I've had it with iTunes!!!

[Richie Witch]

Last night was the final straw!

In June, the iTunes update screwed up my account so badly that even after several hours of repairing the damage, I realized I'd never be able to sync my iPod again.

Last night, I was forced to uninstall every Apple product on my rig just to reinstall iTunes, and when it finally launched, a third of my music library was randomly missing. Music that is in the actual Apple Media folder is just randomly not in iTunes. Scores of album covers that have been in my account for years are now unrecognized...

I've had it. Are there any viable alternatives to iTunes? I don't have an iPhone, so I'm not tethered to Apple that way. I have a fourth generation 64 GB iPod Touch and a Windows phone running Win8.1. My music library is around 600 albums and 8000 songs, around 75 GB (and growing, of course).

I know Amazon just killed their music library/player software...

So what else is out there? I'd like to be able to sync my devices, but that's not a deal breaker. Just being able to organize and play my music on my computer would be a big improvement.

[Angstrom]

If you are on a PC then MusicBee or MediaMonkey are pretty good.

I've used Mediamonkey for years, I like their tagging and searching features. I've heard that MusicBee is very similar, perhaps preferable.
They are very classic sorts of Windows apps, with skins and all that stuff.
I think both apps can sync your phone if you need that. Also they have features like DNLA sharing.

[H20nly]

I hate iTunes too, but I believe there is still a chance to get your music back. It's been a while since I did this so my memory is foggy, but there is a database index that iTunes uses to display your tracks. Deleting that and letting it rebuild should return your tracks to iTunes. It was Apple support that walked me through it. A search for terms pertaining to iTunes/index/rebuild library and the like might find the instructions. I'm on a phone in transit or I'd try and find you a link...

Non-Apple media players are so much easier to use. Drag and drop at its finest.

Good luck

[H20nly]

Here it is

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203225

[beats me]

iTunes Match. Released November 2011. Puts all your music in the cloud. No need to wire sync a device. Stream or download to your device, no manual drag and drop needed. All your music is backed up if your drive(s) fail. $25 a year.























Reliability may vary.

[Richie Witch]

When Amazon first introduced their cloud-based music storage, they let me put my entire collection up on their servers. What I discovered was that it took longer for the database to search for a song than it did to play the song.

So I haven't been too keen to jump back onto a cloud-based service since.

Have things improved enough to make it worth it?

[john gordon]

I use match and it works great even without wifi.

[BoddAH]

I ditched my music library since I have Apple Music.

Who needs a hundred gigs rotting away in a hdd when you have instant accesse to pretty much all commercial music ever released.

[Richie Witch]

So I finally settled on Media Monkey, and so far I'm pretty pleased. There were only three albums that didn't load with their tags properly. Nearly all the album art came up, including stuff that I had downloaded from SoundCloud, which I thought was amazing. And since there are no prohibitions on MP3's having album art (unlike iTunes), some of my stuff finally looks the way I want.

I didn't have a chance to sync my iPod yet, but from what I'm reading, I can check for things on my iPod that didn't make it into the library, and move things in both directions until they match. Same with my Windows phone.

I can still buy music directly through the client, via Amazon. So for now--life is good!

[Richie Witch]

I ditched my music library since I have Apple Music.

Who needs a hundred gigs rotting away in a hdd when you have instant accesse to pretty much all commercial music ever released.

Well, that's part of my problem. About a third of the ~8,000 tracks I own were either never commercially released, or released through such obscure channels/limited production/micro-labels/only sold at live performances, etc, that they don't exist in any commercial database.

All I really wanted out of iTunes was that if I filled it with all this bizarre, obscure stuff, it would just keep it for me, and let me rotate things around on my iPod. But the second time in six months that it lost a big chunk of my library and dumped scores of album art that it had originally tagged, I'd had it. My album art folder was already big--I shouldn't have to look up the entire Skinny Puppy catalog, or Rage Against the Machine's debut album--that's stuff is well-known and has been properly tagged by iTunes for years. And then it's gone?

It was time to dump it.

[Tarekith]

iTunes does make back ups of it's database, did you try reloading one of those? In your Music -> iTunes folder it's called "Previous iTunes Libraries".

Personally I've never had any issues with iTunes like this, so hard to guess what's causing it. Up until this last version of iTunes, I actually liked it for my needs, worked fine as long as I set it to not move files around for me. I admit the newest version of itunes is very unintuitive though, not at all easy to find what you want by any means other than search.

I think at this point, it's stilly to try and use your music app to manage all your iOS devices, syncing, back ups, etc. They need to make iTunes just about the music, and come out with an iSync app or something that focuses on that getting everything to and from your other devices.

[Richie Witch]

So now that I've spent several weeks with Media Monkey, I thought I'd post an update.

Pluses:

1. * Fully compatible with Windows phones running Windows 8, and opens a separate pane in the software showing the contents of your phone's media library in a format that matches your computer's media library. Drag and drop in either direction to make changes.
   * The "Autotag from web" feature has located some of the incredibly obscure music I own, including album art and lyrics.
   * The "Edit Duplicates" feature actually looks at the waveforms of the duplicates when deciding if they are truly duplicates.

Minuses:

1. * Cannot sync with Apple products unless iTunes is installed... even though you disable iTunes, it still must be installed.
   * Not compatible with AIFF files, so if iTunes imported any of your CDs in this format, you'll have to find the disks and re-import them.
   * The "Visualizer" isn't as cool.

Overall, it feels like an upgrade over iTunes for me. It just means that I'll probably be retiring my iPod Touch and doing more with my Windows phone.

[beats me]

Windows doesn’t have some kind of cloud based service/application? Seems kind of odd they wouldn’t at this point.

[Richie Witch]

Because of the size of my library, I've never had any luck with cloud-based services. I tried Amazon's for a day and it was incredibly frustrating. I just have too much music and it's ever expanding. But even if the technology improves, I'd be stuck with a monthly fee that I'd rather spend on my Digitally Imported subscription.

Just an associated bit of trivia--Media Monkey says my library would take 18.9 continues days to play.

[beats me]

Well again, iTunes Match $25 a year. Everything in your library streamable and downloadable on your iPod Touch without ever having to plug a cable in.

My library is over 34 days of play.