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Comment by pooriaazimi | Hacker News Reader

Haha. Great to see iTunes and QuickTime (Windows versions, probably?) on the list... Apple should really either update them (I'm not sure iTunes 11 will be released for windows too), or just abandon them (and ask customers to use iCloud for backup). A few days ago I opened a .mov on a Windows machine with QuickTime - it was horrible. I can't imagine how dreadful iTunes probably is. No wonder all PC guys hate iTunes...

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I hate iTunes on every platform. It's bloated; it tries to do too many things and it does them all wrong. Just as an example, searching for anything with iTunes is a horrible experience, particularly when compared with searching the 'net with any of the top search engines. Book, app and media management are terrible. Cross-computer management of the same is terrible. Backing-up your iPhone, if you are not careful, can result in erasing every single app from your phone and replacing them with what happens to be on the new machine's iTunes. Take a music database that Windows Media deals with without any issues whatsoever (devoid of metadata other than folders with the album name and files with the song names). Import it into iTunes and watch it get mangled. Albums get destroyed, songs end-up categorized in weird ways, etc.

Yeah, I feel you. I'm on OS X and hate iTunes with a passion (it's almost an obsession). I almost died of grief when I learned iTunes 11 was delayed...

The sheer number of bugs that crapware has is unbelievable. And don't get me started on Music.app on iPad (iOS 5 and 6), or the dreadful state of "Shared Media" in iPhone and iPad's Music apps (stream from a computer).

God I hate them. If I ever switch from iOS/Mac, iTunes/Music.app are to blame.

I hate iTunes too for all of the reasons mentioned above, however there's one thing it does at least half-ok'ish:

It doesn't eat a ton of CPU while playing a few simple MP3s...

I've tried using Clementine (an Amarok-fork, my favourite music-player by far, at least on Linux) but it's just a resource-hog - comparatively at least.

So yeah - does anyone have suggestions on what to use for music playback? Something that doesn't suck? Something that doesn't waste precious CPU-cycles without reason, generating heat and wasting battery on the go?

I've been using http://www.foobar2000.org/ for almost 10 years now. Though most of my music now is in the cloud, I always keep a heavily modded version of fb2k on my PC.

This is BY FAR the best audio player available.

I had some respect for Amarok when I was on KDE 6-7 years ago. Nowhere close to fb2k though. Nowadays on Linux I prefer just plain old mpd.

> Heavily modded version

That's the problem i found with foobar. I always enjoyed WinAmp and still miss it to this day on mac. Itunes is no comparison.

But there is a Mac version of WinAMP (tho I've nver used it) http://www.winamp.com/mac

You can work just fine with out of the box experience, there's even customization wizard now.

PC guy here. Have used Fedora for years as my daily OS and the only reason i have a Windows VM on my linux machine is actually because i love iTunes so much. I don't have an iDevice, either.

I've used a vast array of media players for Linux and Windows and nothing i can find matches the features iTunes has for organizing my music library.

However, it's difficult to understand why Apple doesn't update iTunes on Windows more frequently. I'm pretty sure the last iTunes update on Windows fixed well over twenty-five security vulnerabilities in open source libraries that were known for upwards of six months to everyone.

While that STILL doesn't match the negligence of companies like Oracle and Adobe, it's still negligence. Unacceptable negligence which is putting users at risk.

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