USB mass-storage would be nicer.
Isn't the real problem that we're forced to use iTunes in the first place?
Some music players let you copy files over as a standard USB mass-storage device, using the operating system and music manager, or file manager, of your choice rather than forcing you to use one particular program. This works much better. Personally I do not like iTunes, at least the Windows port of it, and my file manager (Directory Opus) is far more powerful and convenient. There's no way in hell I would use the Windows port of iTunes for managing playing my music so it's rather annoying to be forced to use an additional application on top of the ones that I want to use. Especially one that kinda sucks like the WIndows iTunes does. Don't get me wrong, iTunes works well enough to get the job done, to be fair to it, but I don't like it and I wish I was not forced to use it.
I used the Rockbox alternative firmware for the iPod for a while (before the official firmware was finally fixed to play albums properly, i.e. gapless playback) and the one thing I miss from Rockbox is being able to copy music files over directly.
It wasn't worth the battery-life hit to stay with Rockbox (which may be better now; I've lost touch with the project) and the time spent copying files over to a music player is insignificant compared to the time spent listening to them (unless we're talking about Sony's SonicStage where the file-copying software may make you homicidal or suicidal, or both) but if we're talking about How Things Should Be then USB mass-storage support for music files is definitely on the checklist.
Rio, whose technology is now with SigmaTel who make chipsets and firmware for various MP3 players, managed to make players which you could copy files over to via USB mass-storage (i.e. as a simple removable drive) while still allowing you to, on the player, view your files by tags. They did this by making the player, not the PC-side software, read the music file's tags and build the database. Given the CPU power of players these days, and the fact they can get firmware updates to handle new/broken tag formats just like the PC-side software, this seems like the ideal solution to me.
Of course, Apple will probably never give us this ideal solution because they have an agenda: They want the tempting iTunes Music Store to be one click away from the user at all times. If they user had a choice about using something else to copy their files then that temptation is gone. Surely this, given Apple's 80% share of the DAP business, is an abuse of a "monopoly" position in one market to gain position in another, as much as it was for Microsoft to tie Internet Explorer into Windows?
Note: I am well aware of third party apps that allow you to copy files to the iPod. The problem with these is that they rely on people reverse-engineering the iTunes/iPod database file format, which Apple have a nasty (and legitimate) habit of changing. (It's less legitimate that the database isn't in an open format, such as XML.) Having to worry about your chosen software not working after an iPod firmware update isn't ideal and nor is worrying about whether your software will support new features when they get added, or co-exist with iTunes.
For example, many of the third-party solutions don't support syncing video files. Will they make a video file that you put there with iTunes disappear by overwriting the database? I don't know to be honest, but I wouldn't want to worry about that kind of thing.
As another example, I have written to the people who make Anapod Explorer twice to ask if their software supports the exact-length tags in the database which are required for gapless playback and both times they have ignored my question. Not even a "we don't know". I've seen other people post on the web saying they asked the same question and also got no response. The trial version of Anapod appears to be too crippled to test out (I think it only lets you transfer a single track, from memory, which isn't any use for testing gapless). They say on their site that Anapod works with he new database format but that doesn't tell me whether it supports all features of it, such as those new tags.
Going back to itunes, Apple are not alone in this, of course. MS force you to use Media Player (or rather a slightly modified version of it) with their sub-standard Zune. Sony force you to use their terrible software which completely ruins their fairly nice hardware. It's all crap.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
