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.