NO! NO! It's not an excellent piece of software! It's a bloated, resource-hogging, user-railroading shitheap like most of things that Steve Jobs belches out! Kill! Kill!
I should know, I've had to suffer it for five years because I was gifted a 30gb iPod in 2006 and I've recently come to the conclusion that iTunes is a hateful, hateful, application. In fact, had I known that one can "sync" (gnagh, a word I hate) one's iPod with other things I would have exorcised it summarily at an earlier date.
Firstly, it's ridiculously large. Installed on my (soon to be old) laptop, it took up about 67 megabytes. Plus another 35 megabytes for QuickTime without which it will not run, and which in turn is slow and has a habit of crashing for shiggles. And besides, you can play .movs and .3gps on VLC VideoLan if you really must. Why you need QuickTime to run iTunes (it complains and refuses to start without it) is something I have never understood. I suspect that Monsieur Jobs has taken a spot of inspiration from Realplayer on this.
And it's clunky and slow and uses too much memory - 30 megabytes on this laptop. Furthermore, opening and closing it became positively glacial and it decided to have to think about whether or not to scroll up or down to what I wanted to listen to or not when I tried to do it. That's when it wasn't outright crashing. Then, when I'd ripped myself a new CD that I'd bought, it would think about it for AGES while it decided to import the new MP3 files I'd generated into the library. If I selected an entire folder and selected "Add to iTunes library" it would only ever add three or four at random, and the last track in the album. So I'd have to go and manually double click each file at random. Fun. Try doing that with Cassetteboy's "The Parker Tapes," all 98 tracks of it. You'd be up all night double clicking, waiting while it thinks about it, imports, starts trying to play that track, thinking about it some more, and so on. Probably it's deciding if you're cool enough to play with Monsieur Jobs's executive toys and taking it's time over it. Or surreptitiously e-mailing its hipster mates and sneering at your music collection.
But then again, it's not really a music player, not at heart. It's an elaborately designed advert for the iTunes music store, where you can pay for crippled (read: DRM'd) music files in a proprietary format that nobody uses other than other iTunes users and that you can't put on any player than an iPod. iTunes also seems designed to try and trap you into opening the iTunes store in as many ways as possible. It's in the base directory of the left-hand side bar and you can't remove that link. Furthermore, the main "table" showing al your music is a minefield of little arrows next to track names that are links to the appropriate page of the store. Sorry, but no. I want a music player, not some demented version of Minesweeper where the penalty for losing is to be advertised to. And if I wanted to buy music in download format off the internets, I'd open up Firefox and, yano, shop around for what I was looking for in terms of cheapness and DRM free-ness. Or maybe I'd, yano, LEAVE THE HOUSE and go and buy the CD.
Now you may be thinking, "A-ha! But Steve Jobs has already your soul, young Hazelnut, for you own an iPod and you need iTunes to copy everything onto it, n'est-ce pas?" To which my response is, "Yaahh boo sucks to you, fanboy! I can transfer my music onto my iPod with Winamp, which is smaller (12 megabytes to download), uses less RAM (11,976 KB according to Task Manager), faster to actually put things into, and doesn't foist you with QuickTime and other assorted bollox that you don't want, nor does it try to sell you things." And not only that - with Winamp you can transfer FROM your iPod or other music player to your computer, so if your hard disk explodes or you get a new computer, you don't lose everything as your iPod is a suitable backup. It's absolutely astounding, I must say, that the official Apple software for your iPod does not do this. I suspect they were terrified of being sued because then people could just use their iPods to pirate everything willy nilly by plugging and unplugging into everyone's computers willy nilly, sort of like a human-powered Bittorrent stream.
And that's why I fundamentally dislike iTunes. There's free, faster, smoother, and more functional programs that do exactly the same thing, they just don't have the slick design to them.
Kind of a metaphor for Apple as a whole, really.