I found aurdivana buggy too but bit the bullet and paid for it, it's file management system is top notch, you can pretty much batch change tags very quickly and the search function is almost instantaneous. It's such an improvement to iTunes for me. I'd say don't convert to Alac just yet, I do hate iTunes.
As a side note when I had the audirvana trial installed it was extremely buggy when I had two screens running, once I entered my license code it started working perfectly. Bugs included the main screen not appearing until I minimized and then reselected the window and clicking on songs in list mode being unresponsive. Restarting fixed it, but like I said now that I paid none of that behavior has returned.
