This is a series of blog posts documenting my switch from iPhone to Android. To read the whole exciting saga, click here.

I removed iTunes from my computer yesterday, and it was the culmination of several years of frustration. iTunes does a lot of things from updating phones to tracking podcasts, providing store access, iPhone backup and restore and AirPlay streaming to other devices. As a result, it became more complicated as time went by. There were a couple of times over the years where iTunes would break and I’d have no option but to remove it completely and start from scratch.

Apple made changes to iTunes over the years and broke third-party compatibility at least twice – I used to use EvilLyrics to import lyric info into my music (which would scroll on the display while the song played) but iTunes made an API change which left EvilLyrics broken.

At one point I had over 300 songs in a compilation folder that I’d play by selecting the folder. I accidentally told iTunes to manage my media, and iTunes faithfully took my folder with 300 songs and converted them into 300 folders with one song each! I spent quite a bit of time after that working on metadata – adding genre, album cover, and artist/compilation info.

Now that iTunes is gone, I’m back to Winamp – the first MP3 player I used under Windows, and it still  works just fine. I can select a folder to play, or use the media player feature to select by artist/genre/etc.

Copying music to an Android phone? Plug it in and drag/drop files. Couldn’t be easier.