It really depends on what you want to do with the player. If all you are doing is storing your music by artist/album and then navigating to an album that you want to listen to, then just about any player will work fine.
If at times, you can't decide what specific album you'd like to hear, but you are in the mood for some mellow jazz, then maybe something with more advanced playlist capabilities would be better. Using the mellow jazz example, the program I use, J.River Media Center, has a pretty good database feature. Of course it includes all the IDE tags as fields, including genre. However, it can do a lot more. First of all, you can define your own fields. If you want sub-genres, that are not part of the normal IDE tags, you can create your own. But my collection is fairly large and it would be pretty tedious to go through everything to edit the tags. JRMC also has a utility that will analyze your audio and calculate the beats-per-minute (BPM) and intensity (along with a few other things). So, if you know a track that you would consider mellow, you could use its settings as a basis for other mellow tracks. That might be something like a BPM less than 60 and intensity less than 2 (the scales used vary depending on each field, so something like intensity uses a scale of 1 to 5). Now I can have JRMC automatically create a playlist with the title "Mellow Jazz" by selecting all tracks from the genre "Jazz" OR "Vocal" AND a BPM < 60 AND Intensity < 2. If I want to play this list in random order, I need to add a randomizer to the list of arguments. JRMC also keeps track of when a CD or track was added to the library; when it was last played; and how many times it's been played. So, I can also add these arguments like "haven't played for a month" or "haven't listened to". You can also set limits to the length of a playlist. So the "Mellow Jazz" playlist can be limited to 90 minutes or something. Now anytime I add music to the library, JRMC will analyze the tracks and automatically tag the music from their online database. Every time I click the "Mellow Jazz" playlists, it will apply my criteria and display a new 90 minute randomly sorted list of mellow jazz tracks that I haven't heard in a month.
Their autoplaylist feature is very advanced. It can do a lot more than I've described in this post and it is not very difficult to learn. It's fun to use and listen to music based on whatever criteria you can come up with. It's kind of like your own personal radio, but much, much better. The only problem I have with JRMC is it supports other features like video, TV, and photography. I don't use those features because I prefer other apps for that functionality, so it seems like a waste. I've been looking at a pure music players, like Foobar2000, but none of them have JRMC advanced playlist power. Windows Media Player and iTunes fall far short of this and last I checked they were really slow with large databases and JRMC is very fast. Does anyone know of a "audio-only" player that has these advanced playlist capabilities?
