I've used MC on the road for years, running on a small 12" laptop with sufficient hard drive space. This approach does not require an Internet connection, uses no data to run, lets me apply all of MC's playback behaviors (I love several), including those not available when using other playback apps to access MC. And I can easily take the laptop to a friend's, to a party, to my office, whatever.
Taking the simple route:
1. Install MC on laptop.
2. Set up MC with exactly the same folder structure (not absolutely necessary but keeps it clean). Key is to have the media files folder have exactly the same path. On my desktop I have a second drive M: (for Music) that has all my media files, so that's where MC library expects to find them. My laptop has only one drive, so i create a virtual drive (using an ancient DOS MAP command) so M: exists as a folder of C: and has the same folder structure as the original M: This is the only tricky part, but once set up it works perfectly.
3. Copy to the laptop all the media files. Copy to the laptop all the MC database files, OR create an MC library backup and restore it on the laptop. Put everything in same folder structure on both computers. I have a backup program set up that does this automatically and reliably. Being a backup app it is smart enough to only update laptop files that have changed on PC, which is my Master system for Music.
4. Done.
As needed, when the library changes, update the laptop (via the backup app or whatever) from the Master PC.
A couple more little things I do:
-- On laptop I set up custom visualization, a variation of Noire TrackInfo. I prefer track info optimized for glancing at in on the road.
-- On laptop I added free Pietro DSP RockSteady, a pretty good audio compressor plug-in that helps keep the music at a strong, consistent level above road noise. This plug-in was created years ago for Winamp, the developer seems to have wandered away, but it still works. The only shortcoming is the UI does not display in today's MC (it used to in earlier versions until something in MC was changed), so I can't get to the adjustments. But it works well as-is. It does essentially what radio stations do to the audio, for the same reason -- even out the sound. I like the result a lot. (I haven't found that MC's internal compressor does what I want.) Being free, there's no reason to not try RockSteady.