[Argorak]

Jein. (Thats a very german cross between yes and no)

iTunes has a fast search through my large library and it is very easy to reach the thing you want. I don't create playlists, but from time to time return to my player, search for something and hit "play", closing the window afterwards.

iTunes is not perfect at that, but _every other player_ is worse. Either, closing the window kill the program (lackluster Linux/Win-Ports), the search is slow or just not very central the interface. For example, VOX wants me to search for a song and then hit "Enter" twice before playing it, with a fancy, but slow animation. Searching for albums is even slower, I'd prefer if they just presented me with album matches immediately.

So, the outcome of my eternal search is: iTunes is not a great music player, but every other on OS X is worse.

[masukomi]

i think you're missing the key argument which is that playing music is just one of the many things iTunes does. Those of us who dislike it rarely hate it as much for its music playing as for the fact that it's a file transfer app (to get files into and out of ios apps), it's a iOS backup and sync manager, it's an OS updater, its a store, it's a music player, and probably 3 other things i've forgotten.

[Argorak]

I'm not missing it, I'm ignoring it. I'd be fully okay with iTunes dropping all that stuff or using something different - if there were another alternative.