shutting your eyes, as you've suggested, would appear to solve your problem
i use none of the social features
It's the principle, and also if I blow a couple hundred dollars on some sexy piece of hardware or software, I so badly want to drink the Kool-Aid and
abuse all the features, so it's frustrating when I can't without feeling dirty.
It would also help if these things had decent support for classical music.
Charles Petzold has a blog post on this:The big problem is that MP3 players are structured around a paradigm — let's call it the Artist-Album-Song paradigm — that apparently works just dandy for commercial pop albums, but it pretty much a disaster for classical music.
For example, here's the hierarchy used to store and present music on MP3 players:
Artist: The Rolling Stones
-->Album: Exile on Main Street
---->Song: Rocks Off
---->Song: Rip this Joint
etc.
The Artist-Album hierarchy parallels the way in which CDs are shelved in a store, and songs are stored on the CD. But as you can easily confirm with a stroll through the Classical department of your local Tower Records your local Virgin Megastore J&R Music World in New York City, the rest of us don't shop that way. (Or check out ArkivMusic.com, which more than any other site knows how to present classical music to the consumer.)
We prefer a hierarchy that looks more like this (and throughout this analysis I will use the term "Artist" to encompass individual performers, ensembles, and conductors with orchestras):
Composer: Franz Schubert
-->Composition: String Quintet in C Major
---->Artist: Cleveland Quartet plus Yo-Yo Ma
------>Movement: 1. Allegro ma non troppo
------>Movement: 2. Adagio
------>Movement: 3. Scherzo. Presto – Trio. Andante sostenuto
------>Movement: 4. Allegretto
Notice the presence of the Composer, which is probably the major difference between classical music and commercial pop. In pop music, the composer is still extremely important — somebody always needs to write the music! — but is pretty much ignored by the music's consumers. (What infinitesimal percentage of Michael Jackson fans can actually name the songwriter behind "Thriller"?)
Notice the Artist is listed after the Composition but before the Movements. This hierarchy allows accessing the same Composition performed by different Artists.
And notice there's no Album in this hierarchy. The Album is a structural element in pop music, but an artifical construct in classical music. [...]
The Zune Marketplace exacerbates this problem, half of the records in the classical section have the composer as the artist and half have the performer, making it frustrating to browse and forcing you to do a bunch of fiddling with tags to have any semblance of sanity in your own collection. It's a big mess, plus the selection is fairly limited.
