I wanted to post a quick follow up detailing what software I ended up settling on.

Music Player & Store: iTunes - Wasn’t really much of a choice. I really like the clean approach that Apple has. As I said in my last post I just can’t stand how it manages the music library. The other nice thing about iTunes is they also have the best music store around… if you can get over the fact that they DRM a lot of the music your purchase and that a lot of it can be low bitrate. If you are aware of it though you can buy iTunes Plus content for the same price. The music is DRM free and 256kbps. Very nice (look for the + next to the price).

I’ve been struggling with a problem in iTunes where after deleting files and moving my iTunes library from computer to computer it eventually ends up having several missing songs. The songs still show up in the library but they are missing from the disk. When you go to play the song you get an annoying grey exclamation point and iTunes asks if you’d like to find the song. Eventually I stumbled accross this fix in a comment response to an iTunes rant blog:

In the meantime, here’s the solution I came up with for the multiple dead track issue: