iTunes hate hate hate

Recently I've rebooted my listening collection organization and lately I've been having discussions with Scregman on this topic. Because I succumbed to iPod and then iPhone ownership I have been forced to deal with iTunes. I NEVER liked it, but I found a way to accept it.  I find it has 3 features I appreciate above all other music organizers.

• A switch to let you "save your place" within a book/podcast/etc.
• A disc-number field that Windows explorer refuses to acknowledge is useful and important
• There is no third feature.

 This guy's article perfectly captures the sentiment, with my favorite quote being:

Microsoft gets a lot of stick for producing clunky software. But even during the dark days of the animated paperclip, or the infuriating ".docx" Word extension, they never shat out anything as abominable as iTunes – a hideous binary turd that transforms the sparkling world of music and entertainment into a stark, unintuitive spreadsheet.

Apple has (slowly) made useful improvements to iTunes over the years but I still find myself continually arrested by their decisions which border on the "Do you even use this thing?  How can you stand doing it this way?" sentiment. 

This week's complaint session:  Books/Audiobooks.

• Main gripe:  ALL AUDIO FILES FOR AN AUTHER ARE DUMPED INTO THE SAME DIRECTORY.  They don't even have the courtesy to be consistent and store each book in a subfolder such as "author name" followed by "book name" just like every other other stinking audio file in the music iTunes library that at least gets a folder for "album name". WTF??

• Ok, Should books be treated differently than music?  Certainly.  But lumping eBooks and audioBooks together and dumping them into the same menu item "books".  eh, no?  They are different media types. They should be treated as such.  Or at the very least trivially separated in the listing.
• There needs to be a "save your position" in a playlist.  Saving position within a file is a good start, but if you have a CDrip and dozens of 5 minute tracks or at best 13 whole-CD rips, it would certainly be nice to be able to come back to the track you left off at.  That information is lost once you play something somewhere else.  In fact that should be just a general option.  If I stop in the middle of even a music playlist, I want to be able to resume where I left off not start the bloody thing over.  At the very least, treat it like a podcast and have a blue dot there indicating the listened-to status.  The functionality is already there,  just apply it to a broader scope.

On a computer, some of this missing feature is tolerable by exploiting the "last-played" or "number plays" field, but those items are absent from the portable device.

Yes, I'll still keep using it cuz despite iTunes those little i-gadgets are well done and nicely polished and useful.  I would just like this monstrosity to be just as nice.  I mean, their philosophy (read: canned response to any complaint) is that you should only organize and access your music/media through their program and unrealistically dictate that you should never need to look at it through the file system.  If they believe that, they need to really make iTunes users happy and make some concessions to how people do things, or get their head examined, or both.