^^
I'm kind of like that. Listening to music is a special experience for me. I put time into listening what I want to hear. I have a few thousand pieces of music on my computer, and that's the only place I want it. If I can't sit down, undistracted, and enjoy it, I don't want to hear my music. In those situations I'll listen to Pandora or Spotify.

Agreed but one step further. Unless I am actually listening to my music, I don't even want it in the background. I certainly can't work with it on & I have zero music on my phone. I have quit buying since I just build playlists of new music on Tidal. I have even started to demo with Tidal - online & off since it is CD quality.

And yes, iTunes is a joke. Both the new interface & the fact that Apple are still selling & streaming compressed music.

Ian

I don't really find it all that bad honestly. I like being able to have content at my fingertips on the iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple TV. The iTunes library / store does make things easy to avoid blowing through data / bandwidth by transferring new songs, movies, etc. when I want to while connected only to my LAN (not over the Internet). You certainly can stream over the net if you want but why would you? It kills battery life and you'll rip through monthly data awfully fast.

Sorry but while I find iTunes to be a little bit clunky I don't have the intense disdain for it most here seem to. Maybe I'm just more tolerant - dunno. There doesn't appear to be any alternative out there that does anything close to what it'll do either...

"Hate" is such a strong word to use, describing one's reaction to consumer software.

It fits.

Okay, I'm going to "swim against the stream" on this one and say that I have no problems or issues with iTunes, it seems to work fine for me. I load iPods with music and set them on shuffle at my office and in both my cars and have never had an issue. I buy from their library and upload CDs.

^^
I think it's great that some people like and use iTunes. I just wish it was optional. If you've got an Apple device, you've got iTunes running around in it waiting to rear its ugly head.

The thing I don't get is that if it's so bad and so universally disliked why nobody else has bothered to write a new piece of software to do what it does only better...

Have they? Am I just ignorant of it? I don't want to stream as stated before, I want to have seamless integration between devices and be able to upload content to my devices so I don't have to stream it and kill my data plan and battery.

So is there an alternative? iTunes works for me but I'm willing to entertain an alternative if there is one.

I have no interest in streaming. I can't do it in an airplane and I don't want to kill my data allowance when elsewhere and not on wi-fi.

With spotify you can save music locally in addition to streaming. I keep a few gigs of playlists sync'ed to my phone for the times I don't have/ don't want to use data.

Put me on the ITUNES SUCKS list as well.

In fact the comment that it would have to improve to suck is right on.

I'm one of those who have no issues with iTunes.

First and foremost, iTunes is a media management tool. There are people with 100,000 songs, movies, TV shows, apps, podcasts, books, iTunes U courses, etc, etc, some stored locally, some on external drives, and it manages all of this quite well. You can have multiple iDevices, and it will sync what you want to whatever device you want, down to the individual song, if you want to do that.

The flip side of this is that any tool capable of all that will necessarily be complicated. There's a learning curve, to be sure, but I've been through it and now I'm good.

I buy music from sources other than Apple (which I think is the most expensive source out there). I have to download zip files, get the music into my library, and then sync my library to my phone. I have no issue with this.

For those with DRM music, Apple abandoned DRM in 2009 and provided a method to replace your DRM music with DRM free music. I never had the issue so I don't know the steps, but I'm sure if you search you can find it.

I don't do a lot of streaming myself, I'm often someplace where there is no signal. Plus, it uses data from my plan. I also find it skips, like say when I drive through a dead zone. It buffers some, but often not enough.

As long as you have DRM free music, this shouldn't be much of an issue. The music should all be stored locally on your computer as M4A or MP3 files. Just copy it to the new location and add it to your new platform.

If by some chance your other platform can't handle M4A files, iTunes can convert them to MP3 for you.

A quick Google search produced this. This is the first hit, there are many, many more.

Kill the DRM in Your Old iTunes Music Purchases | WIRED

I like iTunes. For me it's great. I agree tho it Should be optional.

I'm no fan of Apple (my kids own a few of their devices; I don't), but I fail to see people's overt hatred of iTunes. I've been using it as my primary media player since it came out, and I've never had an issue with it. I do like Matt says he wants to...dump all my music onto iTunes (that was mostly purchased on Amazon, or downloaded through CD's and various other programs...), hit shuffle, and can listen for weeks. My default opening window is my library; I've never even seen an ad...

My most recent issue with iTunes - and it may be my car system, I don't know, is when I plug my iPhone into the car's USB port it turns the radio off and starts playing the music on my phone. It doesn't even ask what song I want to listen to, it just starts playing something. All I want to do is charge my phone. Why does it assume I want to turn the radio off and listen to some random song on iTunes? Why doesn't it at least ask what I want it to do?

That's not a function of your iTunes or iPhone; it's a function of your car stereo. Anytime you plug in a device to the media port, the stereo assumes you want to play the music you have stored on that device (USB drive, phone, whatever). It starts up with whatever song was last playing on your device--or at least it should. ALL car stereos are like this.

Itune's bad because it does way too much. I've lived in Apple's ecosystem for years and sometimes I can't tell if I'm looking at my music on my connected Ipad, on my mac, or on their store... And they change the "purchased" playlist every release too... It's a hot mess... The interface is awful, does too much and nothing well, kinda like a swiss knife...

I wish they'd separate Iphone/Ipad management and music player completely. I'm currently looking for apps that replace itunes altogether but deal with its library. There's a market for these, as several exist on the Mac that upsample too, and I'm leaning towards Stezza for the Ipad I use as a stereo - nicer simpler interface. $1.99 ! Kinda sucks you have to buy something to fix their mess but it's the price of 1.5 song...

If anyone has other recommendations, I'm all ears... I just had to buy another utility to export entire catalogs to formats that play in my wife's car, too. Itunes couldn't do it quickly but that utility scripted it and automated the process... It's got power but that interface is an embarassment !

We're an all Apple house too - have been from the start, and I've got to agree the latest version of iTunes blows. So does the newest version of Photos (used to be iPHoto). They're trying to force you to buy all their subscription services like iCloud and whatever the latest music streaming crap they've got is... There's supposed to be a new OSX coming out soon, so we'll see if it gets better or worse...

Every new version has been worse... in the sense that they try to make the mac more like an ipad.
Bad idea... I'm sticking with Apple because they don't crash, and they don't get patched as often... and because Windows is going the same direction... but really I wish they'd let us use a mac like the computer it is, circa 3 or 4 OS releases ago.. Enough with the big icons, tiles, and tabletification of computers...