Are there any true alternatives to iTunes?

Yeah, you can buy MP3s from Amazon for $1 each. That’s better than iTunes because once you download them from Amazon, they’re yours. Amazon can’t say there’s suddenly a copyright issue or price increase after the fact and take them back. They’re just files than you can make backups, copy to different computers, copy to your XBox and Playstation, and burn to CD for your car, etc.

Media Monkey has often been reccomended very frequently for Windows users. It’s also gotten good reviews from tech blogs and Cnet.

Though I personally don’t have a problem with iTunes, I know that Songbird is a nice iTunes-like player that can sync iPods.

Instead of downloading from an online music store, I prefer to buy CD’s—new and used—from Amazon and local music stores and rip them to my digital library at a high quality. New CD albums average about $0.60 to $1.50 per song, and used ones are even cheaper. I feel that I’m not buying anything if I don’t get a physical album.

Foobar2000 is excellent – you have to do a little work searching around to find the right plugins, but it’s completely worth it. I use it for syncing my devices and I am pretty confident that there are plugins available for the rest of your needs.

@HungryGuy I’m guessing you know that iTunes has been the same way as well since DRM was done away with?

I had a look at Songbird and it doesn’t seem to meet two of my requirements.

There seem to be no podcast support. I don’t want to have to manage those via a RSS client/Thunderbird, I want them automatically added to my library and ready to play/sync.

There also doesn’t seem to be a way to sync to my iPhone, despite it being plugged in.

Why not just uninstall iTunes and Quicktime and reinstall them? It might fix the problems you are having.

I’ve tried that. I’ve even tried reinstalling Windows 7 itself. It’s still doing it.

@missingbite – No, I didn’t know that iTunes finally did away with DRM. But can you copy your iTunes music from one computer to another, burn to a CD, etc. without restriction? I’d heard that there was still restrictions what you could do with it.

@HungryGuy No more restrictions that I know of. Multiple burns to CD, share with other computers, et cetera.

Regarding DRM, yes you can. iTunes even allows it to be converted to MP3 without restriction.

Most, not all songs sold on the Store are DRM free and subject to the above allowances.

This isn’t about the iTunes store however. I have no problem with and rather like the iTunes store. however, my player itself has decided to play up and that’s what I’m looking to replace.

Could be some of the Library files. Sometimes they get corrupt and bring down iTunes. Here is a article that might help.

I had thought of that,but as I said, I reinstalled even Windows itself, and the only thing copied over from that was the MP3 music files (No podcasts) and any movies from itunes store. I didn’t even copy over iPhone app files.

It is possible that you have some MP3 files with wonky characters in the ID3 tags. I have had some screw up iTunes. Usually Asian characters are the culprit.

Hmm, i do have songs with asian characters in their names.

I’ll look into getting those id3 tags translated. Thanks

In just a few hours, i got 15 answers here, many helpful but not a peep from apple :(

Songbird doesn’t do much of anything out of the box. Its advantage is that it uses add-ons similar to Firefox. There’s a nice add-on search function built within Songbird; go search for the features you want.

I suggest using Media Monkey. I switched over from itunes and its amazing. It’s very similar to itunes but without the freezing