Some people don’t really like iTunes, but are entrapped, mainly because they’ve got an iPod or perhaps their libraries are too integrated with iTunes. But it really isn’t all that hard to move to Windows Media Player, WinAmp, Real Player or one of the other alternatives.

First, try to get all your music in one place. This might be unneccesary if you’re like me, and have your entire collection in one folder (actually, in my case, partition). This helps when you’re adding the files to another media player. Do this by going to the Edit menu -> Preferences. Click on the Advanced Tab, and set the iTunes library location to the place you want all your music to go. Now, clik on File -> Library -> Consolidate Library. Will take some time, but will make sure that all the music in your iTunes library is now organised in one folder.

I’m trusting that you didn’t try and play video with iTunes. It is possibly the worst player for video. Apparently it refuses to take video codecs from the OS’s codec library, and will only support .mov (QuickTime) and .mp4 files. I can’t say about podcasts, mainly because I don’t really use them too much.

All you need to do is add that folder to your new media player’s media library and/or watch list. A watch list will monitor that folder for any changes, and automatically add new media to the library as and when you add it to that folder.Now, the main problem arises when you’re thinking of moving metadata. This can be a pain with iTunes, mainly because it doesn’t believe in keeping stuff like playlists, play counts and ratings as metadata with your music files, but it keeps it hidden away in that crappy iTunes library XML file. That place looks like a complete junkyard. And I can see why searches take so long in iTunes. Anyway, there’s a solution I stumbled across – MusicBridge.

Actually, this only works for iTunes -> Windows Media Player. It’s a tool which copies all that info from your iTunes Library to your WMP library. All I had to do was just add the media files into the WMP library, and then run this program which did the rest for me. I had an option to copy just General Metadata, Ratings, Playlists, Artwork and more such stuff. It could also copy stuff from WMP -> iTunes, but such a person would be a moron, right?

In it’s defense, iTunes does seem to use less RAM in Windows 7 for some reason. Apparently, window management’s gotten better, and this means that it needs less of private memory. But that’s about it…;-)