I miss MusicMatch JukeBox and AudioGalaxy.
For me, it was no FLAC support (I was already heavily invested in it before ALAC came out) and no ReplayGain support. That and criticism from fanboys who didnāt understand why I would need support for them.
It would have been nice if itunes had given me that option before it fucked up my own folder organisation. I just donāt do things the Jobs/Cook way. Thankfully foobar2000 fixed everything quickly. itunes may have improved since then but the damage has been done.
The only thing I like about itunes is the AAC encoder, and I know how to install that without the rest of the Apple stuff.
[quote=āthe_borderer, post:43, topic:54889ā]
For me, it was no FLAC support (I was already heavily invested in it before ALAC came out) and no ReplayGain support. That and criticism from fanboys who didnāt understand why I would need support for them.[/quote]
Again, I still donāt understand all the angst against iTunes. Just because it doesnāt have some specific, esoteric options you personally desire doesnāt make it a bad choice for most everyone else.
Most people can barely hear the difference between lossless and mp3, etc. and it certainly isnāt worth filling up an entire music device with huge, lossless music files for most people either.
In the extremely rare instances Iāve come across FLAC in the past, iTunes worked with it via Perian for many years. I wouldnāt know today, because like most people, FLAC or any other lossless format doesnāt interest me very much. That said, there is a lossless format for iTunes if one is interested in that sort of thing.
As far as ReplyGain goes, it may not be up to your esoteric standards, but thereās āSound Checkā built into iTunes that does basically the same thing. If thatās not good enough quality, thereās psychoacoustic analysis plugins for iTunes such as Media Volume Pro for 4 bucks.
I mean, I get it. iTunes isnāt for you, but that doesnāt justify all the fanboyish angst against it I was asking about. Iāve also often found a lot of the angst comes from people who havenāt used iTunes in many years and/or have very little proper experience with it as well. Apple has certainly fucked up with it in the past, but like all other software apps, itās been a work in progress and has evolved over time in both good and bad ways depending upon your preferred workflow.
I think some of it also stems from fanboyish, knee-jerk, anti-Apple angst that has little or nothing to do with the quality of iTunes overall.
It would have been nice if itunes had given me that option before it fucked up my own folder organization.
It does give you that option. You screwed up, not Apple.
It asks very clearly in a dialog beforehand. It does this for both Mac and Windows. I just recently installed iTunes on a Windows machine and iTunes never moved a single media file anywhere. Itās been this way in the past as well (see old icon below):
I just donāt do things the Jobs/Cook way.
Nor do I. And, I donāt do things the Linus Torvalds way, the Eric Schmidt way, nor the Bill Gates way either.
My choice of electronic devices and apps donāt define me as a person.
Did you read the article?
āI thought I was the only one who messed up a sync and ended up wiping an entire music library that I had spent years building, but multiple friends have told me that they did the exact same thing. iTunes is like having your hand held by a robot who wants to walk into the ocean and die.ā
So FLAC and Replaygain are too esoteric to offer native support for established technologies, but not so esoteric that Apple didnāt spend time and money developing proprietary alternatives (yes, ALAC did eventually became open source in 2011). Thatās a rather specific level of esoteric.
As for why i use FLAC, its not because it sounds better (killer samples aside, you are right that no-one will hear the difference between high bitrate lossy and lossless). I use it for my CD backups, one set of them is used as a working copy that I can transcode to lossy formats. I have done that ever since I lost a favourite CD from a record label who had gone out of business, leaving me with a low bitrate copy.
Thatās the sort of thing I always pay close attention to as installing stuff on Windows is like walking through a minefield. Maybe someone played a sadistic practical joke on me when my back was turned? The perils of living in a shared house? 
Iāll stop blaming Apple for it and try not to let my paranoia get out of hand. Itāll make no difference to whether I use it in the future, I (mostly) switched to Linux shortly after that install.
- do you suffer from blackouts?
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