[charlesarthur]

"Last time I used it, it still didn't have a media library and dumped tens of thousands of songs into a flat list."

In the "Advanced" tab, which I'd expect any self-respecting HN denizen to go to first, there's a checkbox for "Keep iTunes Media folder organized" which explains that it will "[place] files into album and artist folders, and [name] the files based on the disc number, track number and song title". Mine is a very hierarchical structure - and I've had it for a decade. No flat list here.

"You have to have that garbage installed on your machine if you own an iPhone. Not interested."

Not true, either - hasn't been true since the advent of iCloud in 2011.

As to the codecs - it does do MP3 and AAC, which probably covers 95% of available content, though it doesn't do Ogg Vorbis, Quo Vadis, or various others. For that sort of thing there's VLC.

[zamalek]

> hasn't been true since the advent of iCloud in 2011.

Assuming I'm using AIMP3 as my media player of choice, how would iCloud play into getting my song library onto an iPhone? Like Winamp and Foobar2000, it allows you to treat a removable drive as a media player.

> For that sort of thing there's VLC.

That's a non-starter. Even Windows Media Player, which is probably used by a total of three people, can be extended to support any arbitrary audio codec using a documented API. I don't get phone calls from my 90y/o father asking how to get media to work, the codec pack that I installed guarantees that almost any codec under the sun will work with almost any Windows application (notably excluding iTunes).