I've spent a dozen years with iTUNES, and I still hate it!
Now that PCS are often sold with SSDS rather than spinning drives, hard drive size has decreased. My home laptop has only 128GB of storage and my work laptop has 237GB.
But iTUNES still wants to save its library on my already crowded hard drive. I wrote a guide for Applevis ten years ago on how to move your library to an external drive, and that still works. But if you forget to hold down the shift key while you start iTUNES, it will default to creating a new library on your hard drive, or using the new library you created last time you forgot!
Even if in advanced preferences, when you set your library to be on an external drive, the newest iTUNES seems to not always honor that preference. I just discovered that half the CDS I ripped yesterday are on my hard drive, even though I explicitly set it to find my library on an external drive.
And when you tell it to "consolidate your library" as many guides on the internet advise, it pulls in every piece of media it finds on your hard disk. I have lots of stuff I download from the internet to listen to that I sure don't want taking up space in my iTUNES library; I only made that mistake once. My library filled with NPR podcasts and internet radio recordings I wanted to skim through on my PC.
Plus iTUNES for Windows is just so clunky. The only way to read anything on the screen -- and one wonders how much one misses out on reading -- is to repeatedly press TAB.
So I really want an alternative to iTUNES. Ideally, I want a program that rips CDS directly to my phone, skipping that whole storage process. After all, I already have the CD, I don't need to waste storage pspace keeping copies on my hard disk.
I've tried ripping CDS to files that I save in the cloud. But then I have to stream them and waste cellular data, and/or wait for them to load when I want to play my music. And the experience isn't really seamless: in the files, onedrive, google drive and dropbox apps, a song doesn't start playing just by tapping on it; you have to get through all the file storage tasks like move, copy and share in order to find some way to play the thing. Apple's music app is wonderful, but I've found no way to simply move music files directly in to it.
With Android devices, you connect them like an ordinary flash drive and they have a music directory. You simply connect the device and copy your songs there. Then you can remove them from your computer if you don't need to keep them there. Except for iTUNES, I really love iOS and would not want to switch to Android.
Playing your music on your phone should be a simple experience; I'm not going to buy songs from the iTUNES store, when I already have a huge CD collection.
Thoughts, anyone?