i have reset the music folder to the external disk, iTunes claims that all content on there is brand new and refreshes my complete iPod, including the lightning-fast process of optimizing
all the 10'000 pictures that i have. to do that, it apparently first deletes all optimized
pictures on the disk, and then recreates the exact same versions...
implementing decent and robust data management really is not all that hard, it just takes some good engineers to sit down and come up with a robust and consistent plan for it. i really would prefer to have two or three releases of iTunes with zero additional features, and instead real improvements in the very basic data management issues. it always amazes me how much effort is being spent to create the illusion that things work automatically and effortless, and how little effort is being spent to make sure that this actually works even if users dare to do something that deviates from the most basic demo setup.
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