Winamp, free version. Not sure it's particularly cool though.

You can drag and drop files or folders onto the playlist editor, so if you want a separate hard-rock-shuffle and a mellow-shuffle you can do it pretty easily.

What OS are you using?

For Windows, I like old versions of Winamp (2.5e used to be my fave, but 2.95 is also nice). I also like Foobar2k, though it's definitely not for everybody.

I can't find a good player. In the last six months I've gone through iTunes, fooBar, SongBird and WMP. I'm currently running WMP.

If I had to choose for you, I'd take iTunes. iTunes makes it easy to create a dynamic playlist such as ...
"Play me a random Selection of 20 songs, excluding Christmas tunes, anything over 10 minutes and anything already played in the last three months."

Is there something other than WinAMP? And, if so, does it still whip the llama's ass?

No? Didn't think so.

I have a tag-on question. . .if I have one of those Apple Mp3 players. .they are something pod. . .anyway. . .will a program other than iTunes work with it?

I seriously don't know.

I use Songbird. I dig that it scrobbles to Last.FM, mashTape connects to flickr and shows images related to the currently playing artist. I use MorningPeeps as my alarm and LyricMaster to append lyrics to the metadata of songs. I manage my iPod on it. It has add-ons to find both duplicates and ghost tracks. It isn't the end all be all but it suits me now.

Winamp.

Guy uses mediamonkey, but I've never tried it. I find iTunes to be clunky and nonintuitive.

Is Songbird out of Beta? It was recommended to me, but I couldn't make it work.

danf: sure. Ephpod is the stand-alone biggie, and major mp3-playing programs like Winamp can also manage iPods these days.

Is Songbird worth a try? When I saw it, it was way beta, and I just didn't see the potential. But now, I'm looking for something for my netbook, because Foobar is somehow not quite right.

I've been using QCD for years. One thing it does that I REALLY REALLY like...it allows you to program the icon in the tray. So, for example, a single left click of the tray icon pauses the music. A double-click skips to the next track. I've not found another light-weight program that will do that. Oh...the default skin, like many of these programs, is butt-ugly. I like "soma".

I do wish it would scrobble to Last.fm though. And it's not super popular, so it's a little light on features. The latest version offers full-on library type support, but I like it JUST be a player. I organize my folders the way I like, and I've not ever learned to like any iTunes-y sort of tag-based organization.

I might have to check out Songbird if it scrobbles though...

Oh, and danf, I had a pal who LOVED Mediamonkey as an iTunes alternative.

And, thanks to this thread, it got me thinking, and I had a hard time believing that there wasn't a audioscrobbler plug-in. Looked around a bit and found this. So..QCD is once again my dream MP3 player.

Yeah, I use Songbird to manage my Nano and was able to plug in a friends yesterday with no concerns of DRM madness eating hers or my library. I do wish that it had podcast subscription support built in. Do any of the others?

Songbird 1.1.1 is the current release.

You know how Mac users had to put up with bloated ports of Microsoft Word? That's how Windows users get to feel now when they use iTunes.

foobar2000 is like Linux. They say you can do amazing things with it once you figure it out. But I was never one for steep learning curves - even when I had more brain cells available for the attempt. A few minutes of fumbling around with it sent me rushing home to Winamp.

It's not perfect. But it doesn't get in your way and it seldom springs surprises on you. It works.

I use Winamp to play music and Itunes to load my ipod. I've tried Songbird and Mediamonkey and found them both to be pretty broken. Mediamonkey was OK for a while but then forgot where my music was and nothing I could do would convince it that there were actually mp3s in my music directory. Nothing but Itunes seems to be able to reliably load music into my shuffle though but shoot me before I used that bloated POS to actually play music. Why it needs 100% of my CPU on a fast machine just to play an MP3 I'll never understand.

Winamp sorta sucks too but it's fast and not too bad of a hog.

Thanks for the suggestions folks ! i'll give a couple of these a try

I wish someone had come up with a real alternative to iTunes, because that's really the only thing stopping me from dumping Windows completely and switching to Linux.