jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Upon recommendations I've seen online, I'm deleting iTunes and going with Music Bee (probably). VLC supposedly has a good audio manager, but Music Bee seems more intuitive.

Microsoft doesn't support iTunes, so it's a security concern. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGHNKonbFTM

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I don't use iTunes that much, think I'll keep it.

Windows media player works too.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

ITunes is a very poor Ap and Apple apparently knows it as of the Catalina release. Apparently ITunes Match is still alive, but problematical on a Windows machine. It uploads your current music library (MP3s, etc) to ICloud and makes it avaialable to all your other devices. No big deal, but the allure was that it would (a) eliminate duplicates in your library (b) if Apple had a better quality version, it would substitute that, and (c) it would add the album cover and notes to every song/album it could. You could then download the deduped, enhanced quality collection with album covers - a perfect way to clean up a messy MP3 collection (mine had 65,000 songs/cuts) - worth the $25/year for a one time clean up. Unfortunately, mine stopped being able to add new songs/albums, which made it useless. I worked with half a dozen Apple specialists trying to resolve the issue for >6 months, and they could never fix it, so I said screw it and cancelled. So much for Apple’s vaulted support.

What I do subscribe to is Apple’s excellent high definition music streaming service with millions of titles, all CD quality and many digitized from masters. Combined with a decent external DAC, it’s as good a music source as there is in terms of quality and variety/depth in my opinion - right there with Tidal, except less expensive, more titles and easier to navigate in my opinion. $10-15/month depending on the number of users.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I just use "plain" (free) iTunes. It's a nice database type listing of what I have on the PC.
To my knowledge, my songs are not in the cloud. At least I didn't intentionally put them there.

Fotoserj Loc: St calixte Qc Ca

Oh apple will do it for you then charge you for recovering YOUR music

Bayou

Good choices. iTunes is dreadful, and Music Bee is my music player of choice...very good, though I do most of my listening on a streaming service these days, but that's another discussion.

KillroyII Loc: Middle Georgia

I hope you keep us informed about the transition and use of MusicBee. I am interested in a change as well.

JoeBiker Loc: homebase: Houston, TX

For Playing MP3s, I have tried foobar2000 and MediaMonkey (both on PC and Android devices). I like MediaMonkey better.

For moving stuff back and forth to iDevices, I have used Syncios and iMazing. Syncios is free (or at least the free version is usable), but I like iMazing better. You can occasionally get iMazing on sale for ~$35.

iTunes, itself, has been nothing but trouble for the last year or so.

therwol Loc: USA

iTunes has worked for me in conjunction with an iPod and a JVC car stereo that has an iPod mode. My iTunes library is synched to the iPod and organized the same way. The car stereo brings up the playlists in alphabetical order, and I go from there. I don't need anything else. Also, a friend of mine who is a 100% Mac guy ripped thousands of CDs in the Apple Lossless format and plays them on his multi-thousand dollar audio system. (I import mine using AAC. MP3 does not support gapless play, and on many CDs, particularly classical, one track goes into the next without a pause.)

pilgrim1951 Loc: New Jersey

I don't know, I've been using iTunes for years and my only complaint is that sometimes the album artwork isn't available, which I understand since a lot of my music isn't produced by the big labels. 99% of my music I upload from my analog library and I'm pretty old-school in that I use an iPod for all of my music and nothing else. My phone is my phone and my music is my iPod- "Everything is in its place, authority must be maintained." (Victoria by the Kinks).

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

The issue with ITunes and Macs is that it is no longer supported past the Catalina release( of the OS, being replaced with Apple Music: https://www.4c.co.uk/industry_news/apple-is-discontinuing-itunes-heres-everything-you-need-to-know/

Laramie Loc: Tempe

I rip all Cds I buy and listen to the ripped copies in the car and in the office. I let my ripper place the mp3s where they belong, and use XMplay (portable) to play the music. I realize it's not what you asked for, but some might be interested.

AlGreg

I have used windows media player for years. I have a library of over 50k songs. Windows media player just works. Make playlists. Play by artist, genre, album. Rip your CDs to any format. Sync to a flash drive for your car. Make a music CD or an mp3 CD for your CD player. As you rip a CD it automatically puts it in the proper genre, organizes it by Artist. It handles videos also. It comes with every Windows computer for free. Did I also mention that it works.