Hey Brett_Val, thanks for both the rep and the kind words! :-)
Personally, I use a lot of stuff instead of WMP/iTunes. Since you asked...For my media/library managers/full featured software players, I rely on both Winamp and MediaMonkey. For quick and dirty listening, foobar2K is quite a nice little low resource app. For ripping CDs, I use EAC and CDEx, always with the latest LAME binaries. More if you want to know!