I personally prefer a player without any buttons or seekbar at all now after using foobar for the better part of this year. The only seekbar I ever touch is the STFU plugin style called via a hotkey. Interestingly enough, the very first thing I do with a fresh install of fb2k is to change the hotkeys to the z/x/c/v/b method used in WA; probably just sticking to what I learned and that lets me control everything with the left hand (none of my hotkeys are on the right side of my split MS natural keyboard).

addition: nothing else comes close to the original look of fb2k with a decent formatting string for me at least

Windows media player. I used to use Winamp but started using media player, Winamp 3 took forever to launch.

Provide some evidence for this or shut up about it. The artists (including Dr. Dre, Mick Jagger and Ben Folds amongst others) seem very vocally happy about it, so what's your beef?

Come on ... Let's stay civilized.

Would you provide evidence for this, please? Seriously - any links to interviews, maybe also by not so rich/well-known artists ...?

-edit: choice of words

Fair enough, but one thing that really annoys me is people doing things just to be annoying (catch-22, I know) and this obviously falls into that category.

Moving on...

Apple deals with the Major labels because that's the only way to license music. After all, Apple can't renegoitate a musicians contract with his/her label. But they also deal with many independant labels and most of them seem really excited about this opportunity (and can now end-run round the established labels).

Here's some inside scoop on the deal Apple offered them:

http://www.gnutellanews.com/article/6830

For me the killer feature of foobar are the global hotkeys. I browse the files in my fav. file manager and do all the previewing/seeking with global hotkeys. My hands never have to leave the keyboard. I hardly ever look at the player - all I see is the tray icon.

Apart from that it's mostly little things. The whole concept of the player is very logical, consequent and pragmatic; no unneccessary bloat. Form follows function. Native support of ape2 tags on many file types is very nice. Broad support in the community i.e. plugins for "obscure" file types (ok, Winamp is strong there too). Being an mpc user myself owning an mp3 portable, I enjoy the easy conversion from one format to the other preserving tags. The integrated ABX tool motivates quick tests (I don't have to locate the files on the hdd and decode them, load them into a standalone abx utility..). The flexibility of the playlist display is impressive and it works globally for all file types.

Those are some of the reasons I prefer foobar over Winamp (and the few other players I tried. I've never tried any of those huge all-in-one apps like MusicMatch or MJ). I suppose others here prefer it for similar reasons. It's not all just blind following. I don't care much for version numbers, but I do stick to the stable releases. Foobar already offers a large set of benefits over the other players I tried. ymmv.