musikcube, songbird, winamp, and foobar2000 are the apps i've used on my pc for playback. when i had a mac, i used cog primarily. right now i'm using foobar2000. i dont like having all my music listed in a 'library', i drag-and-drop the show and clear the playlist when there are too many items. musikcube is alright, but i cant control master volume on my pc, it only turns down the audio in the player, so to adjust master levels i have to use the taskbar. this is likely an issue only on my end. songbird is good, its like a non-apple itunes (with ipod support, iirc, but i dont have one so i'm not sure). its a mozilla-project, which is great, but unfortunately it comes included w/ an internet browser-- a little feature intensive for my purposes. i want a simple interface, that's easy to minimize/hide, and that features lossless playback. winamp is nice, but its clunky imo. it takes a long time on my pc to bring up the playlist when its "minimized" to the top of my screen as a thin toolbar. however, foobar2000 doesnt support shn, imo. so, 69 dead i'll usually use winamp (or other shn shows, but most are flac these days). mediamonkey looks like a huge memory hog.
i dont need album artwork, options to purchase the songs, album/artist/track names (just filename display needed, no metadata), ability to rip cds, ability to encode to other formats, huge libraries, ipod/mp3 player support, etc., etc. just play lossless files, let me scrub tracks, and minimize well. thats mostly all i need.