The Joy of iTunes

I find it curious that a company lauded for its design skills when it comes to hardware can get it so wrong with software. My iPod Classic is an immensely cool and sexy piece of kit - almost lickable (to copy Stephen Fry's memorable description of his iPad) - and yet iTunes feels like the complete opposite: clunky, unintuitive, unreliable and fundamentally untrustworthy.

My negativity stems from the number of serious bugs that have plagued me ever since I started using this benighted piece of software - bugs which Apple seems to have no interest in fixing, preferring instead to add half-arsed new features such as Genius and Ping. Here are a few examples:

• Album artwork that disappears from individual tracks or is reduced to a lower resolution, seemingly at random
• Overwriting of my edits to album information (track titles, genre, etc) - again seemingly at random
• Splitting of a single album into several identically-titled albums by the same artist for no apparent reason

I encountered another instance of the last of these earlier today and managed to fix it by making all the tracks 'part of a compilation' and then clearing this flag from all the tracks. Logical, huh?

This stuff isn't hard to do. I've not encountered any of these problems with the copy of my music library that I access from Linux using Banshee, for example. So how come a big, high-profile hardware/software developer can't get it right?