I still use iTunes. But .. with the experience of losing over 100 GB of music .. many years of collection .. how .. because iTunes was 'buggy'. I suspect their devs were caring too much for developing their online services where they make money, not for the free use of iTunes & maintaining large libraries. And as I'd mentioned earlier, iTunes introduced certain issues across versions from v. 5-7. Sure iTunes has improved its conversion, however their abilities in that regard have dipped greatly over the years ... in part due to Quicktime which iTunes uses for its conversion library. I do like the VBR encoding abilities added over past 12 months or so. iTunes reliance on QuickTime's libraries will no doubt risk itself into future problems also. Quicktime has often been buggy over its history .. each release needing to await feedback to its issues before updating. How do I know? I work on a mac with video encoding .. and quicktime plays a part.

As far as alternatives go; I'm not sure of any other mac audio program that keeps its own library in the same way. Sure lots of decent mac audio programs that can utilise playlists. What's more, the newer and not so newer mac audio programs can play almost every audio format you could think you'd need a player or converter for. Whereas iTunes is limited to mp3 (cannot play mp3pro), mp4audio/m4a .... , aiff, wav, apple lossless, and a few other limited formats not many people using p2p would use. Alternate Audio Players & support plug-ins. At least with using plug-ins, etc. it is possible to play ogg vorbis or flac files on mac, or wma via conversion.