Very long post, but I do have a question in the end, sorry ...
(Changed everything to French, and what do you know, it started resyncing over and over any song whose title began with "Le" ...)
All right, I know (kind of) what happened, and I have a fix. I am putting all the info here so Google will find it and it may then be useful to someone else, sorry if it is too long. No guarantee that it is correct, I guessed most of it ...
\begin{rant}
At some point in the past, iTunes would sort songs according to whichever field you chose, and tried to be clever at it: for some fields (artist, album, title at least), according to the language selected, it would ignore the first word if it was an article (i.e. in English it would ignore 'the', 'a', probably 'an'; in French it would ignore 'le', 'la' and 'les'). That was convenient, but not very flexible.
As of 7.1 or so, they added "shadow fields" to the tags for each song, which you can find under "sorting" in the File Info dialog. If e.g. the "Title for sorting" is defined, iTunes will sort according to that. That is very flexible, but not very convenient if you have to fill it by hand.
So, as part of the update procedure from 7.0 to 7.1, iTunes will automatically find the fields for which there is a sorting analog, and for which the contents begins with 'the', and it will fill the sorting field accordingly. Then, after this is done, it will completely ignore the cleverness of 7.0 and rely solely on the contents of the sorting fields. Apparently this did not proceed as expected in my system, probably because my language was set to some unlikely combination.
It all makes sense, except that the iPod firmware needs to be compatible with both 7.0 and 7.1, so it needs to decide which algorithm to use somehow. So (I am guessing here) if the sorting field if filled, the iPod will use it, and if it isn't, it will be clever and strip articles from names.
The problem arises then if iTunes, version 7.1 or more, sees a song whose title starts with 'the' but whose sorting title is empty. It will follow its algorithm: sorting title is empty, I sort using the title, but I am not clever => sorting key is "The Journey". The iPod sees the same file, no sorting title, so (and I am still guessing here) it tries to be clever => sorting key is "Journey". Different sorting keys, the synchronization algorithm sees this as an inconsistency / as a sign that the local file was updated to change the sorting order, removes the "old" file from the iPod and puts the "new" one in its place.
OK, but since all the info is in the .mp3 file, the "old" and "new" files are absolutely identical ! So copying the file over to the iPod did not fix anything, and the problem accurs again next time you plug your iPod. And of course no amount of restoring the iPod will change a thing; rebuilding the iTunes database won't either, because removing a sorting title generated automatically by the iTunes update can make sense, and rebuilding the database will preserve it. The only fix is to fill the sorting fields to make iTunes and the iPod agree on what to do - and I did exactly that, on every song for which all the sorting fields are non-empty the problem disappears.
\end{rant}
OK, short version : restoring the iPod doesn't fix it, rebuilding the iTunes db doesn't fix it, filling the sorting keys by hand fixes it on a file per file basis. Except I have 1300 or so files where the title is the field beginning with 'the', so I won't fix each one by hand. I see 3 solutions :
- set the language to some obscure one, to be sure that none of the first words in my songs is an article. Well, except that then my iTunes and iPod will talk gibberish to me :-( For every language I kind of speak, I have a ferw songs in that language ...
- wait for the next iPod firmware to follow iTunes and stop being clever about sorting. Not going to happen, I guess ...
- Somehow trigger iTunes into doing whatever it does on an upgrade, so that it fills whatever needs to be filled.
Does anyone around here know how to do that ?
Anyway, thanks for your help ! (Well. to those who are still reading anyway ;->)
