I like iTunes enough to use it, but it does have some real shortcomings.

The good news - great interface, great sound quality (seems somehow better than MusicMatch though I don't understand why it would), and wonderfully seamless synch with my iPod. It installed easily for me, and worked instantly.

The bad? Several things.

It's VERY slow to add new tunes. I've got a fairly big collection (20GB, 5000 songs in 400 albums), but for some reason I don't understand, it can take five minutes or more to add a new album to the library. That's just dragging the folder of already-ripped tunes into the library, not moving any files at all.

Also, it takes a very long time to synch with my iPod - hours, I think, though I'm not sure exactly because I do it when I go to sleep. Ephpod also takes a long time, so maybe this is just something about the way the update needs to be done, but I would have though it would be smart enough to only download the new stuff, which shouldn't take so long.

The feature I miss most is the ability to watch my music folder and automatically add any new files to my library. MusicMatch will do this. If it wasn't so slow to add new tunes manually maybe I wouldn't mind it, but it's a real nuisance to put the new stuff (which I rip and encode separately with EAC / LAME) in to iTunes. So I wish it at least could do it without my help.

Finally, it has crashed several times. It hasn't hurt anything or crashed the system, but there's something wrong in there somewhere.

As I said, I'm using it. It's pretty good now, but if anyone from Apple is watching there are definitely some areas for improvement.