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A rant about how I finally ditched iTunes... :D

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wreckedcarzz:
Just an FYI: Mac/iTunes users, please don't take offense. This is a LONG rant about how much iTunes sucks (just my opinion, you see *cough*).

Some background info:

I used to never listen to music. Ever. It was boring. A few years back I got an AM/FM radio w/ a CD player in it, and eventually got bored of it- it didn't integrate with my PC in any way. (Everything I own anymore has to be able to work with my computer in some way or I will use it about 3 times and forget about it). I had Windows Media Player 9, with version 10 coming in the near future, but nothing to play. Apple was not exactly one of my most favorite companies, but they did have something everyone used- iTunes.

iTunes was slow and confusing to me, so I went back to my FM stations. A couple years ago, I gave out and got the new iTunes (it was version 6 I think). A few friends gave me some songs via MSN and I was all excited. Except...iTunes was still the slow, confusing thing it used to be. And the FORCED install of the buggy and insecure QuickTime didn't exactly make me all excited about it, either. But it was the norm, and I was just another follower of a bandwagon of annoying teenage iTunes lovers.

About a year ago, I got extremely angry. iTunes had taken up a chunk of my hard drive, it was slow even on my new laptop, and the store took ages to load. I dropped out once again.

So, 6 months ago, I got it one last time (for my laptop, that is) and all was well. I was finally happy with version 7, and it was starting to be more logical. So, good deal! I also installed in my new desktop PC, and it ran great. I was buying music like crazy, playing it 24/7, and having a great time.

So why switch from iTunes?

Basically, it was a big trail of events. First, it wasn't open source (I find it ironic that Apple uses a UNIX base for Mac OS X, but you have to buy the thing...). After I was kinda bugged by that, the problems with Vista were insane. It wouldn't open. It would give errors. This, that, the other. So I almost uninstalled it, but kept faith. Apple released a patch, and all was well. But then, I noticed 2 things that I had forgotten about:

"iTunesHelper.exe" starts up on boot automatically- if you remove it, the next time you start iTunes, it makes the startup entry again. >:(
"iPodService.exe" starts up in the same manner as iTunesHelper, except that if you DELETE it, it either:
a) makes it again
b) gives you this error, with an option to not show it again, but the option does nothing- it shows up EVERY SINGLE TIME
You would think iTunes would ask "Do you have an iPod?" before installing the other 50+ MB of crap that goes with it.
There is also an iTunesService (or something along those lines) that puts itself as a freaking Windows Service, to FURTHER slow your boot down (and IMO, it is probably a marketing thing to make you think "Wow this PC is slow, I wonder if a Mac is faster?")

(In case you don't know, I am very critical about programs I use, and if just one thing is off (ex: "theobject" instead of "the object" in a window) somewhere it will force me to send an email to the developer, and possibly uninstall the whole program. I am *VERY* picky.)

I am happy to announce...
I uninstalled iTunes from my laptop a month ago- it hasn't changed a bit, and will never see my hard drive again.
As well as my desktop PC that is running Vista

However, this is what blew me off the edge. I spent an hour looking on the Apple Support site for an iTunes feedback option, that is no longer there (that made me even more angry!!!), after finding out...

If you are on Vista, and you run iTunes: iTunes does not uninstall fully. :o >:(

I kept getting Apple Software Update appearing every week or so, and about 2 1/2 hours ago, did a search (I love the Vista search :-*) for "Apple". Out of a total of about 50 items, about 30 were leftover from iTunes/Quicktime. They took up almost 200MB! :o And I havn't even run a RegEdit search yet, oh boy...

-----New Music Player-----

I have switched (both personally, and other people) over to the open source program musikCube (http://www.musikcube.com/) that does the same thing as iTunes, but I can put it on my Linux PC, WITHOUT DRM, and WITHOUT lag or suspicious startup entries. :Thmbsup:

-Brandon

Darwin:
Yup. Sounds familiar. I went through much the same process and am now glad to be iTunes/QuickTime free - for pretty much the same reasons!

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=10146.0

Grorgy:
Me too, I also hated that installer thing it had, i thought, somewhat foolishly perhaps that it would install only the apple products you had, ohh nooo, it installed all itunes and quicktime which, at the time was a bigger problem to me than now, as then i had a 1 gb download limit and itunes and quicktime took a tenth of that almost blahhhh.

As apple free as i can be now  :)

edbro:
Unfortunately, if you have an iPod, you need iTunes. It is the only thing that can do firmware updates. I use JRiver Media Center to handle all my multimedia needs, including syncing my iPod. But, no 3rd party utility will do the firmware update. I have disabled all the Apple services from startup, I think there were 3 total. And, I did not install the Apple Updater as that was an option on install.

CWuestefeld:
As annoying as iTunes may be, it doesn't hold a candle to Zune's awfulness. What's worse, Zune owners can only use the Zune software for managing their devices -- it's a completely closed interface to other software. A week after installing it, and I haven't discovered any way to do the most basic operations like, say, editing ID3 tags info for a track.

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