I’m glad you asked this as I have long wondered the same thing. It always floors me when I hear people blasting it. For me, it couldn’t be better/easier.
Why would iTunes be copying anything unless you told it to do so? I don’t know why people always complain that iTunes “moves around” or “changes” their mp3 files. No, every single one of my files are exactly where I put them. All iTunes does is create a library and playlists that link to those songs. Nothing is moved, copied or changed.
You also get a lot of these exchanges:
Person A: “I don’t like iTunes because it does* x*! This sucks! What a stupid program!”
Person B: “It won’t do X if you tell it not too. Just click this setting here.”
Person A: “Oh, well, um… iTunes still sucks!”
Being bloated and slow aren’t valid criticisms?
My experiences with iTunes and my wife’s iTouch:
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It took us over an hour to figure out how to load songs onto it through itunes.
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It took over several hours to convert my youtube videos into quicktime through the VLC player. (First, I had to scour the Internet to find out only quicktime videos work on the iTouch, then another hour to figure out how to convert videos to Quicktime, then more time to figure out how to load videos onto the iTouch.)
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When my wife bought an eBook from Amazon that downloaded directly to her iTouch, we couldn’t save a backup copy on her computer through iTunes. After two hours of fruitless research, I emailed Apple. The response came 2 days later: iTunes cannot do this, but there are third party software that will. This pissed me off: Apple helpdesk is telling me to use different software than iTunes for what supposedly is a freakishly simple procedure.
I don’t know of anyone who thinks iTunes is scary or mysterious. I do know lots of people who think it sucks. I’m one of them. Terrible, terrible software. Horribly bloated, horribly slow, underhanded, and just all around something that should make Steve Jobs hang his head in shame and well-earned-self-loathing.
iTunes tells me the way to sync my music to the ipod is either to sync everything or sync the checked stuff. So I assume the purpose of the check system is to decide what music to sync. So I go through all my music and pick out the 10 or 15gb I’d like to have on me at all times. Since I have a ton of music, this takes a while.
It was only after this time invested that I found out that checked also serves a dual role where only your checked music will play through itunes. There’s no option to change this. Why would you have a dual system where you decide which music your mobile player carries and with the same selection which music your client at the computer will play? That’s retarded. You’re essentially saying it’s my fault that the most obvious, intuitive solution to managing part of my music collection also crippled the ability for it to be a music player at the PC, and that I should’ve figured out some more complex, less intuitive alternate way, not knowing that the program would be so dumb as to give me those limitations.
It doesn’t actually matter - I would never want to use iTunes here at my computer to play music when I have the superior-in-every-way winamp available. But it is a good example of really stupid design.
I’ll have a think about this while I’m restarting my computer to update iTunes. Again. And every time I do it screws up a little worse, especially when it comes to connecting with my iPod. I swear Mac’s got a little self-destruct code in everything it makes (and I say this as someone who buys and uses nothing but their damned products).
Winamp really is awesome.
I think it’s gotten slightly less awesome with the last few releases, but it’s still the best thing going.
I find iTunes is increasingly bloated with features that I do not want, and they increasingly strip out the things I do want (do you remember the web-streaming in version 4? Sigh. . .). When I sync my touch it makes my processor sound like a jet engine starting up (I miss my Handspring, sigh.) I’d totally move to winamp or something except the SO is tied to the podcast setup and won’t move.
What really irks me, though, is iPhoto. . .
My problem with Itunes is that I never figured out how to get the MP3s on my MP3 player. It was probably just me being stupid, but whenever I looked up how to do it online, it kept telling me to burn the songs to a CD first, and that just seemed way too complicated.
Dunno about mp3 players, but an ipod appears in the list of media on the left side of the itunes screen. You then highlight the songs you want, and drag them over to the ipod’s icon. Done.
Right, but I don’t have an Ipod. I have a non Apple MP3 player.
I have used drag and drop with mp3 files to get them into my Itunes library.
Maybe I’m the only one to have uncovered this mystery of the universe. I’ll accept cash for my discovery.
If we’re talking about mp3 files, it’s the exact same process.
Ok, I just opened itunes, and I’m looking at the left side of the screen, and I don’t see an ipod. I’m seeing “library”, which is made up of music, movies, tv shows, pdocasts, and radio, “store”, which is made up of itunes store and download, “shared”, made up of home sharing, “genius”, made up of genius, and “playlists”, made up of itunes dj, 90s music, classical music, music videos, my top rated, recently added, recently played, and top 25 most played.
I do have my mp3 player hooked up to my computer.
To echo Larry Mudd, I don’t like it because it’s unnecessary. I don’t use it to play my files on my PC. I don’t use it to organize my files on my PC. The only thing I use it for is to add/remove files from my iPod, something that I would be very happy to do in Windows Explorer like I would with any other storage device.
For me, the program is an unnecessary barrier of bloatware imposed on me by Apple. I don’t need or want it to play, organize, or do anything else to my files. I just need it to transfer them, something that my computer is already fully capable of doing (faster) by itself!
I was asked about my issues with iTunes:
(Note that I was given 2 broken iPods which I fixed. They came loaded with songs already.) I can’t remember all the details, but a few things stand out:
I wanted to select a bunch of songs on an iPod to move/delete or something. But I could only select one a time. No shift-multiselect allowed. Huh?
I organize my mp3s on my PC using directories. Nice and structured. iTunes doesn’t give a rat’s posterior about my already set up organizational system. Huh[sup]2[/sup]?
At one point the software just deleted all the songs on a iPod. Gone. Bye bye. Never asked me if I wanted to do that (I most certainly didn’t). No halfway reasonable software should ever do anything like that.
Throw in the file name munging (yes that is the technical term) for no valid reason just to tick off people and it’s clear that the designers are incompetent idiots.
For a non-Apple player? iTunes doesn’t support anything but iPods, right?
I know I can drag-and-drop songs from the iTunes library to my iTouch (provided iTunes hasn’t “lost” the song), but if I drag the same song twice, it’s on my iTouch twice. Pain in the ass.
Bwuh? 
I can do that with no problem.
The iTunes library is just one big central listing of all your music. You have to create playlists if you want separate listings of certain music. But you know you can view them by artist, album, alphabetically, etc. It’s not like it’s some random list.
Did you click Restore or Reset, or had it set to automatically sync? I’ve *never *had it delete anything unless I told it to.