I have been on an epic quest for the past few years trying to find the perfect media player. Tonight I came close with SongBird. It does an excellent job at playing music from my favorite radio station, MPR's The Current. Whenever I am browsing a site with music it shows me the song info and even allows me to easily download it and add it to my library. This is a great combination, and something that is now a must-have in my book. However, one drawback that I have experienced with the most recent version (0.2 developer edition) is its failure to handle a large library gracefully.
MediaMonkey on the other hand does an amazing job with handling large libraries. I have even read that people with 70k songs are able to easily browse and search them using MediaMonkey. While I do not have that many songs, it is important to me for a media player to be able to handle a large library because overtime I would imagine that my library will continue to grow and I do not want to see the performance of the player degrade during this innevitable process. Therefore, MediaMonkey does appear to be a reasonable solution for large libraries. However, I have noticed that it consumes a large amount of RAM and consumes a decent number of cycles. Regardless, it does still perform great with large libraries.
During my college life I was using iTunes, however, this player has become more and more bloated and sluggish over time. During this time, and within the last year iTunes was using an xml file to store the library data. A friend of mine started to notice huge performance hits with this player with his large library.
Windows Media Player has come a long way, and yet not far at all. One of the things that I enjoy about this player is that it has always been good about not consuming too many resources and it is fairly lightwieght compared to many of these other players. Media Player 11 is actually my player of preference currently. The complete media library view is very useful, it allows me to find my files quickly. However, I must admit that I have not tried this player out with a large library, so I do not know how it would react.
The perfect media player should be able to search a large library quickly, be extremely performant, and work well with the internet. Therefore, if a player could have the following combination I think that it would be the perfect media player:
1. The quick searching ability of iTunes
2. The internet integration of SongBird
3. The performance of MediaMonkey
4. The presentation of a library like that of Windows Media Player 11