ITunes alternatives?

That is pretty open ended and can easily lead to a discussion comparing apples and oranges.

What is the baseline here? I mean depending on what you are trying to do and acheive iTunes might be great or utter crap.

iTunes is a program that can be used to, among others, buy data, organize data, rip CDs, transfer data from an iMac to mobile devices, play music and much more.

I generally do not like such "swiss knife" programs and prefer using specific programs for specific tasks. But this is my taste, of course.

What I particularly dislike in iTunes are the data transfer functionalities. For instance, I have not managed to transfer to an iPad app a whole folder hierarchy without trensfering also the associated files. This sucks. Also, data transfer is unacceptably slow. The program does not seem to only transfer file differences: if you change just a tag in a file of a music collection and synchronize with your iPhone (or iPad) via iTunes, the whole file appears to be transferred. This also sucks.

From the point of view of intuitiveness and easy of usage, iTunes is one of the worst programs I have ever used. But again, this up to a great extent a subjective judgement and many in this forum quite like iTunes and seem to use it very successfully. And, as feeling_zen says, there might be tasks for which iTunes is, in fact, the first choice. This is certainly the case for those tasks for which there is no alternative to iTunes :-).

Maybe you could start making a list of the tasks you would like to use iTunes for. Then you could test (or ask) for programs supporting those tasks. Very much also depends on the OS in which you are looking for iTunes alternatives. Is this OS X, is it Windows, is it something else (is iTunes available for other OSs?) ?

Good point.  There is only one thing I use iTunes for at this point which is maintaining my iTunes Match library.  I use that as a cloud-based music library when I travel.

But it's getting tedious, as I keep all of my home music library in .flac format, and must convert it to something that iTunes will recognize.  Google Play, on the other hand, recognizes flac (and converts it to 320kbps mp3, which I'm fine with for portable music).  I probably will let my iTunes Match subscription lapse and just use Google Play from now on, as adding music is much much easier if I don't have to convert it!

I do not use iTunes but my wife has iMac, iPad, iPhone and although she is planning to leave the Apple universe sometime, she is still there. She mainly has troubles with iTunes and I would be interested if there were good alternatives.

I think that JRiver is high on many lists as an alternative to iTunes.

When my local hifi shop sets up customers with a music server (they used to sell many homegrown pc-based servers, before there were so many decent servers ones on the market), they use JRiver.

This is what I was doing in the beginning but, as you point out, it is tedious. I do not want to convert. And iTunes does recognize and transfer .flac files, actually. The problem is not iTunes but iOS. Now I'm following a different approach: I keep our entire music collection in .flac. I have a number of mirrors, one on a 2TB hdd formatted for OS X (HFS+, I guess). When I do some changes to the collections -- typically changes in tags or file names -- or when I buy new music, I propagate the changes to the mirrors with dedicated rsync scripts running on my laptop. This is fast, reliable, OS agnostic (rsync is available for virtually all OSs) and can be fully automatized. When my wife wants to transfer music files to mobile devices, she plugs the HFS+ drive (with the whole music collection in .flac) in her iMac and transfers selected .flac files (or whole directories) via iTunes to an iOS app that supports .flac (I think she uses "Capriccio" or "Flac player" or something like that). This sucks because she cannot transfer empty directory structures (to have a complete view of our collection on her mobile devices) along with a few GB of data and because most apps on iOS are poorly documented. But it has two advantages: 1) there is no conversion involved and 2) she has .flacs files on the mobile devices. And she anyway needs music files on the iPad only for occasional listening or on holidays. At home she can use the iPad as a UPnP client (we have a UPnP server running on a Raspberry Pi) or as a control point for our MPD server which drives the Naim DAC. 

iTunes is actually pretty good in terms of organization.

If you use an iDevice then iTunes is more or less without alternative if you want to avoid the hassle mentioned above.

My workflow, which has served me well: ripped CDs as 44.1k ALAC, some high-res ALAC files converted from FLACs plus iTunes Store AACs, all organized in/by iTunes. The ALACs are automatically converted to AAC when transferred to the iDevices. The iTunes library (which file-wise is basically just a folder structure) is then served by "Playback" (UPNP server app, unfortunately discontinued) to the Naim streamer (Naim supports – amongst others – ALAC and AAC file formats).

Some alternatives, anyway.

http://www.tomahawk-player.org

http://swinsian.com

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/fidelia/

http://coppertino.com/vox/mac

http://getsonora.com

https://www.doubletwist.com

DoubleTwist is particularly interesting for Mac + Android users, as it allows syncing to Android devices from a Mac, which iTunes (understandably) does not allow.

The problem with iTunes is where does it go next? Perhaps sometime this month Apple will finally announce its long awaited streaming service of which not a lot is known except that it will be based on Beats that they spent $3 billion to acquire and have been hiring various characters including a Radio 1 DJ in anticipation of its pronouncements. It is not anticipated that the service will provide full CD quality streaming like Qobuz or Deezer as Apple feel their own AAC mastered for iTunes, or whatever it is called, is more than adequate. iTunes music sales have been decreasing, down 14% last year, due to the insurgency of the established streaming services such as Spotify, doesn't really matter whether you like Spotify's offering, it is big!

Additionally, the music producers are not about to roll over to the extent they did with iTunes and let Apple dictate the market place if at all possible, and Apple will certainly have to compete with the established players. All in all, it is testing times for streamed music and it is hard to figure out where this is going to end up. I cannot see the buying public being content with a basic 256 Kb/s service from Apple and even a 320 Kb/s offering would simply parallel Spotify. The Pandora's box of hi res streamed music has been well and truly opened and is not going back. 

For the moment, I will pay my £9 a month to Spotify as I have linked a lot of my local music to it and it allows me to sample new artists at a satisfactory resolution. If Apple's offering has some sort of high resolution quantum leap I will of course jump ship or await the winner of the hi res wars. As it stands, I have music all over the place. I have it in CD format, album format (but no turntable) on my PCs in various formats, on a NAS, in iMatch and in Spotify, which is partly why I won't try Qobuz or Deezer. And of course my hardware is equally disparate with no bets going on Naim further than my Muso at the moment due to their patchy software implementations plus overextended product ranges with overextended support.

@andarkian I think you confuse iTunes (the media manager software) with the iTunes (Music) Store.

No I confuse it with nothing at all. Apple has no valid streaming service just an iTunes Store and an iMatch capability for loading your own music, if you pay for it, as I do. As this is a streaming forum, I am talking about streaming services. This is not yet Apple's marketing model, although it can obviously stream from its acres of servers. Apple's problem is how can it make masses of money from this. Big problem!

Fair enough! I may have one last stab at ripping my CDs to my NAS for a higher available resolution  but I suspect I can't be bothered as the lower resolution extras I have acquired through Apple and Spotify will all have to await the winner of the hi res and file format wars. 

If your sole goal is quality ripping without music management or iTunes store etc, then ripping CDs in something like EAC (which I use) or dbpoweramp direct to a NAS may be more your style.

I think it really depends on what you are trying to achieve. The fact that some of us don't use iTunes doesn't necessarily mean three is a problem with it - and I think it serves some people extremely well.

I would caution against it for ripping though - simply because it rips in burst mode (which is very forgiving of scratches) and this doesn't result in great rips. Media Player does the same thing unfortunately. When I tested rips made in iTunes, MediaPlayer and then in EAC, I found the difference far greater than the sound quality difference between 16/44.1 and hi-res audio (which was minimal to me). The big misconception is that CD audio is stored as files (which, although digital, they are not files and have no filesystem). This is probably the biggest argument against using iTunes (and its siblings) for ripping audio.

New Audirvana release has a library manager (not the itunes mode) and hopefully soon an ipad support for remote controlling. Must say that the new version sounds freakin' good...

cheers ralf

This is not entirely true, iTunes does offer the option to enable error correction. What you describe as burst mode, with all its possible shortcomings, thereafter no longer applies. Using iTunes' ripping engine with error correction enabled provides perfect rips, just like dbPoweramp, XLD, EAC and even Naim's own ripping solutions. There are no differences in the results. The results are all bit perfect. This topic has been covered ad nauseam here on the forum. A number of forum members did the comparisons, analysed the results, i.e. the rip reports / log files, and all provided bit perfect rips. You can't get a better rip than one that's bit perfect. iTunes' ripping engine provides just that, bit perfect rips. 

On the topic of differences in sound, plenty of people here can't hear any difference between a CD ripped using iTunes, XLD, dbPoweramp or even Naim's own ripping solutions. This includes some forum members with very high end systems. Others like you can. The point is, there are no absolutes. I don't doubt that you hear things but how much of this is due to actual differences and how much due to your brain telling you that there is a difference remains an unknown variable. 

But if EAC makes you happy, that's a fine solution too. 

Hi Wat,

I keep meaning to document the findings properly. Indeed I stumbled across this when I found tracks ripped in different applications sounded very different. I was looking for the most convenient app at the time and did not really expect (and was not looking for) any sound quality difference. My system is only half-way up the Naim ladder so when I suddely had a track on sounding totally different I did a double take since it wasn't very subtle. The best way to describe it was the sound quality jump in going from say AAC@256Kbps to LPCM. Same hardware used to do the rip. 

A while later I started digging under the hood. First I did WAV to WAV between EAC rips and MediaPlayer by trimming off the RIFF format headers and processing the bitstream in 4byte chunks and totting up the total number of identical vs. different chunks. What was interesting was that if I ripped the track in EAC it gave identical output each time (after RIFF headers removed) but MediaPlayer never gave me the same bitstream twice. I confess I do not have a record of the percentage (it was 0. something) of deviation.

I then repeated with iTunes converting to WAV and got the same poor results.

It is worth noting that Secure Mode ripping and the use of C2 error correction are not the same thing. Since merely ripping with error correction does not initiate re-reads for anything other than a completely unreadable block. With that in mind I went back and did a portion of the test again with a brand new disc. This time, EAC and iTunes did indeed match for 2 of the 3 rips. I used a different drive and this dropped to 1/3. 

My conclusion was that iTunes can (but not always) get a bit perfect rip depending on:

• The condition of the disc
• The quality of the drive

The same could not be said for MediaPlayer which only gave me a match once in a blue moon (well precisely once over the whole wasted weekend if I recall).

However, EAC was able to provide consistent rips that also matched the accurateRip DB with older discs and on any drive (admittedly providing I pfaffed around for 2 hours trying to calibrate the thing). The caveat was that for some discs (second hand) in poor condition, there was no way to get a rip at all in EAC without changing to burst mode which is very tolerant of scratches but sacrifices quality (never had a burst mode rip match a accurateRip checksum). iTunes would generally read these without too much trouble.

One thing I don't know is whether iTunes on a Mac and PC are fundamentally different. Does anyone know if the Mac version uses built-in drive offset profiles for the drives Apple use in their products? I tested this all through a Windows box.

One of the reasons i use XLD. I buy a lot of used CD's and some aren't as pristine as i'd like. iTunes would happily rip through a poor disc and playback would have ticks and pops in it. XLD could take about 20 minutes to do the same disc, but the resulting file was clean. I've never done any file comparisons but this was enough for me to discount iTunes for ripping duties for my library.

I've ripped just over a hundred CDs in iTunes and touch wood never had any ticks or pops thus far. I have done some comparisons sound wise with XLD rips and could not hear a difference. So for convenience I have stuck with iTunes until now. To be honest though I still prefer handling them good old silver discs most of the time. At some stage I will rip all my CDs properly and truth be told will be using XLD as my ripping software of choice then - just to be on the safe side in case there is a difference.  

I believe one thing to consider in all the discussions about sound quality of different ripping engines and formats is our choice of digital playback. The results may very well vary depending on whether one is using a Naim streamer or DAC, i.e. the delivery of files via ethernet or S/PDIF. It seems that the delivery of PCM data via S/PDIF is possibly more agnostic to these variables than the Naim streamer range.