I don't personally use Musicbee but I've installed it for other people several times. I always recommend it to people who find it easier to find/play music from a single interface. It's got some decent sound profiles if you have crap desktop speakers and wouldn't bother with an equalizer. It's more attractive than mediamonkey but in my experience it is less geared towards very large libraries than mediamonkey.
Also check out Aimp2 http://www.aimp2.us/ which is in my opinion kind of a mix between foobar and musicbee, aesthetically speaking.
If you prefer open source and cross platform Clementine is pretty nice. http://www.clementine-player.org/ It's an offshoot of Amarok created by people who didn't like the change in direction they were seeing starting a few years ago.
I don't get it when people say foobar is featureless and takes a lot of tweaking. Foobar is by far the most feature packed player out there. Supports far more codecs than any other player. Anything that more than 5% of people will use is already included, if possible. Certain things have to be downloaded seperately, from their site tho, for legal reasons.
Of course, plug-ins for services from third parties need to be installed. But that should be seen as a plus since these are often the heaviest of features, which often slow down players and lead to instability in the software.
I will say tho that if you really want a solid browse-friendly media library integrated in to your player, or a ten-foot user interface, I wouldn't recommend foobar. Those features are completely outside the realm of fb2k's design goal. Not that you couldn't add them. Foobar is designed to be a program that doesn't rely on other programs.
To put it how they used to, or have before, foobar is an audio player before it is a music player and it is designed for managers rather than browsers (audio manager vs music library). What is meant by that is that out of the box it won't manipulate your files by adding tags without your permission and it won't download artist information and random artwork only to slow down your system and mess up your library. It doesn't presume you have a computer full of music any more than it presumes you have a computer full of podcasts or audiobooks, or an ftp server on another device. As the name "foobar" suggests, foobar2000 is not a certain thing and it doesn't do any certain thing, it's a placeholder until the end user decides what they want to do with it. And it's certainly not a web browser like most modern programs.
The other thing that throws me off is the interface customization complaints. It takes me maybe 3 minutes to completely set foobar exactly how I like it or how someone requests it. Everything revolves around simplicity and common sense with foobar. No going in to settings 20 times to tweak the interface only to find out a setting is under some name that a single person thought made sense. Foobar is basically unlock, drag, drop, lock. Beyond that it is pretty much stretch and right click/tick untick to resize or add/move/remove any individual part.
Foobar doesn't require a mouse or a keyboard. Though you will need at least one...in most circumstances.
FYI, check out Boom for a straight music player in a foobar package. Made by the same guy that makes foobar. It plays music exclusively, or in other words it's the software equivalent of a boombox for those people that still stick a CD in their computer when they want to listen to music.
