Chip:
I have never used VLC personally and only recommended it because I have heard good things about it.
For what it's worth, to play MUSIC, I much prefer I-Tunes. I use an antique version from 2005 and it works fine for my purposes. I do NOT use it for anything other than playing tunes directly from the PC over headphones or through a wired connection from my sound card to my home stereo.
Advantages (compare to VLC, which I have never even looked at):
Excellent full screen interface
Instant column sorting by artist name or song title through thousands of songs
Columns can be customized to show only those you need. I use artist, title, bit rate, running time, and "last played" (tells me when the song was last played).
Below is a pic of the screen, sorted by artist. The listing is for the entire library (Dion, Dizzy, Django, etc).
Notice on the left: 10 genre categories. These are my playlists. I could play from them, but I usually play from the library. The playlists are 100% replicas of my mp3 hard drive folders. Think of it this way: the sum of the songs in the playlists equals the songs in the library.
I acquire maybe 200 mp3s per month. So maybe once a month, I "clear" the library. That automatically empties the playlists but does NOT delete songs from the hard drive. I then copy everything in my hard drive "blues" folder to the Itunes "blues" playlist, and do the same with country, rock and roll, etc.
Copying songs to the playlists automatically puts them in the library.
In that way, I keep my library updated with newly acquired songs.
You could use a recent version of I-tunes, but you don't need to. I don't have an I-POD or anything like that, so don't need fancy features.
It has shuffle play or you can just have it walk down the library or a playlist in order of appearance.
