I ditched iTunes in favor of foobar2000. Quite customizable and very light program (as opposed to iTunes), may be a good idea to check it out. But now I use Google Music, with All Access enabled. Love the fact that I can upload 20k songs and stream them in any browser.
Also a fan of foobar2000. Its the plugins that make it. I use the discogs tagger, facets for organising by genre and the DLNA plugin for streaming.
I'll second foobar2000. It's a great little program, I use it fairly often and it's nice how customizable it is. A lot less bloat than iTunes, and it accomplishes the same things and more.
Yeah.... google music. My living room computer didn't quite understand "backup" when it met the NAS. It... ate all my MP3s. But hey! No worries! Everything's up on Google, right? After all, I backed up 28,000 songs up there... ...yeah. Not so much. It corrupted hashes on 68% of them. It downloaded garbage. Fortunately I was able to restore from an older backup, but my faith in Google Music is nil. Also: Foobar is Windows only. Those of us on the Mac side? Yeah, getting away from iTunes is impossible.
I haven't seen iTunes Win since 2006 but at the time, I recall wondering why you'd run it over, say, Winamp. I'm not surprised to hear it's gotten worse. On the plus side there are viable alternatives on the Win side. On the Mac side?
Right... but if I want to keep a library organized, share the XML over the network, control it remotely via my phone or sync it with my devices, I still need iTunes. That's the real problem with everything on the Mac side - iTunes is damn near an extension of the Finder, which means you can't do shit without it. It sucks.