[vagarach]

Foobar2000 on windows, all you need is the columnsui plugin, and you're set! It's a great program with a snappy UI, which even itunes running on a mac (which is miles ahead of its windows version) can't guarantee all the time.

The itunes store songs, hmmm, burn to cd and then rip and store in lossless, I suppose that's all you can do if re-encoding to a lossy format reduces too much quality for your liking.

 

[pez]

You know, actually after all of this looking through, I just downloaded winamp and have pretty much fallen in love with it, even though it won't rip mp3, unless I pay, but it lets you rip into AAC (wierd), but I set rip for FLAC, so it'll be good right? But winamp by far takes up the least system resources out of anything. Only 20k, compared to 40k for WMP, and iTunes 120-140k, and MediaMonkey and Foobar and a couple of other ran at about 70k.

 

[krisjan]

WMP all the way.
The most important thing i have found to be the library management, and I have yet to find something that matches wmp - i add a lot of files to my music folder, and wmp's automatic updating works great. The album art is also a must have for me - i find it very difficult to select an album from a sea of text - if i don't know what i feel like listening i simply scroll through wmp's library in album mode and select the thumbnail of choice - much easier with pictures. and updating info is also a snap...
I have tried winamp a few times, but the library management is a nightmare - for some reason it simply won't update automatically even if i set it to - a few times i had to delete the library completely and rescan the folder, and then i just decided to go back to wmp.
itunes - a hog on windows + i'm sorry but apple i try to avoid - most apple evangelists are outright obnoxious (in my locality anyway) - beyond the seductiveness of their eye candy i don't think apple is so great...but as i said i've been conditioned by many unpleasant experiences with bash-you-over-the-head-with-my-apple people - so i'm defn. biased in this regard...