How's everybody doing? 

I've been having the iTunes dulldrums since it's bungholed, oops... I mean, bundled with Quicktime which steals all of winxp's file associations upon instalatoin. After fighting for a week to get my file associations back from Quicktime I finally  uninstalled Quicktime, uninstalled iTunes and I'm back to Windows Media Player 9 (with security patch and runtime 9). Don't even know if I should upgrade to WMP 11 at this point???

A few things I didn't like about iTunes. If you add folders to your default music folder they do not show up in your new library until you drag them from the folder where they reside into iTunes Music browser while it's open. Editing song names and info has to be done in iTunes or the library does not recognize the changes if you make them directly to the stored files. Too much hacking involved to keep iTunes happy. Argh!!!

Things I did like were the radio streams, the store, and ocassional podcast. I usually only stream radio but have built up quite a collection of songs too.

I heard that Windows Media Player 11 will recognize folders of music that are dragged into the default music folder and add them to your library automatically without all the problems of iTunes. I haven't tried this yet though.

The main thing that made me uninstall the beasty was the fact that Quicktime stole all the friggin file associations for every form of media on this WinXP/Pro?SP2 rig, and it's hard if next to impossible to get them reverted to WinXp default file associations. For example, there is now way in hell to get WMP to be the default avi player once Quicktime steals this file association. This can cause real havoc when trying to play your avi vids with any ease of use. 

Also, I googled how to install iTunes without quickitme and found a few work-arounds but I imagine that I couldn't update iTunes ever agian without going though a complete hacked iTunes install again. Here's the basic tecnique I found on a couple of sites.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/07/19/download-and-install-itunes-without-quicktime/

or

http://digg.com/software/Itunes_without_quicktime

Maybe I'll give it a shot this weekend and post back. It will be interesting what 'yall are using and why you like what you use. If your up to it, go agead and post some pros and cons about your favorite (ror not) music player, so we can get a better picture on the best music players out there. pros =  , cons = 

Cheers,
f