fucking itunes blew away all my music

[stimpee]

I must say that I dont use iTunes for my music library either. I just dont like it. But I know its a different beast on the mac. On the PC its bloated and overbearing, taking over everything media related on your machine (along with Quicktime). Also if you have multiple devices (iphone + ipod) you have to keep a separate library. Getting music OFF your ipod with itunes is also a pain in the ass (not possible with iTunes). Sharing libraries is also not possible I think (as in put the library on the network and have multiple devices read/write to it at the same time). Im sure there are hacks around it but from what Ive read theyre not that good. Windows users should check out Aethyr tho.

Songbird got some investment money from Philips and basically stopped all development on what they were doing to make a custom Philips Songbird (this included stopping Linux builds i think). Now theyre back on track and the amount of devices they support is rapidly increasing. v1.8 is out and its getting better. Still not ready for prime time tho.

Also when I add my NAS to the library it wants to calculate gapless playback for everything. Trying to make it stop just freezes my system. iTunes also takes about 100mb of ram, which is a lot for a music player (Winamp takes about 8-9mb).

I use Media Monkey. Its got a library if you want to use it, but if you dont, you can just browse your NAS and drag n drop to your ipod/iphone. You can also drag stuff out of your iphone. You can put your library on the network and share/add/delete/read/write to it. No need for syncing or authorizing.

If youre gonna use iTunes on the mac though, as BLD mentioned, Applescript is your friend. Check out Dougs Scripts http://dougscripts.com/itunes/
If youve got Windows, then I cant recommend iTunes at all. Try out Media Monkey instead. I actually just use MM for managing my tunes. I dont use it for playing. I still use Winamp. Some habits are hard to break i guess...