There are other alternatives. I am not the one to know, but have read about other alternatives including plug-ins and apps that do the same thing. They've been around for several years and new ones out. Other members will probably know which alternatives there are.

iTunes is one heavy over-sized application for what it does. It can only play a limited number of audio formats and limited video playback formats. I have audio editing programs that are able to play, encode, decode many other audio formats and other abilities and or rip 'properly' from a CD but are one tenth of the size of iTunes. And I've been a mac user most of my life.