Hello! I love my iPhone. But I hate, I mean really, really hate, iTunes. With a passion. I can't even count how many times I've had it crash and/or **** things up on my phone. The final straw was today when it randomly decided to try and delete every single app on my phone when I tried syncing. This wouldn't be so bad if I could back everything up first, but oh, wait - for some reason, backing up my phone takes literally almost a full 24 hours. Half the time it stops right before the end and gives me an error message and I have to start over. It's not just my computer, either... I've tried this on three different ones. Ugh. Sorry... I'm getting ahead of myself. The point of this post is, I need to find an alternative to iTunes before I throw my phone out the window and shoot myself in the face. I've heard of a few, but I'm not sure if they can manage/sync/backup everything (including apps and photos and everything else... I'm not just talking about music). Any suggestions? Which are the best? Thank you!
Wow, you certainly have been experiencing some issues. Have you upgraded to the latest software? because I have not had any such issues. The thing is with iTunes is that there isn't really a solid alternative. Sure there are alternative song buying stores but no actual 'load your songs onto you ipod' thing as apple make both the ipod and iTunes. Correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't think there are any iTunes alternatives that do what iTunes does. Edit: 300th post
madmud is right. There is no alternative to iTunes for loading songs to an iPhone or iPod Touch. There used to be for the iPod Classics (still is I imagine) because the directory structure of those iPods was transparent, if obfuscated. That isn't the case on the iPhone or iPod Touch, so there's no possible way to create an alternative to iTunes that works with Apple's touch devices. My suggestion would be to wipe iTunes, hard-reset your phone, and start over by reinstalling from scratch. I don't know how you're having the problems you're having but I've never experienced any of those -- at least, not since iPhone OS 1.x when backups took for-freaking-ever. I have experienced problems with app management in iTunes, such as it deleting things I didn't tell it to delete and installing things I told it not to, but that usually only happens when I go too long without syncing and things get messy. (I have a habit of managing, downloading and deleting apps directly on my iPhone and syncing maybe once every 2 months or something. I'm changing that though, especially with a couple of recent beta programs I've entered where it's required.) If I sync regularly it's usually pretty good about it.
Assuming that you buy all your items legally, one option could be to only ever download things from your phone. This is not sure fire due to things like updates and music from off CD's, but this is what I do normally to save hassle and time, not to mention avoiding itunes.
But if something were to happen to your iPhone, you've pretty much lost every purchase you've made on it (minus apps).
