I’m not even going to number this one because it is just so deeply unacceptable. It silently resets my library folder preference off of the NAS and on to a local HDD where then I have to painfully figure out what I imported to where and reimport it. It then wants to rebuild the library which takes freakin’ 3-5 hours (mostly I cancel that and by some miracle it actually honors the cancel button). Why? What makes it think it can reset my preferences without telling me? Usually this happens if for some reason the NAS was unavailable. But not always. Sometimes, it does this JUST TO MAKE ME ANGRY. And it works. It makes me angry.

1. It sucks CPU even when you aren’t asking it to do anything but sit quietly in the background. In this shot, it isn’t even PLAYING MUSIC.

2. It is slow as christmas.

3. Programs that go comatose and give you the computer finger (hourglass on Windows; rainbow pinwheel on Mac) without telling you what they’re doing really annoy me. Ok. It is beyond annoyance. Why can’t they stick up a dialog that says, “I’m taking this opportunity to erase some of your preferences… please wait.” iTunes is the king of comatose. I see the rainbow frickin’ constantly. “You want me to PLAY SOMETHING??? Here’s the rainbow while I hope you change your mind and go do something else…”

Ok. Why, maybe? Well, because I have a large music library and I keep it on a software RAID5 NAS. Which brings me to:

4. iTunes can’t handle large music libraries. Splitting them into multiple libraries is not a satisfactory solution.

5. iTunes sucks over a network storage device. This is the modern computing era, seriously, why can’t we have a decent library indexing scheme and some local caching?

6. It is a monopoly. I would dearly love to chuck iTunes for something that doesn’t make me so angry, but there isn’t anything else that doesn’t make me just as angry for OS X. There are literally hundreds of players for windows. Where are the choices for OS X?

And honestly, I’m fine with the crap ripping, the crap transcoding, the crap file naming, and the crap support for OGG. All I’m asking it to do is import, organize/tag, and playback music.

If Apple really wants to be the multimedia device of the future, they’d best stop adding useless cruft to iTunes like the album art flippin’ waste of CPU and do some basics right. Like have a decent library storage format that doesn’t take 5 hours to rebuild and can manage a modern sized library without sucking.