I think the question is: "What else do I get for that $25?"

I hate dealing with my library of songs. If I could stream it to any device, any time, as well as have -any- other value-added service attached, I'd pay the $25 per year.

By 'any device' I mean TV, PC, Android Phone, PS3 and more. Basically, any device that I can hook to the internet.

As much as I hate dealing with a lot of files and ID3 tags, streaming music sucks for mobile devices for a couple of reasons:

- 3G quality and speeds are guarranteed everywhere and every time. I was left with nothing but the songs I had on my SD card when I was on vacation on an island.

- Constant streaming kills battery life, killing your phone and music player in one kick.

- Because of massive roaming charges, you can forget using it outside of the country.

If you don't travel much, have a good plan and don't mind the battery issue, it could be useful.

Me too. iTunes is just horrible. I'd love a non-iTunes way of getting my music onto an iPod.

Then allow me to make your day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers

Yes, trying out other music managers is a very good way to come to appreciate iTunes and how it works. I encourage everyone who thinks they're unhappy with iTunes to check out these other applications.

The Winamp iPod manager wasn't so bad. Sure, there was no drag and drop, but I always kept dropping in the wrong place anyways. The biggest problem was how it handled certain aspects of tags and labelling different from iTunes. It really wasn't a problem if all you ever used was Winamp, but if you started with iTunes, and switched to Winamp, it would just reorder your music (the most obvious example being 0-9 coming before/after a-z), and piss you off.

Today, I use foobar to play my music. And I keep iTunes around to load my iPod. Cause as stupidly annoying as iTunes is, foobar gets it worse.

iTunes is a great personal media database, and a terrible everything else. The former is enough to make me willing to put up with the latter.

Yes, but why can't I just drag and drop mp3 files on my iPod/iPhone directly from the file manager?

Because you purchased an Apple product.

The iTunes UI is horrid, but I have yet to find anything that does everything iTunes can without being crashy, slow or non-intuitive.

Can you elaborate? I think the store is frustrating, but I've found the player itself has been pretty stable and usable for the last 6-7 years on OSX (I have 40GB of music btw). It's a big ol' spreadsheet with instant search and drag+drop playlists.

I find the spreadsheet-style interface pretty uninspired for something as personal as music. The linear list of albums/tracks breaks down very quickly once your library starts growing, and iTunes becomes a confusing, disorientating mess. To Apple's credit, they've been taking baby steps towards more interesting ways of browsing your library with Genius playlists and mixes, but they could and should do so much more.

What are the alternatives, though?

I quite like the three column browser for quickly finding music even if I only have a very fuzzy idea of what I would like right now. It scales quite well, even if you have a library with several thousand songs and a few hundred artists. Together with the hybrid cover view it doesn’t even look very much like a spreadsheet.

Then there’s the grid view which also has its uses. I especially like to display albums by year which gives me a nice chronological overview. Coverflow is pretty worthless, though.

I think that while iTunes gets the big picture somewhat right (at least as far as its audio library functionality is concerned) it gets many details spectacularly wrong. The UI for tagging feels ancient. Oh, and it’s modal. iTunes forces me to play column jockey. I don‘t want to change column widths just so I don’t get vertical scrollbars. iTunes should keep it all nice and tidy for me, kind of like Mail. That, and many other small details.

Amarok has some interesting UI features that are really interesting.

Like what? This is a honest question. I don't know much about Amarok but whenever I tried it, it looked completely unimpressive and like an even bigger UI clusterfuck than iTunes to me.

iTunes opens lots of error dialogs, loses files and fails to play tracks when it's run in an account with an nfs home directory.

Hmm: http://fusepod.sourceforge.net/

If you have an iPhone, Android, or Blackberry, Rdio is awesome for getting music on there. Way easier than iTunes, if you ask me.

Disclaimer: I totally work for them.

This will do it on windows: http://www.mediamonkey.com/ (I have no vested interest in this company other than continued development for my personal use)

edit didn't see the comparison below, but this works very well with Iphone/pod/pad

What happened to the YC startup that allowed you to store all your music in the cloud?

Are you thinking of Lala? It was acquired by Apple and subsequently shut down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lala_(website)

If Google's plan is to use Simplify Media's tech then it will probably be a plugin for Winamp and iTunes.