I use iTunes as I pretty much never listen to music on anything other than an Apple product. Need to maintain that play-count, otherwise no one will know what I'm listening to. Thus, what's the point?
I use iTunes because I got an ipod 6 years ago, and I saw no good reason to keep using windows media player. And iTunes has been great for playing and organizing music and podcasts. Sure it's crashed on me a few times, each time completely wiping my library. But each time I successfully copied my music back to my computer from my ipod, which I'm sure apple would rather me not know how to do. So its all good.
Bottom line: If it works for you, keep using it. Don't trash it just because you think trashing it is "more geeky".
@theredace said:
"I'm a geek, and I use iTunes for all my music and podcast management. But apparently, so I've read, geeks aren't supposed to use iTunes because it's totally DRM filled..."
...hmmm. Apparently you're not geeky enough to know the relationship between iTunes and DRM.
" I honestly don't get why geeks hate iTunes so much. There is literally almost nothing wrong with it. It plays music fine, it has great MP3 player support and if you do choose to download torrented music, it loads to iTunes fine. "
I think part of it is because it does so much unnecessary stuff. In addition to being a music organizer and player (which is fine, it does an alright job with this), it converts video, has a music/video/software store, is an iPod/iPhone manager, an e-book/PDF manager, an internet radio organizer and extensive printing capabilities. Not to talk about the heaps of unnecessary (of course, all in my honest opinion) crap Apple tries to push on you, which include Genius (which is anything but) and Ping. The result is a huge, heavy program that takes up way too much resources for what the average user uses it for, which is what you typically call "bloat".
It's the same reason why geeks often dislike using office suites (MS Office, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc) for text editing, for example. They introduce so much bloat and what geeks (and indeed, I would think, most people) consider "unnecessary" features that it drastically impacts their performance when all they really want is to make a decent looking document.
iTunes is okay as a service; has most of the music I want (except for musicals), has a cool "Itunes U" feature etc. My criticism is with its performance and interface. It's typical Apple bullshit: slow as fuck and clunky to use for anyone that knows how to right click. I am aware that there are better programs out there, but unfortunately I was an early adopter and I've already got too much music on it already.
I really only use iTunes for syncing music to my iPhone as it's the easiest way to do it, other than that I use WinAmp for day to day media playing as it pretty much does everything I need.
itunes its fast and easy to see anything I want. Search works mad fast. I tried using other stuff but it always felt slow in comparison. But to each his own.
" I believe you used the word "geek" four times in your post, and its meaning was equally arbitrary each time. "
Yes, congratulations. You have cracked the secret sarcasm of my post.
If anyone's wondering, I posted this as basically a response to this article I read recently, which listed the top 10 geek sins that will get your geek card revoked. First on the list? "Admitting that you like iTunes". I was surprised when I read it, which is why I'm asking here to see if this is really true. Considering the number of people that use iTunes, and I consider this community to be fairly geeky (no offense). I still use it, I have no problem with it, and I scoff at the idea that my geek card should be revoked.
Would I like something better? Absolutely. But I haven't found it yet so I might try out some of the alternatives you guys have brought up. Cheers.
"I'm a geek, and I use iTunes for all my music and podcast management. But apparently, so I've read, geeks aren't supposed to use iTunes because it's totally DRM filled..."
...hmmm. Apparently you're not geeky enough to know the relationship between iTunes and DRM. "
...hmmm. Apparently you're not geeky enough to understand sarcasm, or the phrase "so I've read". And, to be fair, draconian DRM IS one of the reasons people have hated iTunes in the past. Yes, you're right, using iTunes doesn't inherently mean purchasing DRM'd content (which I'm aware is gone now). But the entire point of my post was to question whether or not geeks write off iTunes for stupid reasons, such as the ones I mentioned in my post ending with "and other shit". Not sure how I could've been more specific without just ending it with [/sarcasm].
" I'm a geek, and I use iTunes for all my music and podcast management. But apparently, so I've read, geeks aren't supposed to use iTunes because it's totally DRM filled and not geeky enough and "from the man" and whatever other shit. I use it because it's efficient and works well with my iPhone. But if you're so geeky you can't use it, what do you use instead? I'm legitimately interested to know. Anybody still rockin' Winamp? "
It has little to do with DRM and "the man". It's about nerds that feel as though they have to be different and being alternative makes them cool. iTunes is a perfectly fine program to manage your music with. Don't listen to the douchers that tell you otherwise.
Zuse. It's a modified version of the Zune software which allows for scrobbling to Last.FM. It is really just a patch for Zune to allow scrobbling to Last.FM, but it works well. I used iTunes for much of my time on a computer. In actuality I have been switching between iTunes and Zune for the past few weeks, and Zune seems to be the one I shall stick with. iTunes is good, but I find that it corrupts my music a lot, meaning that it cannot play it. Other media players can play my music, but iTunes cannot. It's odd, and even my 360 can play my files, so I cannot explain the problem.
I used to use Winamp as my only media player since I started listening to music. Just recently though I have switched over to MediaMonkey. It was such a hard move but MM just offers a more simple way of managing my massive music collection that Winamp was just okay at.
I use Winamp, iTunes and Foobar2000 depending on what I want to do. For anything that isn't audio I usually use MPC or VLC, or Quicktime on my mac. A friend of mine has an absolutely massive music collection, most of it doubled up in flac as well as mp3 for use with portable devices, and he swears by MediaMonkey. It seems like a pretty slick piece of software, but I never really tried it. On a different note: I finally got iPod scrobbling working again, and last.fm stopped crashing my iTunes :D Good times..
I tossed iTunes after they released 10. More often than not, my cursor would flat out disappear if I would use the software.
I picked up Winamp. I like having the option to play FLAC, streaming podcasts instead of downloading them, an equalizer that's readily available at a second's notice, and a pretty solid library.
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