I hate iTunes. It’s official, I can’t stand it; the way it looks, the way it works, everything about it just drives me nuts. But I told myself this post wouldn’t just be a rant, so I’m going to take it nice and slowly and work through my problems. I have to start off by saying that I only have two apple products, one being my beautiful iPod video and the other been iTunes. It’s not that I hate Macs, it’s just I don’t like the way they look or work, call it been a windows child since I was 5, or my few experiences all been negative (and by experiences I don’t mean two minutes on it before giving up, I’ve spent days on Macs along with UNIX, Linux and other OSs).

Anyway, back on topic, iTunes. It’s awful. Sure it might look all nice and pretty, it plays songs and that’s all you’d ask of a music player right? Wrong. How about the ability to rescan a folder to check for new or missing songs? How about the ability to automatically get album art for you (when I rip 200 CDs I don’t expect to have to go through and manually do this Apple). Windows Media Player can do this, Winamp (my current choice) can do this, but iTunes? No, you have to either put up with it or go looking for third party add-ons. Why?! As it now stands I’ve got just over 1300 songs on my ipod along with a few movies (all converted using Videora as iTunes just took forever) and I’m happy. But once a month or so I have to sync my pod to my PC to add on the few dozen or so new songs I’m likely to have garnered by that time. In winamp I can simply hit rescan on the media library and my new songs are shown up instantly. In iTunes I either have to go through and manually add the new songs (which I can never remember) or I have to delete my entire library and re-import it. How nice. /sarcasm.

I understand there are those who love iTunes, who will stand by it till the death and fight off any and all like me. They would sing its praises; its beautiful looks, the iTunes music store and its seamless integration with the iPod. Well I would respond like this; “beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there’s still no way I’m going to buy legal downloads with all their DRM crap and lastly they built the dam mp3 player, why shouldn’t it update seamlessly!”

Honestly, as soon as my warranty runs out (hopefully not before the battery does) I will dump yamiPod or similar onto it and be done with iTunes once and for all. If Apple actually added the very basic facilities iTunes is missing I would consider it a valid music player, but until they do it is merely a fisher price piece of software with an apple slapped on it.