The advantage of a folder structure is that I know where my files are all the time. If I use another OS or copy files to another device, I can just browse through my files just like I'm on my own desktop. Rockbox also allows you to browse by ID3 tags, but I rarely use this. I have my own classification scheme that doesn't exactly fit with iTunes' artist/genre/album scheme. For example, in my spoken audio tree, I have two folders, one called "en", another called "ch". These are for English and Chinese respectively. Sometime, I have an file with Chinese audio, but an English filename. What could be easier than to have a folder for Chinese audio? There's only one thing that I can think of that could improve it, and that would be tagging. Sometimes I have a file that falls under more than one classification. If I could tag it with both that would be great. But this doesn't bother me enough to start using iTunes, which has too many annoyances.

0. BTW, you can tell iTunes NOT to copy your music into their folder structure. Check it out in Prefs.

1. Just use iTunes on both OS's. ;-)

2. In iTunes you can right click on an album, track, etc. and copy it elsewhere.

3. You can tag songs/albums/etc. multiple ways in iTunes.

I understand where you're coming from, that used to be me; but if you give up your compulsion to control every little (unnecessary) mechanical aspect of managing your media and just let iTunes does what it thinks is right, you'll see that it frees up your time.

0. I did that, but why can't I browse my folder structure within iTunes? Rockbox lets me do it.

1. What about Linux? Portable devices not made by Apple?

2. It's easier to drag a drop a directory or use cp -R /audio /media/mp3player than figure out iTunes' methods.

3. I give iTunes one star for that one. Hopefully next gen OS will give us the ability to tag files.

3. Fulltext-search applies to every column, even the not-so-often-filled-out ones. Try mentally reading "Genre" as "Tags"—works perfectly, both practically and semiotically, even when creating playlists. For example, I think I have a few songs from DDR in my library; their genre is "Dance Game Soundtrack". A few from some old japanese equivalent to MP3.com are Genre'd "Indie Asian-language Pop".

I do that too, but it doesn't work perfectly.

For instance, how do you select all your tracks with genre Game, without also getting "Love is a losing game", or creating a smart playlist.

0. Because why do you want to?

1. Uhm.

2. If you set iTunes NOT to copy music into the Library, then you can continue to manage your directory structure manually and do your command line tricks (or even drag & drop the folder visually). The only big limitation which will probably to continue drive you away from iTunes is point 0.

3. You can tag files in OS X. I don't think you can have unlimited number of tags though. (I don't use this feature).

Here's just a small example of the daily pain I face when I use itunes:

I recently ripped both the mono and stereo box sets of 2009 Beatles remasters. These are all in a proper hierarchical file structure, properly tagged with musicbrainz picard yet iTunes insists on merging both versions of each album and I get something like this:

  1. Taxman
  1. Taxman
  2. Eleanor Rigby
  2. Eleanor Rigby
  3. I'm Only Sleeping
  3. I'm Only Sleeping
  4. Love You To
  4. Love You To
  5. Here, There and Everywhere
  5. Here, There and Everywhere
  6. Yellow Submarine
  6. Yellow Submarine
  7. She Said She Said
  7. She Said She Said
  8. Good Day Sunshine
  8. Good Day Sunshine
  9. And Your Bird Can Sing
  9. And Your Bird Can Sing
  10. For No One
  10. For No One
  11. Doctor Robert
  11. Doctor Robert
  12. I Want to Tell You
  13. Got to Get You into My Life
  13. Got to Get You into My Life
  14. Tomorrow Never Knows
  14. Tomorrow Never Knows

and if you set the album names (or the 'grouping' field) to "Revolver (Mono)" and "Revolver (Stereo)" you wouldn't have that problem.

but those aren't the names of the albums.

edit: I had no idea about the 'grouping' tag. I'll have to give that a try, thanks.

another edit: okay 'grouping' is still useless if I choose to sort by album or album by year (preferred). I guess my only solution is to append (mono) and (stereo) to each album but I'm REALLY pissed I have to do this.

You could also set the Disc Number tag, if that's your fancy.

No. When I want a playlist, it's often not easy or not possible to find a search term that includes just the album I want, so I have to drag the album into a new playlist, which creates clutter. Playlist searching is great for finding a song but terrible for building a playlist.

Type in the name of the album? Or even the artist. If you're in Grid view (top right, next to search), you get pretty album art, you can simply drag & drop the album into your playlist.

The name of the album or the artist are the kind of "seems like it should work" that doesn't work. Lots of artists reuse album names as (all or part of) song names, or there'll be other metadata in the ID3 tags that happens to match an album by a different artist, or whatever.

Also, the grid view would be more useful if you did get album art for most albums, but most of the icons I see are a gray musical note. This is one of those better-in-theory features. :)

Anyway, though I use it today for lack of an alternative, I'm still holding a grudge against iTunes for destroying my music library back in May 2003 when I switched. I only had five thousand tracks or so at that time, but most of them didn't have any ID3 information because I'd ripped them from CDs myself over the years, and the filenames already contained the information I cared about, which was visible in the CLI (I came from Linux); the ID3 tags were invisible metadata I never paid attention to. Then I imported my music, and iTunes helpfully arranged all my MP3s into "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album/Unknown Title (n).mp3" based on ID3 information that didn't exist. Thanks, iTunes.

For music I don't buy through iTunes, I either do "Get Albmum Art", or I find it online and add it manually.

This is something I can highly recommend as your iTunes experience would certainly go up a notch.