Proper Alphabetization in the Digital Age

I have succombed. After eight years of forcing proper alphabetization of my now-massive digital music collection, I have moved to the defacto standard of first name/last name artist listings. I do it begrudgingly. Two big questions stuck in my head as I spend about five hours retagging files: is proper alphabetization even necessary? And why didn’t someone think up a solution for this a long time ago?

When you have a lot of something, it pays to be organized. For years my digital music collection grew and grew. In the early (dark) days of Winamp and RealJukebox, user-generated file structure and organization was key.

I did things at that time the only way that made sense: the same way you would with physical media. When the record store puts Michael & Janet Jackson together, that makes perfect sense. So when I was sorting my digital files, I did the same thing. That meant having to list the siblings as Jackson, Janet & Jackson, Michael. Kind of a pain, but my brain was trained to find solo artists (and self-titled bands, for that matter) under last names.

That served me well for quite a while, and even when I migrated my then 7,000+ mp3 collection over to iTunes in 2002, I stuck with the old way. That was fine and good until a few years ago, when all these cool online tools to use your iTunes data came along. Now I had to do work-arounds to upload content via iTunes Watcher, Last.fm, etc. It also was annoying when I tried to get artwork directly from the iTunes store; for a while their search algorithm wouldn’t recognize my alternate name structure.

Additionally, one of the caveats of this new system is a minor loss of browsability. Wherease I don’t have a lot of artists that start with “Isaak” I have quite a few that start with “Chris.” Now when I get to that part and have to wade through 7 different Chrises to find the one I’m looking for, it’s slightly less user-friendly. Such is the price of conformity, I guess.

Since this “First Name Last Name” format has become the new standard, I finally decided get with the program. It was quite an undertaking to do so (about 7 hours of renaming roughly 1/3 of my now 13,000 large collection), but it will be worth it, now that I can play nicely with the future of shared data. If only I could get things to sort the right way though. My brain still wants to find Michael & Janet next to each other, not under “M” and “J” respectively. Oh well. There’s always a chance somebody will get it right eventually.