why is iTunes for Windows so slow?

The Windows version of iTunes runs the UI remotely via a portal to hell which is inherently laggy due to the distances/physics involved.

(More seriously... It's just awfully written. I found that even when it was just updating the tiny, poorly designed progress bar at the top, the program's CPU usage would vary depending on how large the window was. Despite the fact that the progress bar was a fixed size. It seemed to be rendering the entire UI for every single change as far as I could fathom. I wish Apple had some competition in the UK DAP market so I didn't have to put up with that terrible app.)

I run iTunes in a VM these days

Amen.

3/. Lotus Notes

A-f'in'-men!

I hear the latest version of Lotus Notes is "much better" (I've only used up to 6.5) but I'm unwilling to ever give it a chance after being subjected to earlier versions for years at work. From the screenshots I've seen it's still a hellbeast, with a slightly less offensive colour scheme, and I suspect (might be wrong) the people saying "it's not too bad" are the same ones who apologised for previous versions.

(Some people seem to put up with anything. I swear they'd ask what the big deal was if the UI was upside down, rendered entirely in pink on purple with 100 pixel writhing-tentacle borders around every panel and with a single interactive button that you clicked morse code into to perform tasks.)

At the end of job interviews, when they ask if you have any questions for them, "Which mail client do you use?" has been added to my list. I think using Lotus Notes is a good indicator that a company doesn't properly invest in and maintain their general IT infrastructure and will leave things festering for years. No regard for the productivity and morale damage caused by making staff use such awful software. Email is vital and used all day, every day, intertwined within every other task but also essentially getting in the way of the real work. Anyone who chooses Lotus Notes should not just be fired from their job; they should be fired into the sun. That program is a crime against computer science.

FWIW, iTunes also provides a COM API (and I presume an AppleScript API or similar on OS X, but I don't know) that lets apps access the library data. Last I looked it was missing a couple of newer attributes but it worked pretty well...

...Except,when you instantiate the iTunes COM object it will start the iTunes app and display its UI. (As an added bonus, the iTunes UI remains in an unresponsive state, not even painting its window, while your code talks to its API.) So, sadly, the API is okay for automating iTunes itself but not ideal for accessing the iTunes database in other programs.

I would think it would be fairly easy for them to make it work better, though. An efficient API would be a million times better than tying 3rd party tools to a massive XML file. I wanted to hook the iTunes ratings tags -- stored in the XML rather than the music files -- into another program but the overhead of parsing/caching that huge XML file just didn't seem worth it and triggering the iTunes UI when people view a music file in something else isn't an option either.

Even better, they could stop locking me into their software and trying to entice me to use their online store, and let me manage my iPod as a generic USB disk drive with the metadata indexing done either by the player itself (like the later Rio/Sigmatel players do) or via an open database format and/or code library.

Of course, Apple doing this is about as likely as, to paraphrase Wayne's World, my chocolate tunnel being soothed by gusts of wind left in the wake of hastily-exiting winged simians...

I've been put off by the alternatives as they're still not what I want (i.e. most of them are still "music manager" apps with skinned UIs etc.**) and it's uncertain whether they'll work with hardware/firmware upgrades (Apple have a habit of breaking compatibility on purpose, going as far as encrypting the database format in firmware updates) and whether they'll support all the features (e.g. gapless, videos, games, podcasts...*)

I did use a very lightweight tool when I first got an iPod. It just showed a tree of files that you ticked on or off and would then sync them. That stopped working and wasn't updated for newer models/firmware.

Anapod Explorer looks/looked like it might be nice since it integrates with Explorer and provides a UI that is close to copying files to a HDD... Unfortunately, the demo version is quite restricted so I was put off installing it as I didn't think I'd be able to test it fully. I wrote, twice, to the people who make it to ask if it supported the iTunes database fields required for gapless playback (exact length tags) but they didn't reply with even a "we're not sure."

(*I don't use videos much but it's nice for a couple of TV episodes if I go on a long train journey. Don't use games on my iPod anymore after Apple screwed 5th gen iPod owners by telling us we had to re-buy our games at 100% cost to get the v1.1 updated versions that worked on the 6th gen iPod. I decided not to buy any iPod games, old or new, ever again as a result. I used to download a lot of podcasts but found I never listened to them... So gapless is the main thing, I guess. But, as crap as iTunes is, the alternatives would have to be massively better for me to switch to them and, from what I've seen, they're not.)

**EDIT: The UIs of some of the ones in the list you posted look okay, though.

I can safely say that the latest version of Notes is just as bad as previous version, it just uses more colours.

Thank you for confirming my suspicions that Notes hasn't changed!

I'd buy a Zune in an instant if it was sold in the UK and in a large-capacity (at least 64gig) flavour.

(And assuming the gapless playback works properly. I've seen the odd complaint about the Zune's gapless but I don't know if the problems only happen with certain encodings / codecs... So long as it can be made to work with some codec, that'll do me. I don't mind batch-transcoding my lossless files to something else if it works better on a particular device. Already do that with my iPod.)

As much as I'd like a Zune, I won't import one. That's too much hassle if the hardware fails (or is simply lost / dropped), both in terms of getting a replacement quickly and in terms of warranty/support. iTunes sucks but I only use it for a couple of minutes a month, if that, and the iPod itself is fine (not perfect but still good). If the iPod itself was as bad as iTunes I'd import something better.

The Zune sounds like a great piece of hardware so it's a shame that MS haven't brought it to more countries. It's a tough market, though, and I can understand why MS probably want to avoid a false start (and the lasting bad impression that can bring) and instead want to concentrate on a handful of places for now.