I Hate iTunes

i've never liked itunes, so i was really surprised when recently a good friend of mine told me he really likes the way itunes organizes his music and syncs with his ipod. that was about a month ago. since then i've tried at least four times to get itunes to functionally import or organize my music to no avail. every time i import music and let it copy a file to its library, it reads everything in duplicate. then when i tried to delete all the duplicates, itunes deleted all copies of any files that had duplicates. working with this program has been one of the worst experiences of my life. i need to start investigating some itunes alternatives...