Many people that know me, know how fond of my music collection I am. They quickly notice that my CDs are sorted alphabetically with precise rules (surnames first, articles ignored, etc), and that with my digitalised music I'm almost obsessive. All my 50+ gigs of compressed music follow a precise filesystem scheme, with a metadata file on each album in XMCD format and I also have my toolcase of shell scripts to rename files, look up in the freedb database, etc.

Those scripts also were meant to tag the MP3 files, but I never cared about it, since all the data was in the filesystem, and also because ID3v1 —which is still the only thing mp3info understands— is the shite, and doesn't allow for long titles, not any other useful data. I never bothered to even add OGG tagging. (Before you mention it, transcoding audio to get rid of MP3 is not an option, that'd require a re-riping everything from scratch).

If I chdir into Waits, Tom/(1973) Closing time —for example— and type mplayer *, It Just Works™. But this new trend of tag-based music players, made for people that cannot order their music, annoys me to no end. In most of them, there's no way of telling the thing to stop trying to be smart!

So if you're writing an audio player, pretty please, with sugar on top, remember that some of you users can know better, and provide an option to disable any non-filename-based sorting. Today I made my world a better place by patching decibel-audio-player, which was a minor offender (the sorting was only done when adding directories to the playlist). The media players on my gorgeous Nokia n810 are a total pain in the ass, and would require a lot more work to "dumb" them down. Al least it's free software.

Found via the fine Coilhouse blog (which in turn was discovered a few days ago after a middle-button-click crisis), these Swedes are a strange mix of music box, electronic and folk music. This video made me crave for more, but fear not, the two albums they've already released can be found in the usual places.

Update: Forgot to include the link to the (quite ugly Detektivbyrån's webpage, thanks Erik for noticing.