[vintageseltzer]

Thank you. VLC is a near-perfect product. I love the focus on utility, speed, and simplicity and nothing else. It is the WinAmp of video. It seems like you know what you're doing, but please resist pressure to iTunes-ify what you've built.

[jbk]

> but please resist pressure to iTunes-ify what you've built.

What would be iTunes-ifying it?

[vintageseltzer]

Early iTunes was pretty nice — a lightweight, focused music player and not much else. Over time it became slow, unusable bloatware — an iPhone/iPad backup / sync manager, an e-commerce / ad platform (iTunes store), a social media platform (Ping), a way for Apple to automatically tag/categorize/mess up your library, among others. I'm not sure if it's better now, I abandoned it years ago.

[sdenton4]

I imagine they mean adding a pile of content management bloat...

[jbk]

OK, but a media library can be lean, can it not?

[Can_Not]

I associate iTunes with useless bloat and loss of user control. My experience has exclusively been with windows and I've never purchased a device that requires iTunes to sync. Before iTunes came out, applications like foobar/winamp/Windows Media player were already loaded fast, used low resources, stable, and performant. iTunes was not. Before iTunes, you would copy your mp3s to your device. With iTunes you had a mysterious syncing process. Stories about requiring a 3 hour sync to add one new song or your entire collection being deleted were not uncommon. There was DRM in the early days. I surely wasn't going to switch from my pre-iTunes system to a system with DRM for literally no other additional value. If I knew that advanced options were missing, I'd include that in my complaints, too.