Windows Media Player 12 of Windows 7 (and v11 of XP) are perfect. The UI is very nice, the star rating well integrated, the playlist functionality good. It play

Windows Media Player 12 of Windows 7 (and v11 of XP) are perfect. The UI is very nice, the star rating well integrated, the playlist functionality good. It plays mp3 audio, it plays avi, wmv, mpeg and mp4 videos, (and does all the advanced stuff most people don't even know about it has included) VLC, WinAMP2, MPC, iTunes, foobar2000 are all good for one thing or the other. But for playing music files, there is no better program than Windows Media Player 11/12. The combination of XP or Win7 and Media Player is perfect. One can rate mp3 files in Explorer or in Media Player and create playlists based on that using saved searches, etc. And the cool thing all the data is stored to the metadata of the file itself, not like iTunes were all your manual edited that sits in an SQLite db and cannot be recovered or gets lost. WinAMP2 has not the best interface, and no a good rating system, but otherwise it is second best media player for mp3. Then comes iTunes, older iTunes versions had a much better UI. Best for videos VLC or MPC Best for music Windows Media Player or WinAMP Unfortunately, many noobs prefer to stream music nowadays, and then they cry when they loose access to "their library" or "are stuck in airplane mode".