So Why Not iTunes?
I have a couple of Macs–and a lot of PCs. While I don’t listen to music that often, I have collected quite a bit of it–mostly on these plastic disks called CDs. Some of you might have heard of them 
Anyway, when I got my hands on a Mac a few years ago for work purposes, I started playing around with iTunes. I ended up feeding it a bunch of my CDs and was fairly happy with the results. When I bought a MacBook two years ago, I decided that I wanted to re-rip my CDs in higher quality. So I went through the process–again.
Between that and a few tracks I’ve digitally acquired, I have about 2500 of them in iTunes. Generally, I can find what I need, I’ve found a reasonably sensible Smart Playlist that gives me a decent mix of music. It’s not perfect and I have to skip tracks, but it works for me.
While I do have an iPod Nano, I don’t use it. Instead, when I do prefer to listen to music on a portable device, I download music to a Nokia N95 thanks to Nokia Multimedia Transfer.
Now when it comes to video, other than for the occasional freebie from the iTunes store, I pretty much use Miro to manage video. I do this for a couple of reasons:
- Support for Flash video and more types of video. I can stuff an RSS feed from YouTube into Miro and it will play the video it downloads from there.
- Bittorrent Support. Need I say more?
- Better at keeping your disk from filling up. Miro gives you the ability to only download episodes when less than X episodes are unwatched on a per-channel basis, a global “don’t download when less than X space,” and a per-channel auto-expiration for watched content.
Now I know some people don’t like iTunes for music. I guess I don’t see the issues, but I will admit I don’t listen to music daily. iTunes is sufficient for my meager needs. What am I missing here?
