You know me... I'm tolerant of Apple. But just barely. I got an iPod because it was the only decent replacement for my old Diamond Rio PMP300. If the Zune was available at the time, I probably would have purchased it, instead because, as I've already said: I'm just barely tolerant of Apple.

If you make a habit of reading my Twitter posts, you would have come across a very unpleasant thought about iTunes. There I was, minding my own business... I wanted to listen to some music, so I decided to open iTunes because since I have an iPod, I might as well process my library into iTunes as well. I had playlists, podcasts and almost half my music library rated. I had album art for every single piece of music I had in the database, and I very much enjoyed listening to the Top Rate and Most Played auto-playlists, and I was looking forward to poking around! I open iTunes and it takes an awfully long time to load... As in, more than usual. iTunes is a freakin' mammoth of a program. If you don't believe me, just take a look at the RAM footprint of this thing. For all the flak that Windows Media Player gets, even WMP uses half the RAM that iTunes does. (And doesn't do what I'm about do tell you.)

When iTunes finally shows up... The entire library is blank. Zip... Nothing is in it. It's a perfectly default iTunes. There is not a single song in the library. Somehow, without any errors or any indications as to why it happened, iTunes decided to ERASE all the information I had in it. Luckily, it didn't go ahead and wipe out the actual music files... Only the iTunes library files. I check the folder and the latest backup it created was from a year ago, almost to the day. You know how much has changed since then? The library I had this month is nothing like what I had a year ago.

This happened two weeks ago and I'm still steamed about it. I haven't gotten around to restoring the music yet because, hey! Guess what? If I sync my iPod again, it'll erase EVERYTHING and then proceed to resync EVERYTHING. 33 gigabytes of music removed and reuploaded to the iPod because iTunes decided it would be fun to erase the library without any warning. No errors, no dialog boxes, nothing. It started up and was empty... It's as simple as that. I am now officially less than tolerant of Apple. For all the gloating snobbishness that Apple fanboys (and even Steve Jobs himself) shoves out onto the Internet, you'd think that they would have at least streamlined iTunes as a program, and definitely not let something like this happen. At least... I would think so. But no, Apple is too busy telling you how privileged and honored you are to use their applications. (Remember that big interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on the stage at the same time? It was last year I believe... Maybe the year before. Jobs himself said that Apple products on a Windows system were like having a glass of water in Hell. Too bad it's just another one of his reality distortion field-reliant lies. It doesn't work on Windows users, mister... And when iTunes goes and does something like this, it makes it all the more easy to laugh at your mass-delusions.)

So I am now taking this time to relocated my music files to my Linux server and then mapping the network share to a drive letter (M:\ for music, if you wish to know) and to look into alternative music players. Actually, I've already decided on Windows Media Player to have everything ready for when I get a Zune, but I need to look into third-party applications to sync music to my iPod. There's a Windows Explorer program that you can sync music with (using the context menu on MP3 files), but there's a WMP plugin that's looking far more promising. I would much rather have a WMP library sync'ed than me having to manually right-click folders to transfer.