I clung desperately to my minidisc player. I loved it. It worked. It was fine. Even as mp3’s appeared and replicated all over the place, I held fast to my MDs. I broke down, finally, and got a proper mp3 player. No extra software. I plug it in, drag my folders over, perfect. It plays what I tell it to, is even smart enough to keep stepping through folders if I don’t tell it not to. It’s. WONDERFUL. So why am I now bitching about iTunes? I got given an iPhone. Nothing spiffy, just the 2G. I never wanted an iPhone, or even an iPod for that matter. I would hear things about iTunes doing this, deleting that, etc and just wanted no part of it. So I never paid any attention to it. But, hey, you get gifted a piece of perfectly functional, not ancient tech, you don’t turn that down.

So here I am with an Apple product, a very popular Apple product, and very little idea of how to make it do what I want it to do. What am I trying to get it to do? Play my music in a normal, straightforward way. That’s all I ask. But no, I can’t. I can sort my music by all sorts of ways, but each one lacks…something. For instance, I have tracks that don’t have ID3 tags. Sorry, it happens. It’s nice that iTunes still shows me these “lower class” tracks, but if I try to transfer it to the podphone, I can’t find it. Because it wants to be helpful and categorize it somewhere, but it can’t because there’s no tag. Easy enough fix: tag it. Fine. Here’s  more exasperating issue. On my machine, my music is organized into folders in which each folder is an album. Make sense? Okay. I want to transfer an Eminem album (don’t judge me). I sort my library by artist, select the album I want, then drop it to the podphone. Perfect? No. Because sorting by artist doesn’t pick up the three or so tracks from the album where it’s “Eminem feat. Obie Trice”. Oh no. That track is 37 tracks down. Okay, group by album. HAHAHAHAHAHA. Compilation albums fuck that right up (assuming because the tagging is weird). I’ll see the same track 3 or more times in a row all pointing to the same album because a tag got fucked up somewhere. Grrr. Why can’t I have my folders? Why is that so hard to understand. I don’t want iTunes to “manage” my media. I use it because that’s the only free thing I found that will sync the podphone. The Winamp plug-in fails miserably for me. I just want to know why there isn’t some extra little option, like an advanced button, that will just let me drag and drop shit the way I want it. “Just make a playlist! Folders are so 90’s!” I’ve already made my “playlist.” It’s the goddamn folder. JUST PLAY ALL THE TRACKS IN THE FOLDER AND GO TO THE NEXT FOLDER IF I DON’T STOP YOU. How hard is that???

I guess I don’t quite have the hang of this piece of software that 80 year old grandparents who can’t work a simple remote control have absolutely no problem using.

Do any of you have any good free iTunes alternatives that will work well with a damn iPhone?