I've long used iTunes, not as a player so much as a transport to get music onto my iPod or iPhone. It's *always* been a bloated program, and every release seems to get a little worse. The interface is great for syncing with an iPod though, and that's what kept me using it. Until this weekend anyway.
Ever since V10 came out this fall with the arrival of the new iPods, the software has been a frustrating mess. Frequent crashes were bad enough, but I've also started to see other weirdness like album art being corrupted and needing be replaced. Add the fact that iTunes has never been very good for maintaining multiple libraries (I have a lossless library in ALAC format, and my MP3 library for portable use) and I decided it was time to throw in the towel.
I've used foobar as my player for quite awhile, it's a great program and very customizable in both performance and appearance, with many plug-ins available. I have two installations of it, one for each of my two libraries. When listening to music on my computer I almost always listen to the lossless library, even though I'm about 99% sure that I can't tell the difference between a high quality MP3 file (i.e. LAME V0) and a lossless file.
So I spent some time this weekend getting comfortable with the iPod plug in, and creating new playlists for my Classic and my iPhone. I also found some great foobar skins here. While it may not be quite as intuitive as using iTunes, that minor shortfall is more than offset by not having to deal with the bloat and crashes and artwork problems.
In short, Itunes: goodbye and good riddance!
Coming up is a post about french trumpeter Erik Truffaz...
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