Okay, so iTunes is really starting to get on my nerves.

It was already on my nerves because it seems to be incredibly slow. Even on my new spiffy mega-mondo desktop it feels bloated–it's got that bad-comedian-in-a-fat-suit slowness going on. I was all excited at the prospect of a 64-bit iTunes…but after running it for a while I wondered why it had gotten slow again. Then I discovered that the installer was the only 64-bit part. The regular iTunes was still 32. Now I'm not a technical guy (not anymore–I don't count myself in that particular club) but why in the hell would you want the installer to be 64-bit? The only reason I can come up with is that the 32-bit version wasn't playing nice with a 64-bit OS.

Anyway, so that was annoying.

Now I found today I had somehow turned on a feechur I'd never witnessed before nor desired: that of "album ratings." I have MP3s that I've pulled in from God knows where–a lot of old-time radio files, audiobooks and other things. As a result, I am missing a lot of artist and album titles (which I use this previously mentioned method to go through on the run).

iTunes, of course, treats that whole "unknown artist" and "unknown album" as one album. And today I was greeted by a lot of tracks with "phantom stars." I've seen them described as "white stars" or "hollow stars" as well. Here's what they look like:

oooh, spooky

After my initial attempts at exorcising my machine did no good–and screwed up the monitor with the blessed tap water–I started rooting around on Google and found this is a lovely feechur of iTunes called "Album Rating." It will basically take the individual ratings of tracks, average them, and assign a rating to the album as a whole.

I found the solution here. Basically you have to open up the "Album Rating" column in your main library (right click the top and select it so it appears) and then un-rate the album.

Here's what I don't understand: why do people feel the need to make feechurs mandatory? Why is there no switch in here that I can throw to disable this bit that simply doesn't work with how I use the program? If there is one, I haven't found it. Just like I can't turn off the threaded conversations in Gmail–and thus can't use it as my primary e-mail client. Why must these companies be so goddamn narrow-minded and try to force us to use their stuff only the way they want?

I will say this: for as much as Firefox sometimes gets on my nerves, at least it appears to have a whole slew of plugins and settings and hacks that will let you do just about anything any way you want it.

Companies: give us the control panel. Don't add a damn thing without giving us the ability to turn it off. You're just annoying us.

Okay, rant ends. How have you been?