it comes down to personal preference, and how could  a person not have problems with a bit of software that hinders such a thing?  When you're a windows user, you start getting used to various things, IE, being able to accomplish almost every task in a number of ways.  Foobar is but another example of this matter.  From the simple like playing and stopping music, to the more complex like converting files and adding music to playlists, foobar has at least two, and in some cases three or more methods to accomplish the same thing, so one gets to pick and choose which feels most comfortable.  Those who never wish to deal with the window can avoid it for the most part as I do through the use of global keys.  You don't really have much of a comparison between the two concepts; foobar not only plays media but does it in a way that is customizable and convenient.  From my experiences with iTunes, it would seem that apple is not interested in giving you anything more or less than a bit of software they feel does the job however it does the job, and for windows users that just isn't enough.  Apple may have created a feature full application with a simplistic enough interface to learn and which can even be precise wherever it needs to be, but personally, I'm not interested on how much I can do with an application; I'm interested on how much that application will do for me, how much it will accommodate to my wants and be the application I feel that it's supposed to be rather than being the tool someone else thinks it should be, particularly since the software is aimed at entertainment and entertainment is supposed to be a comfort and an enjoyable matter rather than something you have to work at regularly.  Foobar may have started off as something entirely different from what it is now; I'll never know, but I don't have to care, because it works for me however I want it to work for me whenever I want it to work for me.  And iTunes?  If I have to tab to access a fair amount of information on a regular basis or use commands that just don't feel familiar or comfortable and which I can't tweek to my liking, I end up with but a simple question... What ever for, when I can have choice?

@Sebby,
For what it's worth, I agree with you entirely.  I don't hate iTunes; indeed there is a couple of features I truly enjoy that I've never seen in any other media player, the most important being the Automatically Add to iTunes folder, a time saver as far as I'm concerned when it comes to placing a load of music on my iPhone both quicly and smoothly.  Just paste and forget, then enjoy, very similar to my experience with foobar in many ways.  It's far from being my default playback application though, just as I would never use or recommend station playlist studio as such for anyone else, even though SPL does have a ton of features that set it apart from many other media consumption applications.  It's purposes go far and beyond the scope of simply entertaining a PC user, and I imagine that this is where we start seeing personal preference come into play.  That's what this topic is more than anything, because in all reality there isn't a best media player, unless you keep looking at the top of lifehacker articles.  :d

I had a quick play with this, and it looks very good. I especially like how big the radio directory is and the ability to easily stream, this will make for a good studio alternative at least for very basic streams. A few things I noticed:

-Most of the program is still not in English. On a somewhat related note if you ever want to open this up to more language translations I'd love to help and make a Polish one.

-The buttons in the main Window are not labeled.

-When things like crossfade and shuffle are turned on or off, the messages get spoken through SAPI, my NVDA doesn't seem to be detected.

-Playing midi files doesn't seem to work for me. The time indicator moves forward, but I get no sound and if I press alt M I get a visual runtime error.

I will most likely put this in my portable apps collections as it's a bit more lightweight than foobar. Very nice work

This does make sense, especially when you think in terms of the level of enjoyment you'll get using the software in various screen readers across platforms. If I were full-time Windows, I might decide that it's no longer worth it to struggle with the iTunes UI, and thereby end up dropping the library database. Curse Apple for not having the brains--or perhaps having them, but choosing not to use them for fear of lost profits--to find a way to store and retrieve the data in tags in the files where they could be easily manipulated, but irrespective of on-disk location. People who wished to organise their stuff according to tags could do so only if they chose to, but what gets a lot of people mad is that they don't get that choice.

This discussion has however been making me look again at the media player scene, in search of a simpler life. Indeed, now that VLC has a library feature, it's not clear to me what alternative there is to iTunes on OS X, except perhaps MplayerX or Decibel. Both of these players are very simplistic, and neither give you any hope of syncing to an iOS device, but at least now you can sort your files independently or play baroque formats. That doesn't sound like a very good deal to me, unfortunately. Better the devil I know, I fear.

Hi.
With foober can you change eq settings and panning and bass? In winamp you can kind of do this... But not really. So if you can in foober I'll check it out.

Hi.
for me, I'll stick to winamp. yes the EQ settings in winamp are bad Well for what I wantthem to do, if you've herd of MaPlEr. you'll know what kind o fthings I want. I know I don't want an advanced media player just something thatI can mess around with and change eq settins like you can in MaPlEr., so that you may here the drums of a track clearer than the vocals and so on. So for me I'll be sticking to my demo of MaPlEr. and winamp.

Although speaking of MaPlEr. my friend Amin, who is known as Bashue on here tried to order it and didn't get his key.

Are you sure about that? WinAmp scores very well for particular baroque file forms, such as ChipTunes.