Let me tell you a story.
One day, about a year and a half ago, I decided that winamp was no longer the media player for me. I needed something more – something better. I needed something that could catalog my vast collection of MP3s and let me visualise it in a better way. And other stuff.
It's probably that 'And other stuff' which almost killed me. I tried a whole boatload of media players – Winamp 3, Winamp 5, VLC, Media-Monkey, iTunes, Windows Media Player 9, 10 and 11, 1by1, Foobar2000, aTunes, MusicCube, Mp3toys, MusicMatch Jukebox – and none came close to satisfying my thirst for control of my media collection. Well that's not technically true. I was happy with foobar for about 2 months – but each one I tried I eventually tired of. I even considered writing my own media player at one point, but before I could, I found J River Media Jukebox.
Initially, Jukebox had come up several times in searches, but I dismissed it based on the name. I figured J River sounded like a cheap knock-off of iRiver, and it was probably a spyware loaded piece of shit. I was so far wrong.
J River is, in a word, PERFECT. Everytime you think of some other feature it could have, you find that feature. It catalogs your entire music database, watches folders, manages portable devices, makes smart playlists (like 'most played', 'last listened','random 100 songs'), allows you to add shortcuts to things all over the place, includes a web-browser, does all kinds of DSP effects, Burns CDs, rips CDs, Converts audio formats, connects to last.fm, imports album art…
I could keep going, but you get the idea. It does everything you need, it does it cleanly, it does it well, and it does it fast.
But my favorite function of J River Media Jukebox is the 'View Schemes' it uses instead of folders. Basically, it allows you to add custom views to the side bar which auto sort/group your music by tag. So for instance, I have a view for disk location, one for keywords (so I can find all my soundtracks at once), one for file-type, one for genre, and most importantly a combo one for album artist / album – this means it sorts by artist EXCEPT where the track is on an album with multiple artists – then it sorts it under (various). It might sound trivial, but its the exact kind of attention to detail which makes great software.
If you've ever been frustrated with the Winamps and iTunes of this world, I urge you to give Media Jukebox a try.
EDIT:
I had the wrong URL at the top there, it was linking to J River Media CENTER, which is a different product. There is a 30 day trial, but it’s not available for free like jukebox is (they have to make money somehow). The correct URL for jukebox (now fixed at the top of the post) is http://www.mediajukebox.com/
