In my previous life (before I discovered MJ 8
) the best I could find was Winamp 2.xx with the EZ-PlayList extension. That gave a spreadsheet look-a-like view to all track information, basic text search and better tagging capabilities than Winamp. I actually liked it a lot. It was easy to pick up new files and send them to the main Winamp playlist because you could see both windows side by side. The combination was much better than e.g. Real 1 or WMP at those times.
I am not by any means complaining that it is slow to find a song and play it in MC.
E.g. I pressed Ctrl+F while I was in Playing Now, did a search in Media Library, started playing the search results and pressed Ctrl+2 (
Jump to Playing Now). The operation took about 2 seconds (even the library has over 18000 entries).
This is of course if you already know what you want. It is more complicated if you like to compare Playing Now and the search results when making choices. You may end up going back and forth between the two views.
You can use Action Window/edit Playing Now for that, but it is showing only "Name (Artist)" information in the playback order. You may also like to compare albums, years, comments, ratings etc or organize the view order by artist, album etc.
You can face the same situation when building/editing named playlists.