Best alternative to iTunes?

Question

Best alternative to iTunes?

Hello,

First post here so be gentle ; )

Half of my music collection recently disappeared from iTunes. Anything not purchased from the store is gone. Hours on the phone with Apple care yielded no results. I have moved everything over from PC to Mac in the last 12 months. My wife and I share a few iPhones and an iPad as well. I love almost everything about Apple with the exception of iTunes. It has just never seemed intuitive to me. Almost like a leftover from some other company, an afterthought.

I purchase music from band camp, and am not overly concerned with being able to keep or rip "illegal" music. I would actually prefer to pay because I believe it is the right thing to do. But I can't afford to pay for it twice. I like iTunes for purchasing in that it is easy, but there is no option to purchase lossless as you know.

I simply need a player that is:

easy to organize all my music - iTunes, FLAC, Random stuff from who knows where
available to Mac and iOS and will sync between the two
works well for playing out to a home system - 2 speaker, nothing to fancy, although a digital output would be nice
not confused by the fact that my wife and I use three different iOS devices and 2 separate profiles on the Mac but would like to maintain the same playlist. If this is not possible what is the next best option to share music between all our devices?

I am willing to pay for a player that works, but would like an established company that will provide the needed updates and will not disappear tomorrow.

Thank you all so much!

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Feb 26, 2015 9:05 AM

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Answer 1

ges74

Level 1

4 points

Apr 3, 2015 7:30 AM in response to Smallchainring

Hi, I'm so glad that you asked this question. I also am looking for the "right" alternative - I know there are so many threads out there on this topic, but I find them all so confusing and can't really tell if the programs would do what I need them to do!

Right now all my music is in the Music folder on my Mac. I downloaded it from my iPod Classic using PodTrans because my iPod got corrupted.

I started trying to organize it by separating out songs into different subfolders from within Finder. The reason why I started using Finder is that with iTunes and Floola (the app I had been using before,) every file remains visible in the library list, even after I've categorized it. I have 6000 tracks and it takes forever to scroll through them, and I'm woefully confused as to which songs have been categorized already and which have not. By using Finder, the main song list gets smaller and smaller as I move items into subfolders, and I don't have to second guess whether something's been categorized or not. It's less confusing and I'll avoid inadvertently missing files.

HOWEVER, Finder does not let me see metadata (artist, bitrate, etc). So I'm having to listen to a short sample of each song before categorizing, making it extremely slow going.

What I would like to do:

1. Use some program (whatever folks recommend!) to EASILY categorize my music into 5-6 different playlists (classical, favs, meditations, hubby's favs, etc), preferably on my Mac hard disk. Easily would mean being able to see artist, bitrate, album title, etc in addition to song title. I would prefer that the actual files themselves within Finder be moved to separate folders so that the next time something happens to my ipod and I have to do another emergency download, they will already be in folders and I won't have to re-categorize.

2. Use some program (whatever folks recommend!) to upload these separate folders/playlists to my ipod Classic.

3. I want to be able to "play shuffle" within each playlist using my iPod.

Any help appreciated!!!!!! Thank you!!!!

GES

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Answer 2

Limnos

Level 10

411,259 points

Apr 3, 2015 8:06 AM in response to ges74

Do what we would have to do to help you. Do a web search for "iTunes alternative" or along those lines. I did this for somebody a while back and got several possibilities. Realize, however, that the best iTunes alternative (Soundjam) actually became iTunes many years ago. There's not a lot out there (kind of hard to compete with a free application) and they all have their weaknesses. If you have any mobile devices that need "syncing" then you have to use iTunes for that.

As for the original poster's issue about losing music and having to buy it twice, it just means they don't have a proper backup in place. Spend $100 and get a backup drive. It should be considered part of the price of owning a computer.

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