I hate iTunes. Not because I have paranoid fantasies about Steve Jobs and the way he unfairly gets all this really good press, (“all Apple does is consistenly releasing excellent devices that everyone likes, what’s so great about that? Ptui!”)
I hate it because it has so many good qualities, combined with so many bad. The good ones are the good qualities of all Apple products. It’s simple and obvious to use iTunes in a lot of powerful ways. The bad ones are the bad qualities of all old, bloated software products. Like the way you click, and five seconds later something happens. Maybe. Or the way once a track has been added, it can’t ever be deleted, even if you delete the file.
But finding a replacement isn’t easy either. I’ve tested a few. They have none of iTunes’ bad qualities, but also very few of its good ones. For instance, there’s MediaMonkey, which was obviously designed by a bunch of programmers who wanted to cram every single feature anyone could ever want into the UI. And you can extend it in any way you want. Translated, this means that if there is a feature you miss from iTunes, you’ll have to scour the MediaMonkey forums for an addon, then write your own SQL code to customize it.
I’ll stick with iTunes. For now. But I advise Apple to outsource iTunes to someone who has experience with cleaning up old bloated software. Like, say .. the Office team at Microsoft?
There’s also doubleTwist ^_^
Looks like an Android app? Probably useful, but what I’m looking for would be a Windows application.
It’s an application for windows and mac, and is ment as a substitute for iTunes. The AirSync is a service for Android users, to enable them to synchronize without using cables.
As an interesting sidenote, doubleTwist corporation was founded and is led by Monique Farantzos and Jon Lech Johansen. The latter is more known as DVD Jon ^_^
http://amarok.kde.org/
Linuxapp som har blitt portet til mac og windows også. Utrolig allright.
DoubleTwist seems pretty basic. It doesn’t even have smart/automatic playlists?
Amarok doesn’t have a stable Windows release.
What I’m looking for is something that helps me to cycle a large music library through a not quite so large iPod in a meaningful way. For instance, I’ve set up iTunes to sync over lots of random songs I’ve never listened to (since I began using iTunes), and then when I hear a good song I give it a good rating, and on the next sync the rest of that song’s album is automatically copied over. iTunes can do that, if you set the playlists up right.
MediaMonkey probably can do that, with the right addon, but what it can’t do (in version 3) is use skip dates and skip counts. When I skip a song on the iPod, I want it to disappear from the “never listened to” playlist. Again, iTunes can do that.
They have cleaned up Office? So I have to upgrade? Shit!
“They have cleaned up Office?”
Yup. Started in Office 2007, and did even more in Office 2010.