This is not an advertisement. I just get a little enthusiastic.

I mentioned some time back that I'd been searching for a decent free music player and library program, and that I was having some severe problems with this task. In fact, I may even have been so rash as to say that Windows Media Player 10 was the best that I could find.

Not any more.

I may as well state at this point that I have freakishly stringent requirements for music players. This can seem rather ridiculous, given that I'm more than happy to just use a CD player if I have the disc to hand, but then the old factor of "I never knew this product existed and now I must have the best version of it possible" kicks in. Anyway, here are the features that WMP10 had, and why they were important to me...

• Two-pane flexible library view. This may seem like an odd requirement, but once I'd seen the ability to list and sort all artists and albums in one pane, then bring up all relevant tracks in the other, I couldn't do without it. This, by the way, is why I can't stand WMP11 - keeping in line with the trend in Microsoft's latest products of removing useful and standard functionality, it severely restricts what you can do with the left-hand pane and turns it into a crippled version of iTunes.
  
  (And makes the menu bar extremely difficult to find. The menu bar. Possibly the most standard feature in computing over the past 15 years, and they try to get rid of it. Complete insanity.)
  
• The mini-player. Having all the controls on the taskbar, the one place on the desktop where they will never be in the way and yet always be accessible, was a stroke of genius.
  
• Sorting by Album Artist. Sorting tracks only by Artist means that the list of artists gets incredibly cluttered, with separate entries for anyone who contributed to a single track. I'm something of a purist when it comes to listening to whole albums as the artists intended (get behind me, shuffle function!), so I particularly like being able to see only an artist's albums.
  
• WMA functionality. I don't like the WMA format much - it's locked and proprietary, and often includes DRM - but because much of my music is from CDs owned by other members of my family, and they ripped it using WMP, the ability to play WMA files was important.

Strange as it may seem, for months I couldn't find anything other than WMP10 that could do all of these things. Winamp can play WMAs, but has a truly bizarre library layout (or it did last time I tried it, anyway); iTunes is just as locked as WMP and lacks the right kind of 2-pane layout; RealPlayer is simply ugly (and who uses RealAudio any more?); and the simpler options like foobar2000 and VLC don't have adequate library functions.

This was unfortunate, as what I was really looking for was something that could also do the following things.

• Index Ogg Vorbis files. Ogg is a free and open music format, and I've been meaning to re-rip my CDs into that format for a while now. Although WMP can be patched to play Ogg files, it steadfastly refuses to put them in the library.
  
• Receive and index podcasts. Especially now that Radio 4 has started offering The Now Show as an unrestricted MP3 podcast, making long train journeys much more pleasant. If only they would use a similar strategy for TV, rather than the heavily restricted iPlayer.

I've been keeping an eye open for players with this functionality for quite a while now, but had almost always been disappointed. So when, fairly recently, I heard about the beta version of MediaMonkey 3, it was almost unreasonably exciting. I tried MediaMonkey back when it was in version 2.something, but didn't like it much. It got many things right, but it was ugly and difficult to use. The mini-player, in particular, took up much of the system tray and constantly got in the way. So when I downloaded the beta and found that not only had they added several functions, they had also overhauled the entire interface and made it much sleeker, it was a good sign.

And then, at the end of December, it came out of beta. I downloaded it a couple of days ago, and have yet to see any major bugs. It's fast, clean, functional and (mostly) free - the functions that you have to pay to unlock aren't those I'd want anyway. I haven't yet tried to rip or burn CDs with it, but WMP was never all that reliable for those functions anyway. The design is good - in particular, nothing on the mini-player takes more than one click. Flexibility is found throughout, letting you resize and reorder practically everything. It's built on much of the same basis as Winamp, so plugins and extensions for Winamp will usually work on MediaMonkey too. I think my quest is at an end.

(Man, I need less geeky quests.)