foobar2000 - a good-enough mp3 player for windows

It doesn't take up half your hard drive or have more shiny buttons than a 747 cockpit, so it's obviously not in a position to compete with dbPowerAmp. But for luddites like me that are still using a pre-AOL version of Winamp, it might be worth switching to.

Some good things about it:

• Gracefully handles large (thousands of files) playlists, caching tag info.
  
• Tab-based interface for multiple playlists. Reasonably clean UI throughout.
  
• Saves playlists & player state on exit.
  
• ReplayGain. Calculates the "perceived loudness" of an mp3 and saves a gain value in the id3-or-equivalent-tag of the file. Adjusts the volume accordingly when playing. Simple. Effective. Took a while to do the initial gain calculations, though - about 6 seconds per file on my machine. Fortunately it wasn't written by an untrained ape, so it can continue to play music while it's doing the calculations.
  
• CDDB support. Select a CD's worth of files, press one button to get nice correct track info by using the track lengths to identify the CD, press another to write it into the id3 tags. Shweet.
  
• Support for every file format I care about.
  
• "Playlist builder" to make playlists from simple search queries.
  
• No skins. No visualisations to speak of. Yes those are good things.
  
• "Stop after current" command. Select a track in a playlist to skip to it after current.
  
• No bugs evident in the last 2 weeks of use.
  

Some bad things:

• No convenient volume control. Strange.
  
• "Current Track" indicator in the playlist view is a little hard to see.
  
• I have to write use-case documentation. Oh wait, that's nothing to do with the mp3 player.
  

In other words go download it already.