iTunes is not the best music player!

Overcommercialized media players suck. It's about that simple to me.
Real Player sucked, and still, although they've cleaned it up some, sucks. WinAmp was, up to around v2.83 seemingly "community", but the 3.0 release was sometime around the release and pick-up of iTunes, and the program went to hell, in a feverish, and pathetic attempt at preserving it's user base, by making a 5th-graders fushion-app, resulting in something as useless and unappealing as one would think when faced with the equation "iTunes+WinAmp =". Oh, and let's not forget the gloreous, and strangely popular, Windows Media Player. The dumbest and sorriest excuse for a 'media' app I've ever seen anyone actually use. And to the users of this idiot-app; No, it doesn't handle movies well. No, it doesn't handle Mp3's at all. No, the interface is not easy and modern; it's fugly and maneuvering through the retarded selection of features is much like figuring out the releasing company's EULA's; You just can't win.

But all of the above don't matter to most (all but Linux users *wave*), since iTunes has become hugely popular. And this is all fine and dandy, but let's not get carried away. Indeed, iTunes, in many ways, has taken on the challenge of handling large music libraries and the desire to download, rather than pay the extra $10 to feed the idiot behind the counter at your local CD dump. IMnsHO (In My not so Humble Opinion), this is fantastic, and praise to you Apple for continuing to make decent, and in this case, above average quality products for the people. But I get a twitch whenever I hear people say that iTunes is the best music player (deviating from the popular "media player", since iTunes only plays Music. No, the sucky Quicktime reference for movie playback doesn't count), since there are better solutions out there. iTunes has many useful features, but Apple seems a little slow in understanding the regular punters needs, such as myself. Here are a few examples;

1. Writing ID3 tags:
Why, oh why Apple, won't you let me change tracks, or at the very least flick through my library/playlists while writing tags? Why do I have to look at the already plenty invasive popup, showing me exactly what track is being (re-)tagged - rather than let me enjoy my music. It's not that hard; Make it a background process, not the first priority.

2. Search?
Yes, iTunes has glorious search capabilities.. Well, not quite. iTunes supports ID3v2 tags which are great and allow all kinds of useful (and some quite useless) information to be stored as metadata. But Apple won't let me search my library for most of these, which can be somewhat annoying if you hear a good song and two weeks later want to hear it again. It's gone from Recently Played, in my case it won't be in recently added anymore.. It's somewhat gone. And even if I tagged it with something suitable, like "Awesome jazz" in the comments - iTunes won't bother look at the comments for its searching.

3. Sidebar
What the hell is up with this? iTunes should not dictate my layout of this sidebar. I'm somewhat of a music lover, and I have *tons* of music, and therefor tons of playlists, and it really does make my eyes turn into flaming Apple logos. You can't move a playlist. FUN! The last made, and therefor probably most relevant playlist, is at the bottom, so I can have lots of fun exercizing my index-finger, scrolling the list - Oh the joy.

4. How I love queues
Why won't Apple or iTunes developers allow me to 'wing' my playlist? WinAmp did this more or less from the get go (although it wouldn't surprise me if they removed it, just to maximize the suckiness of 3.0+) and I consider it a must. But all apple will let me do, quickly anyway, is set a song to "play next in Party Shuffle"; an AI playlist that picks songs I like to party to at a 'whim' - Needless to say, I dislike this concept.


There; 4 iTunes petpeeves you can either help solve, nod at and throw me a comment, or lastly and more probable; toss digital bricks at my IP for bashing a product from the fruity "we wear jeans, dude" company.

The good news, and perhaps the only thing I have to offer you, dear reader (beyond a need for Anger Management), would be my list of *great* music players. These are Open Source and are clearly made for people, by people that want to listen to music.

My two top picks are Banshee and Rhythmbox. They have each their strengths, althugh I would agree to the notion that Rhythmbox is a bit old-school compared to Banshee. In any event; they do all of the above correctly, and more over; Rhythmbox has a neat function called Party-mode - the name pretty much says it all; it'll maximize the window, and whenever one of your beer chugging comrades makes a spastic handgesture and hits the keyboard/mouse, signifying that he wants to change the track, it will be enqueued rather than replace the current song. I, at least, found this useful.
Oh, and they both support media key shortcuts, iPod's, music sharing, last.fm and much more.

I should mention that I'm not really suggesting all mac users switch to Linux(GNOME), but merely reflecting upon some flaws/bugs in what is often called the worlds best media/music player. I hope this might reach some enlightened iTunes developer (clearly, not all of them are).


Well, I think that's enough whining about Apple for one night... That reminds me; I need to change tracks ... !