The new 50 Cent album The Massacre appeared on several BitTorrent (and other p2p networks) sites last night. Get it while it's hot.

The copy I analyzed was beautifully tagged, and imported into iTunes perfectly. This is one major problem with a lot of downloaded albums, they don't import well into iTunes all the time (and thus don't transfer over to the iPod well).

Let me show you some examples:

Here is how the new 50 Cent album imported directly into iTunes...

As you can see, all the track numbers are listed, and all the guest artists and producers are listed in the in the Song Name info. This is nice, I don't really care for the producers, but I can see this being a big deal when tracks are individually produced. Also, I am fine leaving off the total number of tracks so the track numbers wont read "of 22", but that is really easy to clean up.

Here is how the new Streetlife album imported directly into iTunes...

As you can see here, the track numbers were not tagged, and the guest artists were listed in the Artist column. While this may seem cleaner and better by these screen shots, they really mess up the album when trying to access on the iPod.

While I don't have any nice way to show you examples of trying to access these albums on the directly on the iPod (any emulators out there?), I can show you the effects with some more screen shots of iTunes:

The resulting Artist list from importing the new Streetlife album...

Importing the single Streetlife album tagged how it was created 11 different "Artists" in my iTunes/iPod view. This means when I am on my iPod and I go to play all the songs by "Streetlife", any of the songs with guest artists wont play, in fact, if you look at the above track list, you can see that only two of the songs will play.

How 50 Cent displays in my artist list...

Here is how 50 Cent shows in my Artist list within iTunes/iPod. Now, while I currently have 10 different versions of 50 Cent, only 1 came from the new album I imported, the others are from various songs I have and have not cleaned up. At least when I select 50 Cent I will get his entire new album (all 22 tracks).

So I guess this is an open plea to "crews" out there bring us the latest released to at least do it right.