Why I killed iTunes

I have been using iTunes since 2001 (version 1.0) on a Mac, and since it came out - on a PC, too.
I killed iTunes on my PC and here's why.

First of all, I do not posess Apple's "closed source" systems like iPod or iPhone.
This effectively frees me from the need of iTunes - because I do not have to sync those. Nevertheless, iTunes seemed to be the best music jukebox system out there, on any platform. But 7 years have passed, and things have changed...read on.

Secondly, there's no iTunes Music Store operating in Russia (of course, this being a major reason to my first point. A big pity, I must say, I was longing for a way to get those free Album Art covers for all my CD-ripped goodness...
GimmeSomeTune stopped finding the right stuff, for some reason.

Next on, the built-in Visualizer has changed for the worse. It tends to circle a little bit too much on a very limited subset of visual configs, showing just few tired schemes.
My reliable sources said Steve Jobs mada some orders and it influenced the "randomness" of the config preset selection. Too bad, I still remember how beatiful it was in version 2!..
Version 7 showed some improvement in that part, though, but never again was it soo good...

The User Interface has changed in v6 from very simple and elegant, rounded corners, to somewhat edgy and more aggressively-looking one; the Visuals button disappeared into the menu; button layout changed and I must say it was unpleasant and irritating to accomodate to those unexpected changes.

Startup speed on PC was slow.

But worst of all, was the closed nature of it's sync mechanism (iPod or nothing), which could not help my Nokia N95 to get new tunes! Well guys, I remember v1 was not so! It could sync to Rio and Creative MP3 players, although to a limited set.

Once I installed the new Nokia N-series PC Suite, I could not miss the MTP option - the one that installs the drivers needed for Sync with the Windows Media Player.
The second blow came when I upgraded from bundled WMP9 to the latest WMP11.

IT REALLY ROCKS!

I did not expect this from Microsoft, but they did their homework well!
This player exceeded my expectations in functionality, and gave me a very satisfying user interface.

Very important that now I can sync to Nokia, thanks to the open nature of it's device interface.

This thing watches folders! The functionality has always been in my wishlist for iTunes - and I found it only in WMP11. Now you can simply copy some files into a watched folder and they automatically appear in your WMP Library! The same goes with changes/deletions. Wow!

The usability has increased dramatically since the previous versions.
I have never had high expectations of newer MS releases, but hey! WMP11 delivers!
This one goes against my common rule - never upgrade a Microsoft product until you have to.

WMP11 has a built-in Find Album Info feature - this works most of the time, getting all the info, including the album art.

And since all my music was already neatly packed into iTunes Music folder, I just set the WMP to Watch this folder - and all my music magically appeared inside the WMP Library! Managing music with this feature is a no-brainer. The only loser would be iTunes, if I changed something outside of it.
And then - after a week or so - I found it does not make sense to keep PC iTunes anymore. The competitor is strong enough to stand on it's own feet.
Why would I bother manually re-scanning music folders from within iTunes, to add some newly copied files?

Kudos to the MS Windows Media Player Team!

(My Mac still runs iTunes, though! :)