Basically most of my software are freeebies. I use two media players. Winamp for testing my smx's and Zion for the bells and whistles. (read skins)

Foobar is mostly used for FLAC playback, but also is a good mp3  player, very light footprint however, not sure it's still supported. I'd choose this if I used a free player first above all other freeware players.

Hey, I use what I skin...lol.

MusicBee

I use iTunes religiously. My only hangup is that you have to correct most ID3 tagging and embed album artwork before you can import the files into iTunes. One perk among many is almost all 1.27 TB of my library is lossless which itunes will down convert to 128 AAC for my iPhone when synced. Doesn't get better then that.

I would certainly agree with you on that. I have been using dfx for years and it makes a huge difference in sound quality. What most people do not know is there is even a program for making your own skins using existing winamp skins. It only works with the classic skins or skins that use bmp images. Here is a skin I made for one of my favorite winamp skins called Frequency. It is the bottom window.

I have around 15000 mp3 files representing over 500 albums and CDs in my library I have converted. I use mediamonkey for several reasons:

1) it handles very large libraries much better than other players I've tried

2) it has REALLY good support for editing tags

3) supports all the file types you'd ever want to use

That being said, it has its share of bugs and problems like any other software. Honestly, there isn't any perfect player (yet.) Things I find annoying with mediamonkey:

1) making playlists is a bit clumsy in my mind

2) crashes more often with most recent version than it used to

3) my media library got corrupted once and I lost all play history which didn't really annoy me too much, but it would some people excessively

4) the interface could use a lot of work in the looks/usability department in general

Good luck with your search. My advice is, install a bunch of them, use each for a week and keep the one you like best!

Nothing fancy... Amarok on both Linux and Windows...

Lantec...I didn't know that. I hardly ever use my credits so when my sub expires, I'm going to switch. Thx

Of all the players I've tried throughout the years (closing on 1½ decade), and I've tried -many-, I've found that WinAmp is currently the best and easiest to use for music - and by far the easiest to skin (Classic skins).
It is offcause the player I use, and it's been my main music player since 1998. (I use VLC for video/films)

BUT.... WinAmp's not the best player ever to have seen the light of day.
Two other players could potentionally have knocked WinAmp off of the throne. K-Jöfol and Sonique were by far the better players when they still were in developement. Sadly though, the K-Jöfol team were headhunted over to WinAmp and Sonique was bought by Lycos (The Google of it's days), which was the death for both players.

Given that I like to listen to one song over and over again in an endless loop and only change it once every 10 minutes or so, I never really had to move beyond YouTube Repeater.