I have a friend who never used a Mac nor an iPhone, but he owned an iPod and so installed iTunes years ago and used it to manage his entire music library, and continues to do so to this day. I'm sure he's probably an outlier but Windows iTunes users do exist :)
> I have a friend who never used a Mac nor an iPhone, but he owned an iPod and so installed iTunes years ago and used it to manage his entire music library, and continues to do so to this day.
Same here. I eventually replaced my iPod with an Android phone, but found a software combo that allowed you to sync your iTunes library to your phone just as easily, and also enable reverse syncing of ratings and playback counts. Sadly those apps have been sold to some company that's trying to turn them into cash grabs, but at least for now the old versions keep working for me, even on my new phone and Android 14 (albeit with some tweaking that's rather requires a rooted phone).
The advantage of iTunes is that it's perfect for also managing my collection of radio comedy, because you can easily re-classify manually imported files to be treated as podcasts, which makes for a nice UX (podcasts remember their playback position, and podcast apps track which episodes you've already listened to and which are still unlistened). Most other podcast apps don't allow manual file management, so I'd have to set up fake podcast feeds for my local files otherwise, which would definitely be a hassle.
I do this! My personal computers run Windows. I have an iPod touch that I use for listening to music on a stereo in my living room. I use iTunes to manage my music library. When I want more music, I buy CDs (or mp3s if those aren't available).
It's nice owning things. It has no ads, unlimited skips, and music doesn't sporadically disappear.
