Music player for a really big Media Library

Question

I have a really big Media library (250GB.. shared across a LAN)
And I've grown tired of Songbird & MediaMonkey crashing all the time.
Although they are great for searches (mainly Mediamonkey), they can't handle
so many files and keep crashing, any suggestions for alternatives?

Especially for big media libraries
p.s.
tried foobar, it's ok but it's not great [features lacking]

Update
Using Foobar, AMAZING, I was mistaken earlier, it has everything.
Even the Downmix to Mono which is awesome since at work I have only one speaker.
Anyways, thanks everyone, Foobar forever (sure wish it was open source)

Answer 1

I use MPD and GMPC on the same machine for managing and playing music. I use it to control my MPD over WLAN when I'm not sitting at my desktop computer, and also stream the music through the network and also into the internet.

When I'm at work, I simply connect to the MPD that I have running at home with my MPD-Client and then listen to the stream it generates. Think of it as my own private web radio.

Of course this is a Linux-only solution, but it can handle massive ammounts of data. My music library consists of over 500000 media files of various kinds. MPD can handle them all without any problems.

What I also like about that solution, is that I don't need to have a player running to listen to music, MPD will play the music, even if no client is connected to is. Also many people can access the player from all over the network simultaneously, without actually sitting at the computer that is playing the music. This is great for parties, you just take a netbook into the living room or kitchen and control the playlist from there. And if the computer that runs the MPD client crashes, the music is still playing. It's like a very smart remote control.

Answer 2

I don't know if you'll find this very restricting, but according to me, iTunes is the best media library software. It has all kinds of useful features, and you can customize the details for your data, even the album art. Then there's the iTunes Store. And if you use iTunes, you can always go out and get an iPod, iPhone or iPad, and you're at home.

Download it from here.

Answer 3

Ive tried all major media player applications i.e iTunes, Foobar, MediaMonkey, SongBird but the one I found the best is a -JRiver Media Center

JRiver has essentially the same layout and feature set as the others but Iv'e found it to be the most responsive and intuitive to use the only downside is the price tag ($50).

Theres also a selection of free plugins and skins (I dont have enough upvotes to post a link yet) although I personally don't bother with them.