Program replacing iTunes?

What gives you that feeling? Have you tried iTunes? What is it that you want, that iTunes doesn't do?

 

There's Songbird but I still think iTunes is the best music player for Mac.

 

Apple lossless is the way to go. I rip all my cds to it and I even put it on my iPod Touch lossless. Lossless is just that... indistinguishable from the cd.

Can you tell us what you don't like about iTunes? I actually like it. I've organized all my music in folders and smart playlists by artist, album, song. All have artwork. It wasn't hard to do.

 

I'm happy with the playing, but the library organization and lack of customization ability seems really lacking. In fact, that's the only reason I run Parallels/Win7 so that I can use Tag & Rename to clean up the mess that iTunes makes of my cd imports.

For example, I just bought a new album from a band that features guest vocals by several different people on different tracks. iTunes sets the artist to the guest vocalist rather than the band, and creates directories for those artists, rather than put it under the main band where I want it. I also want a specific filename format (# - Artist - Album - Track name.extension). Not with iTunes.

I also want the option to customize my directory naming. I want my archive to have directory names that include the release year so I can see things in chrono order. Not with iTunes.

For now, I rip (lossless) using Toast and then use Tag&Rename then import into iTunes.

So as I'm about to rip hundreds of CDs to put in my shared NAS library, I want it to be how I want it to be. But like other areas of Apple-world, it seems they've decided how things are going to be run (no Flash for you!) rather than letting the user decide. It sucks to have to run it all through a multi-step Mac/Win process to get what I want.

Anybody have suggestions for a single Mac-only solution for ripping/naming/organizing?

 

Good luck. And let me know if you have managed it.