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The best I know of is either J River's Media Jukebox 12.x (freeware), or WinAmp 2.95/5.x.
J River's most recent app is shareware: J River's Media Center 14.x.

I just copy my home iTunes folder to a notebook drive in a USB enclosure, and take it to work.

Carrying disks?!? I just use Media Center to stream my audio and video over the internet from my server to whatever clients I like. I've used Media Center because of its single-click client-specific transcoding and its great tagging/smartlists. However, of late, I've been increasingly using VLC and Orb to stream more media to my phone. Anyway, the point is, carrying a physical disk is a postmodern sneakernet that should be left in the dustbin of history as soon as possible.

I just copy my home iTunes folder to a notebook drive in a USB enclosure, and take it to work.

Carrying disks?!? I just use Media Center to stream my audio and video over the internet from my server to whatever clients I like. I've used Media Center because of its single-click client-specific transcoding and its great tagging/smartlists. However, of late, I've been increasingly using VLC and Orb to stream more media to my phone. Anyway, the point is, carrying a physical disk is a postmodern sneakernet that should be left in the dustbin of history as soon as possible.

There may still be software out there that enables this (not sure, since I don't really care), but iTunes on its own does not.

Media Center has enabled unconstrained internet sharing for years. It can do either library sharing, or server-client streaming. What's really cool is that it can do bandwidth-specific transcoding when feeding the clients - I've used it to stream audio over an AOL dialup (quality was AMish). It also lets me copy the same tracks between the ipods, the irivers, and the PSP. It's like itunes for grown ups.

I've been using this product for several years and am very happy with it (although I haven't been keeping up with the last couple upgrades so YMMV).

I use J. River Media Center just for this. http://www.jrmediacenter.com/ It's got a feature much like iTunes, where you can share your media library over a network. It also allows sorting and tagging of every sort of video file (iTunes is very limited with video files). Simply setting up a media server on one computer will allow you to access that same library on multiple computers.

For the past 4 years I've been using J River Media Center.
http://jrmediacenter.com/

It seems to handle very large collections without any problem (I probably have in the upwards of 7-8K of losslessly encoded music. It's interface is slightly cluttered but still extremely usable and very powerful. Sorta like iTunes on steroids.

The community around it is very supportive and the developers respond quickly to problems/bugs and are open to feature requests. On their forums, you can see the updates as each new version gets created.

-gk

http://www.jrmediacenter.com/ Works fantastically on huge music libraries (e.g. hundreds of thousands of songs), huge amounts of customisation (browse your library by genre/artist/album, year/genre/chartposition) etc. Not free or opensource, but well worth a look if you're on windows.

For Linux/BSD, there are quite a few choices. AmaroK or JuK are the obvious one for KDE, and usually included in most distros. If you prefer Gtk applications, the best one out there is probably Quod Libet (I would not recommend Rhythmbox as it used to be rather slow and unstable). In the console, there's cmus for an iTunes-like ncurses interface, and plait if you prefer the good old command-line. Or you could go for client/server approach with mpd and its plethora of clients.

iTunes is simply the best music software there is. Period.

Your ignorance is understandable only if you've never tried Media Center.

I have yet to find a player that gives me the functionality of itunes, either

That's just because you haven't tried Media Center. I enjoy its more expressive SmartLists, and use it to sync between the Archos, iRiver, and iPod players. MC is what iTunes wants to be when it grows up.

the iTunes application for managing your music is leaps and bounds better than the alternatives.

You're justified in saying that only if you've never used Media Center.

J. River Media Center has an iTunes-like interface, buand has support for not only audio, but images, video, and documents as well. You can create custom view schemes, and custom database fields. http://www.jrmediacenter.com/features.html

This is what I think makes iTunes + iPod the best, being able to manage a large music collection in very powerful ways, with ease.

The iTunes smartlists are okay, but a bit simple and inflexible. Can you create calculated values from columns in one list table, and present them within another list for further operation? Try Media Center if you want some real customisation and flexibility. Personally, iTunes choked on me after 80K files or so. It has no headroom. I prefer software that is not afraid to take on really big libraries...

Apple's Smart Playlists are as close as any software gets to letting me run SQL queries on my music library to generate playlists.

The iTunes smartlists are okay, but a bit simple and inflexible. Can you create calculated values from columns in one list table, and present them within another list for further operation? Try Media Center if you want some real customisation and flexibility. Or, as other people have pointed out, if you want to run actual SQL...

J River's Media Center is the only app I know that lets you use grouping and combinations of AND/OR within smart playlists.

I really want to put the biggest IDE hard drive than I can find into my TIVO

While I do know someone who just finished putting 2 400GB Seagates into their Replay box, I take a looser approach. DVArchive is a Java client that uses uPNP to impersonate a Replay over the network. So any attached disk storage with a CPU that can run Java appears as a virtual ReplayTV and can be used to store and stream shows. I have a 1TB media server that does double duty for audio and ReplayTV, and a HTPC with 500GB that serves up basically nothing but RTV content and its own video captures. Because RTVs are so network friendly, and can be controlled easily from any web browser, I find I tend to treat them more as loosely coupled capture cards that happen to be in a fancy box more than anything else. The drives within the ReplayTVs themselves? Kind of like a local temporary storage cache. MediaMVPs or modded XBoxes make good front-ends if you want to avoid the HTPC route. With VideoLAN you can stream right from the Replays, through DVArchive, and over the net. Of course, you're going to need a really fat pipe, so I usually convert into XVid and serve up using Media Center - it can do some intelligent bandwidth throttling based on the client's pipe.

Without that software we'd be adding song ratings on the ipod itself

Assuming Ratings were not available (they are!), let me tell you how I'd do it in Media Center, my favourite jukebox software.

Define new custom tag: MyRating. Click the radio button so "MyRating" embeds within files and updates during Library changes.
Optionally: set it to update Library setting from device files setting, if newer.
Create new Smartlist with MyRating >=3, say.
Synch.
That's about it.

Of course, you would have to create the Smartlists using MC itself and define the playback statically because the iPod is a closed system with very little configurability available to the end user. For myself, I prefer more control over my playback devices, and the option of open source.

does knowing a movie is gonna be out on DVD six months after hitting the movie theater stop people from going to the movies? Not really.

Box Office is a money loser for Hollywood. It breaks even on DVDs and cleans up tidily with TV and syndication. The box office kabuki is just to add a bit of pizzazz to the TV launch. And in fact, the Box is declining rapidly and becoming more and more of a liability. The release window has now shrunk to 3 months or so for Thanksgiving movies. The studios make no money from popcorn sales, which is all the multiplexes care about, and most of them went bankrupt several years ago anyway. It's a death spiral.

ow well do they interact with a Dish Network receiver?

I don't know. I use software, Media Center (J River, not MS!) to do this. Specifically, it's Media Scheduler daemon, which will record video or radio on order. Then I synch the files to portable devices. MC will also transcode library media on the fly to serve up to clients using variable bandwidth, so it's a treat to log in over the Net and watch a stream a show or a tune. Or I just let ReplayTV grab the shows and copy them across. RTV stores them as MPEG2 but it's a snap to run virtualdub on them to convert to XVID.

I have heard that Echostar, now a 25% owner of Archos, has rebadged the Archos players to use with its DVRs. So I guess the theory is that you set your Dish to grab the shows, then just synch them straight to the Archos. The advantage, I imagine, is that the Dish and the Archos probably use the same codecs so there's no recoding needed, the speed of USB2 and the small hard drive becomes the limiting factor in how quickly you can synch. I'd imagine Dish has wrapped them in some annoying DRM though.

Couldn't someone make a utility that just converts DRMed files to mp3 on the fly as they're being transferred to an iPod

Yes, they have. It's called Media Center.

another organizer will need to beat iTunes by being more comprehensive, useful, intuitive and stable

Yes, there is one. Media Center. Can do on-demand transcoding between pretty much every format for different destinations, be they devices or streams. Can also intelligently downsample bandwidth to throttle for narrow client pipes. Also does ASIO and multi-zone. Amazing software.

Is there a program that allows an easy conversion of multiple files (ideally from a playlist or similar) from FLAC to MP3 for portable devices or burning?

Media Center. Can do on-demand transcoding of formats for different destinations, be they devices or streams. Can also intelligently downsample bandwidth to throttle for narrow client pipes. Amazing software.

No question about it, Media Center is a great solution. Federates all media (audio, video, photo) across multiple directories or file systems. Can play back any format either simply, by playback Zone, or using streaming (with optional on-demand transcoding/re-encoding) across LAN or WAN. Tagging system is open-ended, there are dynamic SmartLists, and there's a progammable API with expressions for querying the database and spitting back results. You can also use HTGML and Flash to make your own "Now Playing" screens.

Make my iPod like TiVo

I use the Scheduler function of Media Center to record shows at specific times through the radio or TV tuner. MC will do autotranscoding and bitrate up/downsampling for different device profiles during sync. Or if you don't get a chance to sync, it will stream the recorded media over LAN or WAN. I haven't used it, but the new version 11 apparently also does streaming client-specific on-the-fly bitrate transcoding. It works pretty well. There are, of course, dedicated PVR-like programs for internet or broadcast media, but they seem to cost a relatively lot of money for single/limited functionality.