1. What's wrong with iTunes? 2. What would you like to see in an OS X music "manager"/player? 3. What is your current favorite app for doing the above on OS X?
(I am not asking this for either Windows or Linux because I believe people are pretty satisfied with their options on both these systems (AmaroK, foobar2000, Exaile etc.)
iTunes treats individual movements as "songs", not part of a complete piece of music. So, you can't, say, click on Dvorak's Piano Trio in F minor, you have to first create a temporary album to hold all three movements.
Also, the searching is messed up for classical music. The composer's name, for example, is sometimes under "artist", and sometimes in another column, and sometimes not there at all. A column for "composer" would fix that.
Those and a few other obvious and easy tune-ups would make iTunes usable for classical music.
So, for example, right now I'm listening to the first movement of Dvořák's cello concerto; I've tagged the track as follows:
http://static.b-list.org/files/itunes-classical-metadata.png
When I bought the CD years ago, of course, CDDB filled in the "artist" as "Antonin Dvorak".
Keeping all the metadata correct has been a royal pain, but worth it in terms of being able to quickly find things and generate playlists keying off things like the composer field.
As an aside, I notice that Amazon's MP3 download page for the above recording does actually seem to display the right data for at least some fields -- I don't plan to buy it again to find out whether they got the whole thing right, though. And sometimes iTunes gets the "grouping" field right for multi-movement works, though not with enough frequency to avoid the need for lots of manual re-tagging.
I expect classical music is probably always tagged badly, which is why the composer ends up in the artist field. Also, am I supposed to enter for Radiohead: Johnny Greenwood, Thom York, et al. or, just Radiohead? I tunes tagging ability is weak in some places. Also it doesn't help when you have a non-ipod and want to remove some songs and replace with others.
Movements are often indicated by the "Grouping" column, or kept together my joining the tracks from a CD on import by selecting the tracks then "Advanced -> Join CD Tracks".
Sub-optimal, I know, but there isn't much more an application can do given the way CD metadata works.
I'd love the ability to have nested queries in Smart Playlists. The only "solution" at the moment involves having folders full of Smart Playlists for individual queries and then having another Smart Playlist to assemble that "level" of the query.
I'd also like the Genius Recommendation feature to be a bit better. The Genius Playlist feature is pretty solid at the moment (when it came out in iTunes 8, I was pretty much blown away), but the recommendation stuff is still nowhere near as accurate as what it's actually trying to emulate -- asking an expert, "hey, if I like this music, what else would I like?"
Edit: Oh, and more album art in Apple's databases. The Gracenote stuff isn't exactly fantastic. I know there's TuneUp and stuff like that, but Apple boasts that it's a complete feature built in to iTunes, when really, it's not that comprehensive in my experience. Who knows, maybe I just listen to obscure music.
It sucks to live outside the US. I could probably access Pandora through a proxy (I haven't tried), but it's a barrier, and even one complication makes a lot of people not do something (look at sites where you can comment anonymously versus sites that make you create an account just to comment on a story).
musicbrainz support would be nice
Virtually every other music manager supports watch directories. Its omission from iTunes isn't due to them overlooking the feature. Rather, it's a coercive measure to try and push users towards acquiring all their new music through the iTunes Music Store.
It becomes the "path of least resistance" when you intentionally omit features to make all other paths harder.
No, I think it has more to do with watch folders not being a feature in high demand than any conspiratorial nonsense.
I wouldn't recommend it for just that, but even if it doesn't strike your fancy--after the trial expires, it still works on one folder with two rules (e.g. Add to iTunes & Move to Trash), so it doesn't really cost anything if that's all you use it for.
I'm not excusing the lack of a similar feature in iTunes, but that's what I use and I'm happy with it.
With my fairly large, multi-gigabyte library, iTunes often takes minutes to respond to user input. Sometimes during syncing it can take up to 30 minutes to respond to my input. Please performance-profile iTunes before frustrated and contractually-obligated-to-use-iTunes iPhone users slap you with a class-action lawsuit.
That said, I use iTunes on my Windows PC. It's not great for large libraries or doing heavy I/O stuff (changing meta-data for multiple long movies, for instance), but it gets the job done and it's a pretty seamless experience between the music player, the store and the iPod/iPhone.
Edit: Also, sometimes I have correctly named mp3's, but I haven't tagged them. Itunes gracefully renames my files to 'unknown' removing any trace to the correct name. And, if the files were in a folder prepended with the album year iTunes will kindly create a new folder to hold the files to leave the album art in the original folder. (okay, that last one is Windows only)
2. See suggestions above
3. Not using mac.
What I mean by that is that I use a MacBook with a 240GB hard disk for media stuff. I'd like to have a part of my library on the macbook (including stuff I listen to regularly, podcasts etc.) and a second part (my lib is around 200G) on an external HDD or AFP mount. At the moment I can only do that if I don't have iTunes manage my lib and then, still, the handling of missing files isn't too great.
IMO they should also get serious about supporting movies (as in: .avi, .mkv) - I'd love to use iTunes for that and helper apps demonstrate how much can be done here (epg guides etc.). Again, that'd require splitting my lib over various USB and AFP drives.
I really think there is demand for a well-made iTunes clone on the Mac, as long as it avoid feature creep: player software should manage and play music, I'll take care of getting it - keep your BitTorrent portal stuff to yourself, thank you.
Another feature I would like to see is some sort of network control... I am frequently on the couch with my laptop, and my desktop is playing music. Or my roommate wants to queue up a song. What I finally did was use Amarok and VNC (with a java web client) to let anyone log in and update the playlist...)
If I put podcasts and music on my iPod with Rhythmbox from my work PC, iTunes will happily eradicate everything it doesn't know about as soon as I plug it in when I get home.
If I plug in my iPod while someone else is logged into my mac, iTunes immediately asks if it can wipe my iPod.
Maybe this protects the interests of the record industry, it sure isn't useful in any way to the end user.
What I want? Something as fast and responsive as the original versions of winamp, with the search, playlist, podcast and sync functionality of iTunes.
