I’m not sure what the hell Apple was thinking with their most recent update to iTunes, but judging by the volume of comments on their forums, it seems to have pretty much hosed a good number of Windows systems. Presently, on one of my PCs, iTunes will periodically bring the entire system to a screeching halt, some times to the point where it crashes the PC. On my other PC, it won’t even run at all, no matter what I do (including uninstalling/reinstalling/installing Quicktime seperately). So, I’m looking for something to replace it. I do have a 1st Gen iPod Shuffle, so whatever I replace iTunes with, needs to work with that, and also needs to be able to download podcasts as that’s mainly what I use my iPod for. So, does anyone have any suggestions?
iTunes works fine with my PowerBook! 
Yeah, well, if Apple’s coding skills have started to degrade, I’d say you don’t have long to go before you’re lucky to have anything working right on your Powerbook! 
(“Apple: We’re the Next Microsoft!”)
Got a link to some trouble reports? I hadn’t heard about this problem yet, though I do routinely tell iTunes, “no, I don’t want to frickin download the newest version”. I guess that’s a good thing, considering this and the bricked iPhones.
Here ya go. The forums on Apple’s site are filled with Windows users having problems with 7.5 (bad installs, missing parts to the program, etc.). Apparently, its so deeply embedded that doing an uninstall and installing a previous version doesn’t correct the problem.
Thank you. Wow, what a mess.
The thing that gripes me is the fact that on the requirements for the iPod, Vista is acceptable. Only to find out when I go to install iTunes on my Vista machine, it doesn’t like the 64-bit version of Vista. A message pops up saying to go to the Apple site and download the 64-bit version of iTunes. However, no such version of iTunes exists that supports 64-bit! Bastards. So now I’m using iTunes on my P3 laptop without USB2.0 support. 
I’ll take an iTunes alternative any day. iTunes, even when working, is an abomination of software engineering at the highest level.
iTunes is the one piece of Apple software that makes me grumpy. Really grumpy. It’s like, with each new “upgrade” they break something brilliant. It’s like they just do upgrades to disable things you used to be able to do. Still very pissed off about them disabling the share-streaming thing with 4.0 or whenever it was (yes, I know there are ways to fix that), and one of the recent builds tweaked it so that DAAP didn’t play well with what I needed it to play with, etc. And it’s turned into a giant bloatware monster. And no, Jesus Christ, I don’t want your gapless playback shit, so stop freezing up while you analyze some song for 10 minutes.
What are good options? Winamp? What about for a mac user? Is there anything like DAAP sharing with other programs, or is that their baby?
Loyal MacOS user here. Hate iTunes. I use Audion, but that won’t be of much use to you on a PC. I’d probably use WinAmp (or whatever it is that xmms is a clone of) if I were a Windows user. That’s fine for playback but if you mean “in order to load stuff on the iPod”, I dunno.
I commiserate.
I have Rhapsody and emusic on my system as well as iTunes. Rhapsody’s more fidgety than iTunes but it should recognize your iPod and has some stuff in their catalog that iTunes doesn’t.
I use EphPod. It’s pretty good and a free download to boot. Unfortunately, since I don’t do podcasts, I can’t comment on its abilities in that area. Another program I used with my iPod is Anapod Explorer. It’s inexpensive, feature rich, but a pain in my side to get running, so I’ve abandoned it until I need it for something EphPod doesn’t have.
Try Googling “itunes replacement” for other alternatives.
Jeez, don’t tell me this. My wife just gave me an iTouch and I’m having a blast with it…no worries so far (although I wish I could play more than just .mov files on the video - I can in iTunes, but not on the iTouch). I had put off upgrading iTunes for the longest time but went ahead and installed the updates last weekend, so a week’s gone by with me constantly playing with the playlist, adding photos, cds, and videos, erasing, renaming, podcasting…and no problems yet.
What’s the horsepower of your box? My fastest is 1.8 Ghz, with a gig of RAM. I imagine that if I had something a little more current, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
I believe the newest iPods (iPod classic, Touch, and the newest Nanos) use a different database structure than the previous models, so you’ll want to make sure any iTunes replacements explicitly support these models before shelling out any money for them.
You can find a bunch of good links and information here.
Is it possible to just copy and paste music onto an ipod like pretty much every other mp3 player on the market? or do you have to use some software like itunes? (BTW I’m referring to windows machines)
No, natively Windows cannot copy MP3’s directly to the iPod and be playable.* You can copy music to the iPod through Windows Explorer, but it’ll be on the part of the system used as if it were a thumb drive. The iPod will see it as just a file, not music. Before you curse Apple for having a “closed” system, remember that for most of the drag-and-drop players, you need some kind of software to manage playlists and other housekeeping duties. Most of them use Windows Media Player, software built into Windows. I personally can’t stand WMP because it had so many problems when I was using it, so I had serious problems using those players. Apple just combined all the software together in one easy piece. Most people generally have no problems with iTunes, otherwise an argument can be made that the iPod wouldn’t be so successful. **
For those of us with more modest needs, there are other software packages out there. As I said in my prior post, I use EphPod, which also works in Linux and Macs, too. ***
- In theory, if you were very patient, you could, but most normal people wouldn’t want to go through the gyrations.
** Recent update problems excepted. It’s not the first time iTunes had problems after an update, but they don’t seem to scare many people off.
*** Hi Opal!
If you want to leave the iWorld altogether, try Rhapsody. It’s not bad.
This page has a list of downloadable versions of iTunes going pretty far back. If you want roll back, this would be a good place to try it until Apple comes out with iTunes 7.51
The problem, as I understand it, is that going back to an older version of iTunes doesn’t help, once the iTunes 7.5 installer has poisoned the well.
You might consider trying Songbird. I downloaded it and played with it a bit a while ago. It works pretty well, though it suffers a bit from the usual Open Source malady of no focus and excessive feature-itis. It supports podcasts, so it should do what you want.
I’ve also heard that Yamipod is a good lightweight iPod manager. I haven’t used it myself though.