I’ve been looking for a decent manager for my lossless CD rips for a while now. For all its faults, I like using apps like iTunes for listening to my music: between the playlists, easy searching, and all that good stuff, it got really hard to go back to manually managing folders and dealing with winamp (or whatever). What I wanted was iTunes for FLAC for XP.

I found two:
aTunes
Songbird

Both provide the kind of slick, library-building interface you want out of your interface. I’ve been using Songbird a lot more (it’s the hipster default interface), and some of it’s taking some getting used to (like the tabs) but it’s really quite slick. And I haven’t figured out how to do some things (like delete files from within the app, or use the app to organize all the files for drop-and-forget ease).

But strictly speaking in terms of finding a decent proxy for iTunes functionality for my FLAC files, they’re doing great. I’ll try and update this when I’ve logged more time with them.

For now, hopefully the search cloud picks this up and it’s some help to future generations typing “itunes alternative flac xp” into Google (or whatever).