2002: "Apple is contemplating ... an 'iPhone.'"

What are the problems for me? * Abysmal interface for large collections. _You_ try navigating around a multi-thousand entry main playlist. * Because it insists on maintaining its own database but doesn't make any effort to keep it up-to-date, it goes bad easily if you do _any_ housekeeping. Decide you don't like a file and move it out of your main folder, or have to rerip an album for a reason? You now have to manually move the old files out from iTunes, one by one. I might be able to do better if I let iTunes manage my library, but given how much I prefer other software for playing off the PC rather than the iPod, that wasn't something I was prepared to do and it should be able to handle it better than this. * Very basic duplicate files finding, which interacts with the above. Does such a simplistic match that it grabs huge numbers of false positives, making it unneccessarily difficult to find where you've actually got duplicates. You then can't see what the file path is or sort by the missing file marker so it's a real pain to remove the old version and leave behind only the new. Back to removing them one by one. * I've no idea what it's doing, but it multiplies artists and albums all over the place. Other music library programs I've used were bright enough to tell that BEATLES, Beatles and The Beatles were all the same band. ITunes isn't, including giving some multiples that appear identical in the interface. It periodically does the same with albums too, making album playlists vastly less useful because rather than one seven track album you have seven, identically named, one-track albums with ascending track numbers. * Play me my top rated songs within a genre. Can't do. Show me my top rated songs by a particular band or even within an individual album. Can't do. * Podcasts resume part-way through if you jumped out into another part of the software; 'Songs' don't - why? That's annoying with some long classical or prog track, doubly so with a podcast I simply decided not to manage with ITunes (because, frankly, I didn't find its podcast software any better than the rest of it).

I could go on... It's one of the worst music managers / MP3 players I've used.

ITunes is pretty and relatively easy to use (for simple tasks - anything out of the ordinary is a real pain IMHO) but that's as far as I'd go in its praise. For me they've created an MP3 player which is designed to handle tens of thousands of songs but lumbered it with the software to do a few hundred and left it. That's not good enough. It might have been barely adequate in 2001 (I'm not convinced frankly) but it's an embarrassment by now.