John Brownlee:
yes, the problem can be attributed to incorrect tags or lag of tag entries. Problem has been for me, that: a large portion of the Music that i listen to doesn't get automatically identified, is obscure or created by friends, is not able to be categorized easily. The "Genre" category is pretty arbitrary, and a (highly contentious) matter of opinion in many cases. Seriously where do you file a band like Popul Vuh, is that New Age (most record stores section), or Krautrock (a musicologist/historian/music nerd perspective), World or Acid Punk (an actual ID3v1 category)?!?

The whole tagging thing strikes me as/ends up being an excuse or (in)convenience that results in tons of files being thrown in a single directory in a giant disorganized mess (at least from the perspective of standard software that is uses the file /directory scheme).
From this perspective it's just another example where creating an unnecessary off-standard tech makes our stuff harder to use in any way that we might want.

"I'd just like to know why people care about this feature so much."

We care about the feature because, very often, we already have our stuff organized, why should we spend time to re-organize stuff into a non-standard "standard", with arbitrary constraints. Many of "us" view the hardware as what it is on a hardware level, a memory device with a DAC, and a navigation interface.

The File/Directory architecture is simple and transparent to the user. It is supported by *many* platforms. It isn't prone producing to annoying discontinuities and difficult-to-resolve artifacts of the metadata approach, and, it puts the most control in the users hands. Some people like this. Not saying it's the greatest way that could be, but rather that I've never seen anyting that surpasses its flexibility and ubiquity. Hopefully that helps it make some sense.

#37 I understand your point that ultimately the user of some particular piece of hardware is the agent in choosing how their music is organized, at least in an ideal, theoretical sense.

The issue that I'd like to try to raise, is how the design of devices plays a role in what users *actually* end up doing. Many devices don't include file/directory navigation, or make it less convenient. That design choice influences the likelihood of a device being used in some particular way. Perhaps some users do not consider these as issues, maybe these things are unimportant to some people. But that being so does not make the designers choices any less influential on the way the device is used. To put it into abstract "market forces" and "consumers have choices" terms is a gross oversimplifcation and sidesteps the point that I am trying to raise that *designers have choices* and that these choices are the choices that users end up with.

The album will continue, better devices and management systems will be devised. And other, more novel forms of structuring information will arise. More user control and agency will further this development. Lack of control is still lack of control, minimalist aesthetics or not.

Apologies if this is too much of a rant, i guess i'm in a phase where i'm trying to conceive a distinction between tools as opposed to gadgets.

Ok, this one almost had me, but i think we're missing the mark slightly. I've gone on and on about this same subject and the travesty that is the loss (alleged) of the album coherence. But, after reading this post and the responses, it seems that the real/bigger problem is one of the structure of storage, and whether the encapsulation of music that is an album, (if that is the relevant source), will be preserved or fragmented.

If the stuff starts out as an album, we should be able to access it in that format, if we want. My gut says this is due more to laziness, or incompleteness on the part of the designers of music players rather than the "people don't care about albums anymore" reasoning. The rationale for leaving that out seems to have more to do with cost-cutting on the part of the manufacturers. "Hey, I know! We can leave off any buttons or user feedback and sell it to 'em as a feature!"

ID3 tagging has certainly made the waters much murkier here too.

I'll refer to Cory's anti-metadata rant as back-up on this: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm