To this day, I don't understand people's love affair with iTunes. I HATE IT. From the annoying background services and applications, to the automatic updates. All for what? A crappy media player attached to a store.

Winamp for me thanks. And i'll get my music from somewhere else.

It integrates so seemlessly with Mac OSX I'm not sure what else I'd contemplate using for keeping my music library in shape.

You can drag drop music files onto it and it imports them. Logical. I love smart playlists. I love syncing to my iPod.

I'm not that keen on using it for PDF or movie management.

The only thing I can't stand is the goofy xml file it uses to manage the entire thing. It's not easy to hand hack.

I won't even install quicktime due to the immense hassle it is - if it wasnt for quicktime alternative I just wouldn't watch anything in that format.

My wife had to install it to format her new iPod apparently and the stupid update popups were virtually impossible to stop - happened all the time even after itunes was uninstalled. Finally she found that the updater is a separately installed program.

With a music collection spanning some 25,000 files and about 150 gb, the only player that truly meets my organizational needs is Foobar2000 - I dropped winamp due to the immense loading time when I hit about 70gb some years ago, grabbed foobar, customized the UI to my liking and never looked back.

With friends who went on and on about how amazing iTunes is I took a look but hated it. So bloated, and how it organizes your music seemed clearly aimed at users who have difficulty organizing music in a sensible folder/file structure and proper play lists. I want my music in the order I want it, not the order iTunes thinks I want it.

I have been a fan of iTunes for a long while. I don't care about the music store (I am a staunch CD purchaser ;) ) - I just like the way iTunes handles music. The first hurdle I originally had issues with is trying to manually organize my music folders that iTunes taps into. I found this creates a mess and that its actually much easier to let iTunes deal with the physical songs while I organize everything in the application itself. The drag-n-drop capabilities, wide variety of ways to organize things and label them, and smart playlists are huge time saver for me.