Hi bcbc;
I to, had tried all the players that you mentioned in addition to… Siren, Real JukeBox 1 & 2, RealOne, & some others. None of them can hold a candle to MJ. They either look like spaceships (meaning the controls are non-standard & very hard to get used to & everything is crammed to close together & to small) or were lacking in option choices, or had very few new releases (sometimes taking a year or more for an update). Also, they all had terrible help systems & little (if any) user interaction with the developers.
Then I found Media Jukebox (MJ for short) & it was love at first sight. It has it all.
After using inferior players for several years, I to was (at first) somewhat bewildered by all the Option choices in MJ. But, I slowly learned to love them as the wonderful people at JRiver had put them there for some pretty good reasons. The reasons slowly became very apparent to me… almost every time I thought MJ couldn’t do something just the way I wanted it to do, I would find one of these wonderful Options that made it work exactly the way I wanted.
So be patient… as you gain experience with MJ, you too will learn to love the many option choices. Then you will be an MJ “guru” & have a worm fuzzy feeling all over that there is, after all these years, something about Windows that finally works as advertised!