I don't like iTunes very much. In fact, I despise it more than any other program on my computer that I use regularly. It is slow, bloated, unintuitive, and following the typical (Typical? Try mandated!) Apple credo, you do it Steve's way or forget it.

What triggered my rant this morning was that I just needed to add a single track to my iPod and the minute I started iTunes it Synced and erased everything on the player. (My Music Library was empty). There is a checkbox in iTunes under Edit--->Preferences-->Devices that says "Prevent iPodss, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically" and this box was indeed checked, but apparently Mr. Jobs knew what I wanted to do better than I did.

iTunes may be a wonderful program for someone who wants total music management through a single interface. But I don't want to play my music with iTunes. I don't want to rip my music through iTunes. I most certainly do not want to purchase music through iTunes, nor look at album art or get advice about what kind of music I want to hear.

All I want is some simple method, like Rio Music Manager, by which I can see what's on my iPod and drag tracks onto it or delete tracks from from it. I don't want it to do ANYTHING else. Imagine being able to open up two Windows Explorer windows, one for the iPod and one for my hard drive, and be able to drag files back and forth between them.

Is there such a program out there?

tanstaafl.