This might be a strange question, Shawn, but if you don't have an iPod, why use iTunes at all?

Given what a piece of crud iTunes is, I'd use Windows Media Player exclusively if I didn't own an iPod (or if WMP supported the iPod - I wish)!

I used to use it (I've given it up) to specifically to buy music that the other music services do not sell. I will now have to go buy the actual CD instead.

WHen I have bought from iTunes in the past (or any music store really), I have immeddiately burned a CD then ripped MP3's from it. Please, don't give me the quality loss story here...I am deaf enough from headphones these past thirty some-odd years so I can't discern the difference.

Voila! Non-DRM'd music!

you think wmp is better than itunes? i dont think so.

For managing a large music collection...WMP (since v9) has been vastly superior to iTunes. THough its not nearly perfect and anyone who knows of a better way to view your music by song/artist/album etc., please let me know.

You can synchronize your Outlook contacts and appointments with your iPod. I would guess that the add-in facilitates that.

Shock horror! MVP slags of iTunes!

iTunes/QT has certainly never delivered a good experience on Windows, at least in my experience. But then, Windows in general has never delivered a good experience in general. So what's all the fuss? Suddenly "good enough" isn't good enough?

So you moan about iTune helper, what about OSA.EXE which presumably got installed with MS Office?

What about the OS itself which has UPnP enabled by default? What UPnP devices do you have connected? Certainly some percantage of folk will have no use for the UPnP service?

MVP - valuable to Microsoft, as useful as a chocolate teapot to everyone else.

My experience with all the helpers is true across all products. OSA can be turned off. I can disable the services with iTunes as well, but everytime I run iTunes, it re-adds all the start-up tasks and restarts and sets to automatic all the services. That's just evil.

If you read my blog often I think you'll find my critism at Microsoft pretty even handed too. I've been a customer of iTunes for several years now, but after more and more demands on my system just for the privledge of buying products from them, I am giving up. (Go and search for my anti-iPod/pro-Zune articles...you won't find them...).

iTunes "used" to be a fantastic media playing program... In fact, I gave up WinAMP for it because I liked how it worked, but now it's become total bloatware.

The Outlook Add-in causes my outlook to not exit completely, and at the end of the day, I can have 5-6 "outlook.exe" entries in my Task Manager... grrr!

Pity I have so much music purchased through the iTunes Music Store, otherwise I'd switch to something like Wal*Mart or MSN music stores...

WinAMP anyone?

The Outlook addin has caused Outlook to crash many times where there wasn't a problem before. What I object to is that it doesn't ask whether you want it when you install iTunes. For this reason I won't have iTunes on my pc. I'm sure iTunes works really well on a Mac but it doesn't on Windows.

I only installed iTunes as a favour for my brother who doesn't have his own pc. I'm sticking with Media Monkey thanks.

Wow. When I first installed iTunes for Windows waaaay back in the day, I was comparing it to MusicMatch, WinAmp, and early WMP... and it was the holy grail, MP3 player software for Windows that Didn't Suck.

I admit I have only had limited interaction with WMP lately (using it to watch WMV, mostly) but from this perspective I find it mind-boggling that people think iTunes is bad software, for reasons unrelated to the iTMS lock-in.

I'll have to give WMP another look to compare, I guess. My impressions of it are several years old.

I also gave up on iTunes, and now use WMP11 on Vista + DOPISP to sync my ipod. Tis's a good thing! www.mgtek.com/dopisp/

the reason was in anticipation of the iphone which uses itunes to sync the outlook contacts and calendar to the iphone

same problem with the itunes sync addin, except it crashed outlook 2007 and i had to disable it.

see: http://arajani.blogspot.com/2007/07/itunes-73-crashes-outlook-2007-disable.html#links

I highly recommend MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com). I've been using it exclusively for about eight months without looking back.

I LOVE MediaMonkey (though I use WinAmp to play the music...its a better player and MM is a better organizer). Luckily MM supports automating WinAmp to be used as the player.

the add in is to sync calendar and contacts

I disabled all my add-ins after outlook started crashing about every 45 minutes. But I see TWO iTunes AddIns
iTunes Outlook Addin
iTunes Outlook Sync Addin
has anyone re-enabled one to restore non-crashing and syncing?

small correction - they are:
iTunes Outlook Addin
Outlook iTunes Sync Addin

Close Outlook, then
Start > Control Pannel > Add or Remove Programs
Remove Apple Mobile Device Support
Remove Apple Software Update

Media monkey is definitly the best. esp for large collections....

Check out sourceforge, (http://sourceforge.net).
There are MP3 players / music managers from the open source community that beat the socks off any commercial product I have seen to date. Most of which, don't sneakily install anything under your nose.

Innocuous or not, sneaky is sneaky. If they want their "additional" software on MY machine, I would appreciate being asked up front...NOT buried in some EULA that is 4500 pages long. This is nothing more than common decency, (which is not so common these days it seems...). Doing so without asking is just plain rude. Being rude doesn't make for good business.

Finally.
I have seen itunes and outlook struggle to co-exsist on my computer and couldn't figure out why. I like how itunes is setup but the mechanics of it are not up to par.
Thanks for the input.

88

Please help! I have uninstalled everything you are saying, even un and reinstalled office (2003 v) and outlook is still doing the same error! could there be anything else activated? when I do to see the addins, this one is not present, it's like i't's a ghost! Pls someone shed some light! txs!

I got an iPhone on Saturday, 12/1, synced perfectly. On 12/4, I set up all of my email accounts on iPhone. On 12/6, my Outlook 2003 started to hang while getting email. I went to the Com Add-in Manager in Outlook and unchecked it, shut down and it reopened in safe mode and worked. I shut down again and rebooted and now Outlook works fine again, BUT I have not tried to sync my Calendar or Contacts again, yet.

Hi there,
The I-tunes addin is for updating the Ipod calander. What a stupid tool. The problem actually emanates from an outlook bug. Apparently other providers that use a similar music player with calender functionality are also affected. Microsoft is looking at fixing this bug.

I don't even use Outlook.
The only reason I even noticed is that my Symantec Firewall blocked an attempt from Outlook to access the internet.

Bloatware, indeed.

Hmm, an email program attempting to access the internet? I'm not sure if I would classify that as typical of "bloatware". I generally like to get my email from the internet; email via the postal service is so much slower.

Apple is a very bad Windows neighbour. The only way I have stopped Qttask from loading automatically is by renaming it: it ignored every adjustment to MSCONFIG etc. Great marketing for Mr Gates as it puts his behaviour in some sort of perspective.

@Shawn Wildermuth

I use the last version of MusicMatch JukeBox. I think it works excelent for managing a large music collection (10,000+ and growing). I haven't tried Yahoo JukeBox since they bought out MMJB. I find MMJB's interface alot more intuitive than WMP's.

With all the gripes I've just read above about iTunes, I'm glad I've never had the misfortune of trying it out myself

Thanks for the heads up, but honestly I use MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com) and love it!

Those of you holding on to itunes for the store need to check out amazon. 100% drm free. (U.S. Residents only)

Just reading about people preferring wmp to itunes, i'd go for itunes anytime.
I have a 31.5GB music library and when i have tried to use media player in the past it's just annoyed me. 2 iPods sync to this iTunes but even if we didn't have iPods i would choose iTunes every time.
What is annoying though is that you MUST have quicktime for itunes to be able to run/install!!!???!!!
I do use Outlook and have found the add in but it doesn't seem to be causing any problems so i think i'll just leave it running.

...and I have now traced my problem with the Outlook process not shutting down when Outlook is shut down to the iTunes COM plug-in.

For another free alternative to iTunes, I suggest "Songbird".

I agree with you that Apple can really be a pain. I was irritated by the same things that bother you but it is very easy to permanenly disable those things. Just go to Administrative Services and disable them. I do have an iPod and the only thing that disabling all that stuff does is that when I plug in my iPod, it will not sync automatically unless I start up iTunes. As for Quicktime, I just set it to manual in Administrative Services so it will not be running in background unless it is being used. Some online videos require iTunes to see them. And as far as your desktop icons go, just delete them. In addition to all of this, I use Spybot Search & Destroy's (free) TeaTimer to block Quicktime from ever getting into Startup again even when I download new versions of iTunes. So it's really no problem.

Zonelll,

I couldn't disagree more. Typically if Microsoft did this to you (install and enable a bunch of services), Apple fan boys would call them idiots, but because its blessed by Mr. Jobs its assumed its the right thing. Having to use Spybot to stop Quicktime from auto-starting is just silly. No iTunes...that's no real problem.

I read the other comments here before making my last post. I am amazed that some people think WMP is better than iTunes for music. I have tried WMP but I find it to be so user-unfriendly that I gave up on it. And that was the latest version too. I don't think it has anything like "Smart Playlists" which I find extremely useful. If it does, it's not user-friendly. I spent hours trying to figure out WMP for music and just gave up. It's a pain and it doesn't have all the features that iTunes has. iTunes, on the other hand, is extremely use-friendly and intuitive. I figured it out in a matter of minutes. The only thing I use WMP for is to play videos.
I would again suggest that if you are getting all that iTunes crap in your Startup when you update iTunes, just use Spybot S&D TeaTimer. If you don't have Spybot, get it. It's free and it's a great program. Then turn on TeaTimer. Disable all the iTunes jobs and then the next time they try to get into your Startup, TeaTimer will give you and option to block them from then on. When you do that, you will never have to think about them again. When you get an iTunes update, which always includes a QuickTime update, TeaTimer will block all that stuff from getting into Startup. Problem solved permanently! I'm surprised that nobody mentioned that here. If you just disable them in Administrative Services, they will be back in Startup the next time you get an iTunes/QuickTime update. That can be irritating. So simply block them with TeaTimer and forget about it. However, there is one iTunes program that does slip by for me when I get an iTunes update. I forget which one it is but I think it's the one for iPhones. It may be that I simply never put it in my SpyBot blacklist (which I will check next time I get an iTunes update) but all I do to fix it is go to Administrative Services and disable it till the next update. No big deal. But I'm sure I can get it in the Spybot blacklist so I don't even have to do that in the future.
This issue of having all these iTunes things getting into Startup is an non-issue if you just take a minute to fix it permanenly. I'm not even a geek and I did!

For those of you who say Outlook.exe is still running when you shut down Outlook - try this:
Under the Tools menu, select Options, Mail Setup tab, click Send/Receive..., then de-select Perform an automatic send/receive when exiting.
This will prevent all sync attempts when shutting down Outlook.
Worked for me. (Outlook 2003. Outlook 2007 has something similar, I just don't know where to find it.)

@ZoneIII and the other guyz who think it is cool to just fix it ...

You should NOT have to fix legit software from starting automatically when your system starts! The default should always be NO, the only acceptable exception in my opinion is antivirus/firewall. OpenOffice, Adobe etc do the same. Adobe is even mean enough to put back a shortcut you moved to some other location when you start it, WTF!!! The installers fail when you remove write permissions on the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run key, WTF? That cannot be a "fatal installation error"!

I also hate having a 1000x1000 pixels "All Programs" menu (although I have 22" and 24" LCD's), so I group useful shortcuts in subfolders and dash out useless shortcuts and folders, like the iTunes readme and many others. I have these folders in the All Programs menu, the shortcut for iTunes is immediately under MultiMedia, for example:

Accesories
Admin Tools
Dev
MultiMedia
OpenOffice
Games
Startup
Plus three Acrobat icons, because Adobe sucks. I need that shit for work - I have already convinced my boss not to upgrade, so we are staying with Acrobat 6 until we find a suitable replacement. pdftk does almost all we need to do ... we are getting there.

As for iTunes, when I update it, the sucker puts its folder back in the "All Programs" folder, ok, I can drop that, but the old shortcut does not work anymore. What are these weird shortcuts? Why would anyone not want a shortcut to point to the executable?

Why are developers on the Windows platform trying so hard to waste my time? Why? It's not acceptable! I cannot believe 95% of computer users are putting up with this...

I am a geek, I was giving training to people for the win 2k mcp's in late 2000. I migrated to linux and then to Mac OS X; now I am back to Windows, for the summer vacation, and I hate the experience. Man, I had forgotten how much Windows sucked! To paraphrase BG: who removed the only user friendly feature in Windows?

Anybody know a useful terminal app on Windows? I mean useful as in like a Mac OS X Terminal or gnome-terminal? I don't need fancy stuff (colors, transparency ...); I want to be able to copy paste with the keyboard (not mouse), for example ... bash or ksh would do fine.

I have tried cmd.exe (even with cygwin), Console.exe and both suck.

The terminal app for windows should also have tabs ... (console.exe came close)

I-Tunes is ridiculous not only does it install the add-in to outlook, but if you have a PPC and want to sync you’re contacts to outlook from the phone it conflicts with the sync progress and you’re contacts don’t go through. Either that or you will be missing some contacts.

Thank you for the information in this discussion. I spent hours trying to figure out why outlook.pst would not open, though the same file with a different name would. This is on Vista with Office 2007. Removing the add-ins from the Outlook Trust Center did the trick.

I am so glad I found this. My outlook 2007 has been playing up recently. I found that whenever I looked at my tasks, multiple blank tasks were suddenly added to the list and then outlook crashed. Also, when I looked at my list of toolbars, I had dozens of Google toolbars which I guess were being added every time I opened Outlook. So I have checked the add-ins and disabled ones from iTunes and Google and hopefully this will work. Thank You all!

>>Quicktime ... (I don't buy or intend to buy movies/tv from iTumes so I don't need this)

QuickTime is Apple's media reader/writer, and I suspect is the backbone of iTunes.

On a different note... I actually do need to synch Outlook and my iPhone (at least contacts and calendar), but iTunes is not approved on our company PC's (it works fine, I was able to get it illegally installed by an internal IT friend temporarily). Is there any other software that synch's Outlook with iPhones directly?