Play - simple and efficient

Play is a media player for OS X only. It's different from iTunes in that you can make it scan folders when it starts up. This makes it very easy to maintain your library, because you simply drop your files into one folder, fire up Play, and ask it to monitor that single folder. Every time you start up Play, it will check that folder for new files, and add them to your library. The only downside is, that startup isn't exactly nippy, when you have a library of +80Gb like I do. Yet, the benefits are considerable in the long run. You get to maintain the (in)sanity of your own library, and Play will just see if there are new additions. Play does not support devices like mp3-players at the current stage, so you can't do any sync'ing with any devices, but we'll get to the sync'ing part later. It interfaces nicely with the last.fm desktop application, and you can lookup metadata for your tracks (individually, but not in bulk, unfortunately) using musicbrainz.

Formats

Play supports FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, WavPack, Monkey's Audio, AAC, Apple Lossless, MP3 and various other audio file formats.

Play is a simple, but very efficient media player, that get's the job done. Highly recommendable if you are looking for just a media player substitute for iTunes. It supports the file formats expectable from a modern media player

Songbird - the Firefox of media players

Songbird is a media player, and a browser for the web. It's build on XUL, so it's very closely related to Firefox, and it works on Windows, Linux and Mac. It's still in it's early stages, with 0.7 being the latest version, currently in the release candidate stage. Unlike Play, it supports sync'ing with a number of different devices including a bunch of iPods. The iPod-support is slightly buggy though, as it takes me about 30 minutes to mount my iPod with it. Not so optimal, but I'm sure it will get better along the way, as several bugs have already been filed on this issue. Oh, and it supports last.fm scrobbling right out of the box.

Extendable

Songbird is, like it's relative, extendable through user-created add-ons. One of my favourites is the mashTape add-on, which will look for concert info, bio, videos, images, and lyrics for the artist and song you are currently playing, and display it nicely in any of the panes you choose to show it in.

Get your daily new music fix with Songbird

Songbird excels in one thing in particular, discovery of new music. From within the application, you can subscribe to a plethora of music blogs, and have their daily dosage of new music, delivered straight to your library, poppin' fresh, organised in playlists by their source. Currently, this is the greatest feature for me, in Songbird, truly.

Formats supported

Songbird has support for MPEG Audio (mpga), MPEG Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG4 family including FairPlay (m4a, m4v, mp4, m4p, m4b), Ogg Vorbis, Speex, AAC, WMA, WMADRM, FLAC, and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR. The developers encourage you to teach Songbird to play your favourite format, if it's not on the above list.

YamiPod

The last application I'd like to share as an alternative, is YamiPod. It's yet another iPod manager for Windows, Linux and Mac, and it will let you manage your iPod in a strictly drag and drop way. You have some limited functionality within YamiPod to control playlists and such, but in essence, it's the iPod part of iTunes, without all the bells and whistles, which suits me rather fine. It will take care of updating your playcounts, and it also interfaces with last.fm, so it submits tracks you've listened to on your iPod, since you last YamiPod'ed it. Very nice! It also doubles as a media player, for the tracks on your iPod.

I haven't settled for any of these applications as the one and only to overtake the iTunes hegemony previously prevalent in my world. Songbird looks like a good candidate down the line, but right now, I'm using Play in conjunction with YamiPod. Yes, it's pretty sweet. You should try them all out and see if they fit your needs.