To REALLY foul things up requires a computer

My music collection is in the hands of a madman.

I still use the Windows Media Player 8 that was installed on my computer when I bought it, primarily because I quite like the interface (why is it that all good computer programs eventually get ruined by being more helpful than you actually need?), but also because every attempt at upgrading has utterly failed to hold on to my playlists, the one truly useful feature.

WMP 8 has some peculiar issues though. When I didn't have an internet connection on this computer, I patiently typed in the names of albums and artists when I needed to, and songs where that was important for some reason (like a playlist drawn from multiple sources). Now, however, I have access to the updates from some mysterious online source which is reasonably reliable when it comes to albums but rather questionable for singles or Australian works that the Microsoft monolith doesn't really know about.

The updater kept crashing and freezing WMP 8, but in some odd way this seemed to work. Album art would miraculously appear.

Tonight, the updater didn't crash, and as a result all hell has broken loose on my hard drive.

Song titles have survived, artists have survived (although it STILL doesn't know who released Under the Pink, for God's sake), but a large number of albums have miraculously transformed themselves. Radiohead's Ok Computer has been retitled as Emigre (a Wendy Matthews album), but still has Paranoid Android on it. Half of The Bends now claims to be k.d. lang's Invincible Summer. Tori Amos' B-sides have stayed in their original groupings, but have now miraculously attached themselves to new friends, so that Alex Lloyd is credited with Purple People and Bachelorette, Sons of Korah sing not only Amazing Grace but 'Til the Chicken and, most bizarrely of all, her versions of Smells Like Teen Spirit and Angie are now part of the score to Tomb Raider (the computer game, not the movie).

I could go on, but you'd think I was just making it all up. I'm not, I swear. This is really happening. You bet your life it is.

Some of the changes are slightly rational. I think that maybe Little Earthquakes has had all of Boys for Pele added to it because the two albums have appeared in a double-pack here in Australia, and some bl**dy fool entered the data as a single work and was blindly believed by the all-knowing internet database that controls these things. Other examples, though, defy all explanation. I could understand if it had merely changed my writing of Powderfinger's Odyssey #5 to Odyssey Number Five, but instead I apparently own both and the second one has a lovely little Tori song called Graveyard on it. And no sane person would mistake To Venus and Back for Strange Little Girls AND attribute the latter to a Christian band instead.

It turns out that pressing 'Update Names' for individual albums is rectifying the problem, but the entire episode is quite possibly the oddest thing a computer has ever done to me. I can't decide whether to point and laugh at it or back away slowly while reaching for a baseball bat.