"Insanely Great!" -- iTunes Got the First Part Right

Steve Jobs famously called Apple's Macintosh "insanely great!" (there's a book about the birth of the Mac that bears those words in its title). But Job's sense of greatness must have been drooling on itself in a padded room when iTunes was allowed to reach the public. What a piece of crap.

If you already have an existing digital music library when you start using it then it doesn't recognize most of your files; you need a third party app like iTunes Library Updater just to get iTunes to find all of the music you already own. Yes, iTunes asks you where your music library is located, but it either doesn't scan the files or it does a terrible job of it.

But even if you do have a music library that iTunes will actually recognize, it will repeatedly fail to copy many of those tracks into your iPod. And we're not talking about your grandma's iPod here, but a brand new 6th gen 160GB iPod. Amanda has seen lots of red and not lots of her music because of the insanely poor performance of iTunes.

So, I've decided to give Winamp a try, and so far, at least on my 4th gen iPod (thanks for the handmedown, Frank), it's working like a charm. Hopefully Winamp will keep up the good work and I'll be able to leave iTunes in the asylum.