A few years ago I decided I didn't want to use iTunes anymore, for various reasons. After looking around, I decided on foobar2000 and I really like it. My one complaint is that while extremely customizable, I have no real idea of how to customize it or what some of the features do. Oh well, one of these days.
I guess the sub question is, what add-ons do you use with your preferred music player and why?
God, I love Foobar. But agreed- when something is too customizeable, it becomes inaccessible to the majority of casual users, at which point it might as well be more rigid in structure. Or maybe it's less the fluid interface and more the design that's the problem? Lot to be said for a program that's gotten a once-over from a good designer. Foobar could retain all of its features and be way more intuitive with just a little tweaking. Otherwise, there's always iTunes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Then again, I only listen to music on my computer casually. If I'm really actively listening, it's usually to a CD in the car.
mpd. I have more mp3s than I want to dedicate space on my desktop's internal drives to, I don't want to keep a disk array under my desk, and I couldn't find a music player that didn't interact badly with nfs. So I have a little music server and disk array on the other side of the room, which I can control from my desktop. There is probably a simpler solution, but none came to mind.
Quod Libet, because:it's designed around the idea that you know how to organize your music better than we do.
Whatever player is native to the OS I'm using. I've never really seen much need for any add-ons to my music players. Sometime I want to get around to setting up a media server at home and perhaps my own file syncing. I have a lot of music in a lot of different places: Different file sync services such as Ubuntu music and dropbox, different operating systems on different partitions and/or machines.
I use Guayadeque. It's easy to use, I can scrobble from it and it can handle FLAC. The best part about it is that I can queue up a bunch of albums easily and just let it play through them. I can queue up a song or album at the end of the queue or after the current artist, current song, or current album. I've tried other music players like iTunes, Exaile, gmusicbrowser, Songbird and Banshee. So far Guayadeque has been my favourite and the easiest to use, but I'm currently trying out Banshee, so we'll see how that goes. What keeps me to a music player is how easy it is to learn how to use it. And once I've become familiar with it there's very little reason for me to switch it up. I'd still be using iTunes, but I've switched to Xubuntu and am too lazy to work with Wine.
I have been unable to get it to recognize and work with my iPod and CDs. There's probably something I could do to fix this, but I haven't tried very hard to solve it. There are a couple of little things as well like it doesn't count a song as being played until the next one starts. Also, when it reaches the end of my queue it will return to the beginning of the queue but without actually making it visually clear that it's restarting the queue (if that makes sense). And there's been a couple times when it wouldn't open, but I just had to restart my computer and it fixed itself.
I use Clementine. I used to just use VLC and manually select mp3s, but I switched to Clementine because it was more convenient to select songs from the sidebar (as opposed to my massive and ceaselessly growing music folder). I didn't use Windows Media Player because it runs really slowly, and I've never used iTunes. I also occasionally use Evil Player for that minimalist feel.
I still use iTunes as I don't see any reason why I should switch. Why did you decide to use foobar2000 and not ITunes humanodon?
One of the reasons was that iTunes kept asking me to update, like every other day. Also, I was moving away from mp3 to flac. I'm aware that iTunes can be modified to play flac, but that, plus the fact that I am not an Apple fan made me think that there was a better option out there for me. The nice thing with foobar is that I can do a portable install, which means that I can keep it on a hard drive where I have most of my music, so when switching to a new computer, I don't have to sign in to iTunes (I was terrible about remembering the password) to listen to music.
I actually found that as a player, Google Music is pretty amazing. I now take the fact that as long as I have internet, I have all my music on the library computer, my friend's laptop that I'm using, etc. for granted. As a store however? I'm pretty sure Google has yet to negotiate very much with many record labels, so the selection is lacking. Nonetheless, that's not the point of the player. The point of the player is you can upload any music you have, MP3s, FLACs, iTunes, and all of a sudden it's stored in the cloud. I've heard Songbird is pretty decent, or at least most audiophile audio sites tell you to go to Songbird, but to be honest I haven't used it much.