Let's talk about our hatred for iTunes, shall we?

I was forced today to install itunes on my desktop in order to allow iPod Touch syncing. I have been using winamp for at least 6 months, and so have become very accustomed to it.

I installed iTunes about an hour ago. Since then, it's frozen three times.

I hate iTunes. With a passionate hatred. My reasoning for this are as follows:

1) It freezes all the time. Especially right after a newly downloaded update.

2) It's a system hog (I have not actually compared the processing required to run this compared to, say, winamp, but I have heard rumors of this).

3) It's clunky. It runs slowly and inefficiently, the menus are difficult and annoying to navigate, and overall it's not very well streamlined.

4) No customization. No custom skins, no themes, no real advanced settings in the preferences window. Overall, you can do very little save change the layout a bit.

If anybody else has anything to add to this by all means feel free to do so. And, in the slightest of chances somebody out there actually likes iTunes, I'd also like to hear your dissenting opinion as well (I promise to be respectful and courteous).

Overall, TLDR, I miss winamp. And I had a sad.

No hate from me. It's never frozen on me. Are you running a windows OS? I hear it runs like shit on them. There are other ways to sync your iPod. Try this: http://www.copytrans.net

OKAY. Well, I just don't really like the design/functionality of a lot of it. They just released an overhaul on it but it's still not great imo. I only really use it to rent movies on my laptop from time to time these days though...nothing else.

If I didn't have apple products, I probably wouldn't use iTunes.

One thing that drives me crazy is that whenever I shuffle a playlist, over a long period of time it feels like the shuffle isn't working or it's resorting to old shuffle choices. I can't actually confirm or deny this, but some time when I'm not swamped with school shit I wanna test it. (I'd be willing to bet I'm crazy though)

iTunes runs great for me. I use it every so often to sync music to my iPhone and it works fine. The menus are a bit hard to use, but later on it becomes easier.

No hate here. Better than the shitty torrents.

iTunes is the best media organizer / store out there if you ask me. I run it on my Mac and on the Windows side and have no problem with either. I love the new design, it makes navigating your library a breeze. The layout has always been perfect. I don't see how it's hard to navigate at all. Start typing in the search box and your library instantly transforms to reflect what you're typing, no wait at all.

Custom skins? What the fuck? It's not MySpace, it's a program.

I don't hate it. When i click a song it plays. That's the extent of what i need it to do.

Also there are other softwares you can use for the purpose of syncing an iPod.

I didn't mind iTunes 10 as a music player. It was all the other junk that came with it that I didn't like: the store, QuickTime, Bonjour, this background service, that background service - fuck off with all that.

I switched to MusicBee and haven't looked back. It's fast, has a small footprint (50MB), no background services, a customizable UI, iPod syncing, etc. It has a dumb name, but that's the worst thing about it in my opinion.

i've been using musicbee lately, and i'm really enjoying it. it's more customizable than itunes (despite having a derivative design language), and (at least on windows) it feels snappier. it also has a nice last.fm integration. here's what it looks with my setup.

I've never really minded iTunes. It holds all my music, and that's about it.

I use Zune for Windows. I hated i Tunes since the original ipod and I'm not surprised it's gotten worse since then.

vlc

I'm fortunate enough to not own any Apple products, so I don't have to inflict iTunes upon my PC.

I greatly dislike it as well. It freezes so god damn much. It's never a sure thing of course but things that cause it to freeze are: playing music for long periods of time, simply pressing play on music, downloading a podcast and adding music to my library. That's about all I use it for too. So it'll just freeze when it feels like it.

I only ever use it if I want to play the songs I have on my iPod or add new music to my iPod, otherwise I use windows media player for specific CDs and such. At the very least wmp doesn't freeze on me.

iTunes is alright, you just have to learn to not update it ever. Same goes with iOS products.

Having to use itunes to sync my father's ipod for him is the most excruciatingly painful thing I ever have to do.

No hate from my part :)

I just wish it were faster.

Yup, it's fucking terrible on windows and I'm forced to use it because of this fucking iPhone. On mac, shit is tight, but they just don't put any effort into the windows version.

Just use Zune then. It's a great media player.

I actually used to dislike iTunes, but 11 is pretty damn good. I've been using it lately, and am pretty satisfied with it.

What's so painful about it? You plug it in and drag the songs to it and you're done. Takes no more than 15 seconds and is crazy simple.

Even better if you have it set up to sync you don't even have to do anything, just plug it in. You can also sync via WiFi, so you don't even have to plug anything in.

If you prefer to manage the library yourself just make sure the checkbox is checked for that on the iPod and then you can drag whatever you like to it. The only way I can see it giving you trouble is if you have it set to sync and you try to manage it manually at the same time. You can't do that.

Agree with all the Mac support for iTunes although it has gotten bloated over the years. I use both a PC and Mac, and I'm amazed at the disparities. I don't get much crashing but it definitely runs slower. I wish Apple would put more development into the Windows version to fix all the bugs. It would go far in keeping people from jumping to Android.

I don't have an Iphone or any apple product, but I use Itunes. It's works for me, sure there's probably better option out there, but purchasing music, playing it on my laptop and transferring songs to my Samsung S2 works, no complaints.

It doesn't freeze for me and I didn't used to dislike iTunes but since that embarrassing redesign I do groan every time I have to open it up.

iTunes is shit. Don't feel like going into detail. Just don't like it. But I've never liked any music library on the internet. So eh.

It's pretty shitty overall on PCs. On Mac it's much, much better but I've never had a good time using it on PC.

@mellotronrules: @bane: Wait. You can hook up your iPod to Musicbee and download the music onto it from there?

Yupp. I've used it once just for the sake of it, and I don't think I could handle having that be my primary media organizer on a PC without wanting to choke kittens every few minutes.

@mellotronrules: MusicBee actually looks potentially neat. I should check that out one of these days, thanks!

The fact that it crashes and freezes constantly isn't going to be fixed by that. I know how to work the fucking thing, it just doesn't want to work with me.

You're almost the only one in here saying you like iTunes, so don't be so ignorant of it's blatant problems.

i haven't used musicbee for syncing, so i can't speak to it specifically. but it is one of the features they advertise, so maybe give it a test run?

Huh. I'll try it out this weekend. Thanks for the answer.

Came into this thread expecting to see @jdh5153 defending iTunes with everything he had. Was not disappointed.

I don't really care for it, but I still like it more than anything else I've used. Plus, I have an iPod, so I kinda need it.

Could be much, much worse.

I fully agree! And i use winamp to this day.

Just put something on your ipod so you don't need itunes.. it's what i did.

Before the new itunes 11 i would of agreed with you, but lately it really hasn't caused me any trouble (stuff like freezing seems like a rareity now). I like the simplicity of the new grid interface and since i don't have a ton of music on my computer i don't need the extra features of stuff like musicbee. Plus i mostly use it to sync up podcast and it does that job particularly well.

Twice now it has deleted all of my music that wasn't purchased using iTunes from my library. 95% of my music I didn't buy from iTunes. Fuck iTunes.

I despise iTunes to the point that I almost bought an android phone instead of the new iPhone (I didn't because the iphone is as much a gaming device as it is a phone and from my experience Android does not compare in that department).

Thankfully, the iPhone can function without needing to actually connect to the computer ever. I charge using a wall socket, i can transfer my FLAC files to the device using E-mail, and everything else can be downloaded from the cloud onto my device. I don't even need to be connected to my computer if I want to do a system update.

Now, I don't know what kind of iPod touch you are using (ie. a 2nd gen Touch cannot run the proper firmware for this), but with the current state of IOS, you do not need to use iTunes for anything.

@awesomeusername: It did for me. I plugged my iPod Classic into my PC and MusicBee transferred tracks both ways. I think there's more to it if you've got a more modern iDevice. Check the MusicBee forum or Google it to be sure.

Zune Market place for life!

I have an iPod 4th gen. Sounds modern enough to me. I might just try it out.

I don't know, I like iTunes just fine.

Haven't used it on Windows in years, I just use Rdio when I am on my desktop. It is really good on Mac once you set it up properly. With Alfred you do not even have to look at it to switch songs or look things up, just type in what you want it to play and it plays.

The pain people feel when using iTunes is likely similar to how I feel when I have to use Windows. After using not-Windows (in my case Mac OS and various flavours of Linux) long enough, Windows starts to feel like more and more horrible. Unstable, bloated, and a mess to keep up to date. I am probably going to go with an Arch install when I rebuild my desktop this summer then just use WINE for everything. I'm not buying another Windows license.

Eh, it's not so bad. There are far, far worse software out there than iTunes, trust me. Using it on PC, it's noticeably slower compared to vlc, wmp 11, or winamp. Though freezing only occurs when I'm alt-tabbing between playing games or any other performance draining program. I can see how the UI is confusing and unintuitive, but that's only because media UI isn't standardized.

If you don't own an Apple product there's no reason to use iTunes as there are always better software out there.

I hate it. Remember the times when I was trying to sort my music but iTunes somehow decided that "G" comes before "A" for some apparent reason. I now have an Android device which is a bit better.

You must have a pretty good life, or you're only 14.

Absolutely hate it. It can't even monitor one particular folder in case I copy music there. I would delete it immediately if I didn't have an iPhone. Even ZUNE was way better.

The former, but ooooooh you burned me good.

I stopped using it after the last update which made everything even worse.

I don't like how it won't let me view HD video on my old monitor.