How iTunes sucks

iTunes is not that bad as a music player but there are features that are distinctly substandard.

In particular the Windows version makes no attempt to provide Windows look and feel. Mac people whine incessantly about the lack of Mac look and feel on programs targetted at their platform, Apple should take the same pains when supporting Windows that they expect other to take for the Mac.

The Apple style Chrome looks distinctly ugly under Aero. More significantly the tab for setting prefferences is under 'Edit' on the far left rather than 'Settings' on the right. Until I managed to find preferences my list of complaints was rather longer.

The other principal gripe I have is that iTunes thinks in terms of tracks, not albums. In most cases this does not matter, but whenever a disk has tracks with multiple artists they end up fragmented in the display.

Another aspect of this problem is that none of the browser interfaces gives me a grid of album covers to choose from. Dealling at the track level may have made sense when 1Gb was a large collection, I have 10Gb and I am not done ripping yet. None of the current displays will show more than about five albums at a time. That is not a good use of my 4 million pixels of screen real estate.

Don't give me a shitty 'coverflow' whizbang display, not unless you have the basics done first. The coverflow display shows me fewer covers at a time, not more, 4 million pixels an I get to see 6 covers, only one front on. My monitor can easily show 200 cover icons at once, use that capability.

One of the main uses for such a view would be to fill in the missing covers after a ripping session.

Another thing I would like is a better way to handle the occasional rip that ends up damaged for some reason, perhaps the disk is dirty or scratched. I don't want to have to deal with these by checking each one after the fact, just keep track of the number of errors and let me search for disks with problems after doing a batch rip.