Thats right, Ive said it, and all of you people that think iTunes is great need to quit drinking Apple’s Kool-aid for a while and try other things…seriously (You too Mr. Rose).

Recently I have been forced to use iTunes to manage my iPhone. It wasn’t a big deal when I first started because the only thing I was using it for was to backup my contacts etc. I didn’t use the iPod functionality with the iPhone so my iTune use was at a very minimal state. I ran into a problem with the MP3 player I was using and decided to use the iPod functionality of my iPhone until I can get a music player replacement.

Thats when I noticed something…iTunes is horrible. First, trying to find anything on iTunes is a mess. I mainly search for podcast and none of them are easy to find but if that was it, I could deal with that. But when you have bad navigation and slow software that makes me pull my hair out. Yea the software is just slow to react. if I click on anything, it takes too long to load.

Another annoyance I had was how the “subscribe to podcast” feature is hidden away in the menu bar. Lets say you already have the RSS feed for the podcast you are looking for, there’s no obvious way to just type in the RSS feed to add it to the list of podcast’s you subscribe too. But if you look in the advance tab in the menu bar you’ll see it. Why is that not a button on the main podcast section? Yea you can do a search, but if you do the results include everything, Music, Movies, Podcast, it can get quite confusing and there is a chance that the podcast you are looking for might not even show up in the search results.

Back to the performance of the software. Ive used several “Podcatchers” in the past few years and I cant understand why iTunes take so much longer to download episodes than every other Podcatcher Ive used in the past. Its also the case with syncing podcast with the iPhone. I use to just sync in a minute or 2, would be something I could do at the last minute before I leave the house. With iTunes, I have to be mindful of the time I have so that I don’t miss out on transferring some of the new episodes to my iPhone.

While talking about syncing, there are times where I update my subscribed podcast, Sync with the iPhone then Im driving to work trying to listen to a particular episode only to find out its not there. iTunes will stop updating podcast if you haven’t listened to an episode in a while, and the only warning you get is a little exclamation mark by the podcast. That is something that happens a lot for me, especially with daily podcast that I might not listen to every day. Lets take Chris Pirillo’s Podcast for example. he release a lot of smaller podcast on a lot of different topics. Some I’m interested in, some I’m not. I can look at his feed and see that he is talking about something I want to hear about and expect it to be synced to my iphone, since I am subscribed but ITunes decided not to download it because I haven’t listened to a few of the previous episodes. By the time I figure that out, I’m already on my way to work and there’s no way to get it then.

I could go on and on about how bad iTunes is but I have to reboot. iTunes just updated and now for somereason I cant leave this tab. Hopefully I can save this post and you will get to read my rant.