Well it looks like it's official.
iTunes is going away after 18 years.
We're feeling kind of smug because we're still going strong. We watched Winamp (the player that started it all for me) pass away as well.
Rest in peace iTunes, and keep kicking tail JRiver!
I've still got a copy of iTunes running on a dedicated old Windows laptop to support the two iPods I use in my car. My car is 15 years old and the iPods connect into the car's audio system via a connector in the glove box. So I am pretty much locked into using the two old iPods that I purchased in 2005. The newer iPods do not work with the car. I've got a special playlist in MC that I use to export tunes to iTunes for those iPods.
I had been on the iTunes/AppleTV bandwagon for a few years, but I started to notice the slow lock-in that I was experiencing. For example, in AppleTV, I would search for a song I knew I had in my music accumulation. AppleTV would always show the search results as finding the song in Apple's Music store. It did not find the song in my library.
That was the last straw.
I was able to tolerate the lack of FLAC support. I was able to tolerate the mediocre database behind iTunes.
But when AppleTV would try to get me to buy a song I knew I already owned, well, them's fighting words.
I switched to MC, and everything's been sunshine and rainbows ever since.
The world has passed by iTunes.
R.I.P iTunes.