About 9 months ago I tried a bunch of media players and settled for Media Jukebox from JRiver (paid the $25 for the registered version). For the most part I've been happy with it but my satisfaction seems to be starting to erode a little recently. I think this is due in part to the fact it seems they have been concentrating their efforts on their Media Center product which duplicates the functionality of other software on my XP machine or has a bunch of stuff I don't need. They keep touting their CNET 5 star rating they got ages ago but I think that wave is petering out.

I recently learned there is no MP3Pro plug in for this player which may be one of the nails in the coffin for me with this product.

I'd be curious to hear what other player people recommend. My must have features are:

- Supports wide variety of formats including wma and Real Audio.

- Robust Playlist building features - I want the ability to build playlists using advanced filtering function like Media Jukebox has where I can say build a list inlcuding these genres, excluding these artists with file dates newer than this date. I also need the ability to assign ratings to songs and be able to filter by that. In essence I'd like to be able to create a SKIP or PLAY filter on any tag I choose and combine filters. I'd also like to be able to save filters so that has my media library changes I can rebuild playlists without having to specify the filters again (wish Media Jukebox had that.)

- No problems with playing streaming audio from stations on Shoutcast and Live365

- Ability to burn MP3 CD's or Audio CD's right from the program with no problems and the CD-Text function needs to WORK. (When I burn Audio CD's in Media Jukebox it doesn't write CD-Text, but if I burn the same tracks using Nero it does!)

- Ability to export all the tag information of all the songs in the library.

If the programs is that good, I'd be willing to pay for it so freeware is not necessarily a requirement.

A "nice to have" but not required feature would be the ability to re-compress files when I want to be able to fit more files on a particular storage device but want to retain my original versions.

Also a BIG plus would be ability to add support for playing MP3Pro files, especially streaming.

Any suggestions?

Ask for the world, why don't you?

Seriously, though, I think WinAmp 5 is what *most* fits requirements. I don't believe there's a single player out there that has everything you're looking for.

WinAmp 5 supports many formats, especially via downloadable plugins. WMA by default, Real Audio via Tara's plugin, and MP3Pro enhancements via plugin.

All of those playlist features are available through WinAmp 5's Media Library Views. Full streaming support (including Icecast). You can burn (albiet, free mode allows only very slow ripping & burning), but unfortunately there is no way to burn CD-TEXT or rid the 2 second gap between tracks. I would rely on dedicated burning programs for non-basic burning options.

"- Ability to export all the tag information of all the songs in the library."
No idea what players can do this. WA5 cannot, unfortunately. Maybe Foobar2000? If not, it wouldn't be too much to make a Fb2K component.

Hope that helps?

EDIT:
"- Ability to export all the tag information of all the songs in the library."
WinAmp 5 does have a sort of workaround... you can queue up your entire media library in the playlist, then have it generate an HTML file out of the playlist. You can change what WinAmp displays as the song title (i.e. what tag fields) with the advanced title formatting options, so you could - I believe - output all of the tag info if you so configure it.

Thanks for the reply. You are right on the money. I just downloaded Quintessential Player, dbPowerAMP, UltimatePlayer, and WinAMP 5. dbPowerAmp and WinAMP 5 were the only two that fit the criteria and dbPowerAmp looked like crap (It was also having formatting problems because my display config is set to large fonts - just didn't have a very solid/quality feel to it.) I discovered that you creat customized media library views in WinAmp5 and it has even more flexibitly for defining rules than Media Jukebox.

But get this, WinAMP sponsers the Shoutcast website of streaming MP3 stations. When you play a station in Media Jukebox, it shows the track titles. WinAMP 5 doesn't show track titles (or any other ID3v2 information) for streaming MP3. How ridiculous is that. So when you are listening to Shoutcast stations on Winamp and hear a song you like, there's no way to find out what song it is so you can go buy it! This would almost be the equivalent of Windows Media Player reading tag information from MP3's but having a bug making it not read from it's own WMA format.

I think the WinAMP guys got beat up pretty bad when they release version 3. They probably are low on resources including programming power over there. It was so bad, they had to skip version 4 to try and distance themselves from version 3 as much as possible.

Go try some of the search functionality on Shoutcast. It doesn't work properly. For example, you sort by bitrate, click next to go to the next page of results and the sort is gone. Select a genre, then try to sort the list of matching stations by bitrate, no dice. It is impossible to a simple search like, show me stations with rock and pop genres that have a minimum bitrate of 96. What's up with these WinAMP guys and there quality control? But I guess that's another thread.

So this is so typical, every product always has one major fault. Media Jukebox has no MP3Pro codec available. WinAMP3 does it all but can't read the song artist and title of songs of broadcasters on its own Shoutcast.com site. Once (if) they fix the problem, then I'll be in media player heaven. But until then, I'm going to have to figure out a way to have Media Jukebox play all my streaming audion on Shoutcast (they only have one MP3Pro station anyway) and WinAMP to play the MP3Pro stations on Live365. You have to look in the Live365 player browqser window anyway to get playlist info since they are sending the tag info in the stream anyway though. Will life in the digital age every be easy?

you obviously don't have any idea what your'e talking about wa 2 + 3 =5

*sigh* I guess not, but was it before or ever will?

edit: explanation