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Comment by koyote | Hacker News Reader

Back in the good old days of mp3s I decided I wanted my library to be as 'accurate' as possible with its metadata. I spent a lot of time manually editing metadata.

Tchaikovsky was stored as 'Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский'. As you might expect, this turned out to be a bad idea on many levels:

* No searching

* Always ends up on the top/bottom of alphabetically sorted lists

* Took much longer to work out which artist it was because I'm not fluent in Cyrillic

* The Microsoft Zune's fonts did not support most non-ASCII characters (this was a big one!)

That being said, I was young and it looked cool, so I kept it :)

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I did the same thing back in the day in iTunes with Japanese artists etc. But iTunes had comment and "Sort Artist" and "Sort Title" fields that solved your first 2 problems and the iPod supports the same set of unicode as the Mac, so it worked out pretty well. It also helped teach me Japanese!

People complained about the bloat in iTunes, but at times all those features did come in handy! I'll miss the depth of features once Apple finally ends up replacing the Mac music app with a port of the dumbed-down streaming service they have on iOS.

The iTunes service/app in Japan also has a bad habit of automatically converting western artist names into their Japanese transliterated equivalents (eg. Billy Joel → ビリー・ジョエル) despite me not asking for it. Some tracks in your library would get the metadata converted while some other tracks (probably ones ripped from CDs not found in iTunes Match's database) stay as-is, hence both notations end up in the database, making a mess. Really wish it wouldn't do that.

I hate when automatic translation is creeping into software or websites without a way to stop it. In particular since a few month youtube decided it was ok to list video on its home page with translated titles. As I browse videos in 3/4 languages, it became hard to know what language a video will be it. I did some change on language preferences in my account but it didn't really solve the problem.

Please don't bring that to Apple, and yes I am also frustrated that this happens. Unfortunately, it's in the whim of the publishers, and I wish that if your device is in English, it should just use Latin letters, but ultimately it's Apple vs Publishers.

I won't be shocked if other services do show Latin letters though, Apple has negotiated the agreements literally 10 years prior everyone else in a period where everything except iTunes was physical and you don't want to change the contracts as much as possible, so the status quo.

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