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There's a great lightweight player called Play that may float your boat:

http://sbooth.org/Play/

Basically, it has the core functionality of iTunes, it's free as in beer, and isn't bloated.

This is the "correct" solution, by which I mean the one that insures both highest quality and compatibility.

On Macs (on which I use this solution) There are tools worth mentioning, because as mentioned iTunes doesn't support FLAC (BAD Apple!) Play http://sbooth.org/Play/ is an audio player with support for open formats, with full support for ReplayGain tags. Personally, I use Cog, because I like the interface better, but it doesn't support Replaygain (despite fairly constant cries to the developer for this feature). Max http://sbooth.org/Max/ is an audio format converter for OS X. It has every feature I need to be able to convert FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) and translates tags perfectly.

This is the "correct" solution, by which I mean the one that insures both highest quality and compatibility.

On Macs (on which I use this solution) There are tools worth mentioning, because as mentioned iTunes doesn't support FLAC (BAD Apple!) Play http://sbooth.org/Play/ is an audio player with support for open formats, with full support for ReplayGain tags. Personally, I use Cog, because I like the interface better, but it doesn't support Replaygain (despite fairly constant cries to the developer for this feature). Max http://sbooth.org/Max/ is an audio format converter for OS X. It has every feature I need to be able to convert FLACs to MP3 (or whatever) and translates tags perfectly.

I think I will have to stick with Spotlight due to my overwhelming reliance on importers such as these. Being able to search through flac tags can be really helpful if you archive hundreds and hundreds of GBs of live music, which generally have strange naming conventions (or at least less imformative ones).

Mind you, Cog is the older and more stable player of the two. When you try it make sure you try one of the later revisions, not the one on the frontpage. DL them here: http://sbooth.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=407&postd ays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

I switched to Play because it has a more promising future looking at the features I like to see in an audio player. Play is in its early alpha stages and not quite stable yet but this way I can help the author make it more stable by reporting bugs.

Under OS X I always used Cog http://cogosx.sourceforge.net/ to play music and just switched to Play http://sbooth.org/Play/. Both play Ogg Vorbis just fine. I believe there is a plugin to let iTunes play Ogg Vorbis. VLC can play music but is actually a videoplayer and its UI never ceases to remind you of it.

Anything in particular you're looking for as far as a music player goes? I was a die-hard Winamp user since right before we were grumbling about version 3 ;).

I'm using iTunes combined with QuickSilver as a music player right now. I find the combination works well. You can play most common combinations of music (album, artist, genre, etc.) with a few keystrokes, and you can also run playlists if you've set them up beforehand.

For ripping, I use Max. It can simultaneously rip to FLAC, OGG, MP3, and others I'm sure I'm missing. The metadata comes from MusicBrainz. You can also pull metadata from the iTunes Store (for free) with a little AppleScript. I've almost got my particularly picky ripping process completely automated - insert CD, and 10 minutes later, the FLAC files are on my home server and backup drive, and the MP3s are imported into iTunes.

As a Mac user who wants to convert to OGG, I was very happy to discover Max. It uses (or can be made to use) cdparanoia as its ripper.

I don't "get" the concept of sorting music in folders.
If I want to listen to "Jam" by "Michael Jackson", I can't necessarily remember which one of his 10 albums it's on.
Therefore I have all my music "sorted" in one huge folder.
This obviously requires utterly perfect file naming, but that requirement is trivial with proper tags (which is the real hurdle) and a good file renamer.

For albums I use: "Artist - Album - Track # - Track name"
For compilations it's: "Album - Track # - Artist - Track name"

This way the tracks are always sorted in the folder in the order they are on the album. In actual use, this method is far superior to the folder-concept due it being easier to spot the correct artist name and there being no frantic movement through subfolders.

In order to achieve the above i use:
Max for ripping
Media Rage for retagging/renaming/etc.
iTunes for retagging/playing.

On Windows I would use EAC, Tag (although with the "Tagger" frontend) and Foobar2000.