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All that said, the overall look and feel of iTunes was what I wanted and so the stage was set for a quest of epic proportions - I set out to find the best music management software in the world! Unfortunately, I quickly learned that this wouldn't be so easy.

After a few days scouring the web I couldn't for the life of me find a single solution that offered everything that iTunes did, or at least that did it all better. I was flabbergasted. I knew iTunes was good, but I didn't realise it was this far ahead of the game.

I must have tried a dozen different programs ranging from the obvious Windows Media Player to the more esoteric open source alternatives and none seemed to get the combination quite right. Many of the shareware or free programs had decent, if unsophisticated, library management, and good codec support but lacked any form of album artwork support - let alone an approximation of CoverFlow. And, conversely, the likes of Windows Media Player have a lot of the flashy bits but they lack the basic easy interface and library. All I want is a combination of the two that doesn't run under Vista like it's being powered by a wheezy turn of the century steam engine and preferably forgoes the other aforementioned bad points of iTunes. Surely that's not too much too ask?

So, what's the solution? Well, for the time being I've settled on a lightweight program called musikCube, which Andy recommended to me. It has all the library functionality I want and even uses the same keyboard shortcuts as iTunes, the only thing it lacks is support for artwork display. It's serving me well and has, for the time being, replaced iTunes on both my home and work PCs.

However, it's still far from the complete package and I'm still very actively looking for my perfect solution. In fact, this is where I would like some feedback from you. I would like to know what software you use or would recommend. Maybe there's a program I've missed or should give a second chance. Maybe, just maybe, the perfect software has just been alluding me all this time and you can be the one to reveal it to me.

But, don't be fooled into thinking this will be a one way exchange. Once I've heard all your recommendations I'll add them to my growing list of software and I'll do a roundup article about as many of them as possible. I just hope it doesn't turn out that iTunes is as good as it gets.

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