One application that's been a huge disappointment since I switched to Mac has been VLC Player. I've always relied on the Windows version to play absolutely anything - both audio and video - and it served me well. The problem I've found on Mac, however, is that often crashes whenever I'm trying to add a large amount of songs or films to the playlist.

I searched and found out that I wasn't alone either. It seems that VLC Player has a tendency to be unstable on Mac for sometimes rather mysterious reasons. One problem concerns failure to play video due to errors in the preferences file as outlined by The Racing Geek. The solution:

1) Quit the application if it is running 2) Delete the VLC folder in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences 3) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences 4) Delete org.videolan.vlc.plist in /DRIVENAME/Library/Preferences

However, the main problem I've been experiencing is adding music. Since I wanted something simpler than iTunes, I decided to try using VLC as my default media player (big mistake) but adding huge amounts of music to it, simply causes it to hang and stop responding. Oh, how I miss simple apps like Winamp sometimes.

The solution I've found is simply to add music in smaller chunks. Album by album seems to work better although this is obviously painfully slow and inconvenient. Users on the Videolan forum are at a loss to explain why this happens - it seems that for all its simplicity, VLC cannot handle a basic operation like adding a large directory of music to it. The most likely explanation is that it can't handle either metadata or album art, although if this is the case there should be a simple way to deactivate reading these.

So come on Videolan, when are you going to fix this simple bug that will enable Mac users to enjoy VLC Player as a lightweight alternative to iTunes?