iTunes for Windows SUCKS

Peen

My wife has an iPod Nano and she's really sick of iTunes. It's slow, it's crabby, and it makes a general pain of itself at every turn. But she didn't (until I told her) know that there were other programs that you could use to interface with your player and you didn't have to be tied to Apple's annoying program, so shes tasked me with finding an alternative.

Problem is, I only know about these programs in the abstract. Looking around the net has yielded Media Monkey and Winamp as possible alternatives; do any of you use a program other than iTunes to work with their iPod and if so what do you use and how well does it work?

Crashtard

I've never done it personally, but I've heard many people on this forum say that Rockbox is a great substitute for Itunes. I'm sure that either MediaMonkey would do well too.

shadydentist

Songbird.
getsongbird.com

I use it and love it.

Red_Cascade

I use SharePod - http://www.getsharepod.com/

Very basic and lightweight, and really just gives you a drag and drop interface. If you are looking for something non-techie I would say it is worth a look.

As you are not using it on a brand new iPod this isn't important, but just incase anyone else reads this you do need to connect the iPod to iTunes at least once for SharePod to recognise it. After that you can remove itunes with no issues.

matt has a problem

Crashtard wrote: »

I've never done it personally, but I've heard many people on this forum say that Rockbox is a great substitute for Itunes. I'm sure that either MediaMonkey would do well too.

I've used it, and it's nicely functional.

DHS Odium

I also use Songbird. I like it quite a bit.

Willeth

matthasaproblem wrote: »

Crashtard wrote: »

I've never done it personally, but I've heard many people on this forum say that Rockbox is a great substitute for Itunes. I'm sure that either MediaMonkey would do well too.

I've used it, and it's nicely functional.

It's also not a replacement for iTunes. It's a replacement firmware for the player, and isn't really what the OP is looking for.

Dog

Songbird is good.

RBach

Willeth wrote: »

matthasaproblem wrote: »

Crashtard wrote: »

I've never done it personally, but I've heard many people on this forum say that Rockbox is a great substitute for Itunes. I'm sure that either MediaMonkey would do well too.

I've used it, and it's nicely functional.

It's also not a replacement for iTunes. It's a replacement firmware for the player, and isn't really what the OP is looking for.

To clarify, Rockbox is the replacement firmware.

As for iTunes alternatives, the only one that I've found to be even close to a reasonable replacement has been MediaMonkey. The free version lacks advanced Smart Playlist-like functionality, but it handles almost everything else iTunes does superbly (even podcasts and audiobooks which are easily what I spend most of my time with). It even supports the iPod Touch and iPhone pretty well. My only complaint is that it doesn't do video at all, but that's a minor complaint as I don't really use that functionality much anyway.

Speaking of which...does anyone know of a program that will put video and television on the Touch? I'd (almost) never have to use iTunes at all :D:D

Peen

Nice, thanks everyone. I'll download a few and see what she likes the best.

kuhlmeye

After using Winamp with my iPod classic, I would not recommend it. It was constantly having problems, took longer to do what I wanted it to, and crashed a lot. Don't use Winamp, it actually sent me back to iTunes.

BoomShake

Guys.
Foobar2000

Basically, the exact opposite of iTunes with resource usage. Super light weight, fully customizable, a plethora of audio processing filters and whatnot to make stuff sound great, and more. Takes a little while to get used to.

Use that for your listening on the computer, use something like SharePod to transfer stuff to your iPod, and you'll be set.

Smurph

I like songbird because I can make it look almost exactly like iTunes if not better, and stuff like getting album art and customizing the appearance works a lot better. What i don't like about songbird is that 3-second lag I get when I first try t play a song. It's like it has to rev up the engine or something, and after that it's fine. Also it LIES when it tries to sync songs to my sansa mp3 player. It will go through all the motions as if it were really transferring songs, give me a little "transfer successful" message, and then none of the songs will actually show up on the player. So songbird is cool but not perfect by a long shot.

RBach

Foobar is nice and all, but I'm betting it would be too barebones/require too much customization to be a good pick. Realistically, I think it comes down to MediaMonkey or Songbird.

IvanIssacs

I've been using winamp for managing music/ipod for awhile. It will sometimes crash in the middle of transferring music but it hasn't really given me much of a problem.

Gonna check out that songbird player when I get home.

1ddqd

Songbird on a first gen Ipod Mini - works like a charm - it's built for Ipods, also has functionality for other brand MP3 players, but Ipods work the best. The extension features ("feathers", I think they're called) are pretty cool, as well.