Performance was also bad compared to Windows Media Player, never mind Foobar2000 etc.
And for syncing, the non apple devices just let you copy the files onto them as USB Mass Storage devices, only the iPod needed special software.
Loved me some Creative Zen MICRO. I'm sure there were better competitors but it's what I had. There was a tiny 1" mechanical HDD in it with a compact flash interface. The drive is now part of my office desk flare. A real conversation starter.
Same here. I eventually replaced my iPod with an Android phone, but found a software combo that allowed you to sync your iTunes library to your phone just as easily, and also enable reverse syncing of ratings and playback counts. Sadly those apps have been sold to some company that's trying to turn them into cash grabs, but at least for now the old versions keep working for me, even on my new phone and Android 14 (albeit with some tweaking that's rather requires a rooted phone).
The advantage of iTunes is that it's perfect for also managing my collection of radio comedy, because you can easily re-classify manually imported files to be treated as podcasts, which makes for a nice UX (podcasts remember their playback position, and podcast apps track which episodes you've already listened to and which are still unlistened). Most other podcast apps don't allow manual file management, so I'd have to set up fake podcast feeds for my local files otherwise, which would definitely be a hassle.
It's nice owning things. It has no ads, unlimited skips, and music doesn't sporadically disappear.
No. It has always been awful.
I was briefly excited to hear that media synchronization had been separated from iTunes. That gave me hope that I would be able to put media on my phone without a cloud intermediary and without the crippling mess of iTunes. But, sadly, my experience is that the Apple Devices App simply doesn't recognize my phone at all, so it's non-functional for me.
I last used iTunes on windows in like 2010 or so, I think. It was pretty awful. Although, it did have a neat feature, you could share your library over the lan, so it was neat to listen to other people’s music in a dorm. I’m sure they’ve removed that feature by now, it was too good to be true.
The sentiment surrounding the iTunes release for Windows was notably intriguing. I recall that quite a few people seriously considered taking a day off just for its launch!
Present day, I only ever install iTunes on a Windows machine to do backups. My parents still use it to copy CDs to their phones, but that's it.
Even if— sorry, when— my library got corrupted, and when different sections started taking 1-2 seconds to load, I still liked using it.
I only switched away from iTunes when I switched to subscription-based streaming.