Alternatives To Itunes?

[Wolfie]

The one thing i truly dislike about apple products is the necessity of using iTunes to sync music etc over to the product (in this case, iPhone4)

Someone *has* to have created a more lightweight product by now, something that gives you a more 'drag & drop' type approach maybe? or even just a light weight music only sync tool?

I've had a little look around and found some tools that gives you access to the phones storage and allows you to use it more or less like a flash drive (USB drive) but simply putting music on the drive isnt enough, you need to update the internal iPod database so that the iPod player knows the music is there...

ANyone have any recommendations on a good tool to do this? I will use iTunes if i really really have to, but for the sake of putting 20 or so albums on my phone, i'd prefer to use something else.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations

[nikster]

Whats the big deal using iTunes? You use it for syncing addresses, email accounts, music, and everything else and it makes backups of your phone so if you have an iPhone you have to use iTunes anyway. Not just for music.

You can set music syncing to manual so you can drag and drop inside iTunes, in case you don't like e sync tab or the idea of syncing.

You can also set up itunes so it doesn't copy your music to it's own folder but rather leaves it where it was. That way you can continue using winamp or whatever windows people use - personally i find iTunes to be the by far best music player on the desktop and it's free so whats to complain?

[Wolfie]

With the size of my music collection it takes about 15minutes to open... and my base unit is not exactly slow either

iTunes always has been (and probably always will be) bloatware

[negreanu]

With the size of my music collection it takes about 15minutes to open

Doesn't sound right - possibly something wrong

My itunes collection

Music: 184GB

TV Shows: 1.3TB

Movies: 2.6TB

Takes about 15secs to open. And the content is on an external firewire drive.

Itunes is simply the best way to Sync apple music devices full stop.

Edited September 30, 2010 by negreanu

[tominbkk]

Hmmmmm, well, manually manage your tunes/Ipod account, and that is exactly what you do, Drag and Drop. Setting it for manual means you don't sync it. Some people like to have the itunes library, but I prefer to just take care of that myself. I drag files from pen drives, other drives etc...no prob.

[tominbkk]

With the size of my music collection it takes about 15minutes to open... and my base unit is not exactly slow either

iTunes always has been (and probably always will be) bloatware

Your computer must be pretty old...? My main library of songs, on a samsung 500 gig hard drive now, fills up about 300 of the gigs. Itunes opens it nearly instantly, maybe 10 seconds....I agree, Itunes is a pretty big program for what it does, but I find it full of really great features.

[nikster]

iTunes starts in less than 1 second for me, 25GB of music on a HD, the app is on the SSD

Bloatware what?

[MKAsok]

MediaMonkey

[VerbalKint]

4 yr old mac mini 460 GB of music, startup time about 5 secs, did you try resetting itunes ?