Comments on: Apple locks new iPods to iTunes

By: Amarok music player to support iPod Classic

Amarok music player to support iPod Classic — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:24:55 +0000

[...] the recent news, about the new iPods being locked to iTunes exclusively, it looks like iTunes won’t have exclusive access to them much longer. The Amarok [...]

By: Griffith

Griffith — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 01:48:51 +0000

Frogman, I think that there’s something terribly wrong with your computer, as I’ve experienced none of those problems and I have a very large music collection, which I manage with iTunes.

By: Frogman

Frogman — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:00:07 +0000

Why use another software to sync my iPod? Well why buy an iPod? I bought my iPod Classic 160GB because it is the only reasonably priced mp3 player that works (sort of anyway, current artwork, syncing problems not withstanding).

Back to the original question:why use anything but iTunes? The short answer is that iTunes sucks. The long answer is:
1. iTunes is buggy. It stalls, it stops, it hesitates, it slows down your machine when set to anything but “manage my music manually.” And then there is the occasional blue screen/reboot when syncing (started with firmware 1.0.1).
2. iTunes does a terrible job with artwork: it doesn’t recognize album art in album folders automatically all the time. Then there is that buggy “autodownload” “feature” which if you have anything over 5000 songs is more or less useless.
3. iTunes is horrible at managing large collections: tagging, renaming, “repathing” (in a flexible way), and managing artwork, is slower and doesn’t work nearly as well as several free alternatives. Hell, even WMP is better than iTunes at those things. And neither even comes close to the best of the best: Mediamonkey.
4. iTunes, the store, is outrageously overpriced. If you use the software you might be tempted to actually use the store. Yikes!
5. iTunes is UGLY. Really it is. Not so much the brushed metal thing which is nice, but the interface is kludgey and surprisingly unintuitive especially for Apple and especially compared to the iPod’s GUI (even if the iPod classic has lost a little of its “cleaness” with the new coverflow split-screen).

By: MTRNZ

MTRNZ — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:48:22 +0000

Can’t imagine what you would have written if Microsoft would have made the same manouver. Don’t say they doesn’t (in fact it happened a lot of times), but it’s a fact the reaction on certain blogs is VERY different when the sinner becomes Apple…

By: Super Jamie

Super Jamie — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:41:02 +0000

Good news, everyone!

The encryption on the iTunes DB was cracked yesterday, so anything using libgpod will be able to sync to 6G iPods. Some guys from the Amarok dev team broke it here
http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/496-iPod-Classic-Will-Be-Supported.html

Still doesn’t fix the face that iPod Touch is a poorly-executed re-hash of the iPhone, or the iPod Classic has EVEN MORE INFERIOR sound chips to the rest of the lineup.

Apple is really slipping. The new Microsoft?

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:23:44 +0000

Although I do mainly use iTunes, I can think of several reasons why not to: firstly, itunes takes up loads of memory (especially for older pcs) and is also a really hefty download at 56mb (and has to be downloaded again and again each update) secondly, if you’re already using another piece of software, you might as have it all in one place, but thirdly – just because it’s fun to experiment with the different things you can do with it!

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 19:05:31 +0000

Have you tried alternatives? I wouldn’t consider Winamp (even with it’s media library) a real alternative to iTunes. Try Mediamonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com) and you’ll see the advantages, including speed, over iTunes. The sooner this is broken the better.