I recently moved all my CD collection to MP3 and am having the hardest time finding a decent, user friendly player with the features I'm looking for. My CD jukebox has been replaced by a notebook computer in my family room that people can use to select and play songs. So I'm looking for: 1. A simple, easy to use (and easy to read) interface that a non computer person could use. 2. The ability to easily select the songs you want via at least a two-dimensional search. Meaning, they can search by two or more separate criteria, genre=rock, year=1980-1989. 3. Ability to play the selected songs without having to create a playlist. (Kind of a party/jukebox mode of sorts I guess.) 4. Ability to automatically check for new songs on the hard drive and add them to the media library. The 'nice to have' features I'm looking for are 5. Support for reading ID3v2 tags. 6. A 'smart DJ' function which allows you to choose several artists or individual songs and autmatically picks songs other songs it believes are similar, would be really cool if it would also stream songs that it picks from the Internet, not just from the hard drive and then give you an option to purchase the song/album. I've tried the MEXP plugin for Winamp. Doesn't have a true multi-dimensional search that I can tell, you can tell it what fields to search but it searches them with one search critieria. You can't specifiy individual criteria for each field. MusicMatch 8.0 - Still exploring this one but again, it doesn't appear to have a multi-dimensional search.
Have a look at Media Jukebox. It has some very nice features, eventhough I am not 100% about it's search possibilities http://www.cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/all-in-one/mediajukebox.cfm
You could also try Apollo player. It has handy play list facilities. I'm not sure about that smart DJ-function. http://www.cd-rw.org/software/audio_software/audio_players/apollo.cfm
