As I'm new to both JRiver and these forums, I might as well start here.
I chose JRiver because an audiophile friend gave me a Centrance DACPort, an obsolete but very nice USB DAC. As it would be wasted on my desktop computer, I decided to put together a music "server" (player) for my audio system. After I ripped my CD collection to FLAC, it could replace the CD player as well as the iPod that had served as an Internet radio tuner.
Having used Winamp for many years to play audio files and Internet radio on my desktop computer, I thought I could use it for the new music server. I tried several remote-control options for Winamp before settling on MonkeyMote, which runs on the iPod. When I saw an Acer Cloudbook 11 laptop on sale at Fry's, I decided it would be the right hardware for my server. It's underpowered (Dual-core Celeron CPU, 32GB of SSD, 2GB of RAM), but that should be enough to run Winamp (and nothing else) with Windows 10. More importantly, it has no noisy fan. So I bought it, along with a 1TB external (USB3) hard drive. I copied the media files from my desktop computer onto the external drive, installed Winamp, plugged in the DACPort, and everything worked.
Then I discovered that I should be using WASAPI Exclusive mode or ASIO for best audio quality. Winamp doesn't support either one natively, but several third-party plug-ins exist. Sure enough, they provided audible improvement. Unfortunately, these plug-ins are beta software at best. After several weeks of tweaking and fiddling, I concluded that none of them were stable enough to use. I tried MediaMonkey, which natively supports WASAPI. But playing Internet radio streams in a playlist hung it up every time, requiring a restart. Not acceptable.
Almost out of desperation, I downloaded JRiver for a trial on my desktop computer. The user interface is far better than Winamp or MediaMonkey. The MonkeyMote remote control actually works better with JRiver. And it natively supports the DACPort in WASAPI Exclusive and ASIO. But with all the video, television, and numerous other features I wouldn't be using, I was afraid it would be too much for the underpowered laptop.
I installed it on the laptop anyway, started it up, and configured it to use the DACPort with WASAPI Exclusive mode. It worked immediately, and sounded noticeably better than Winamp! When I opened up Task Manager, I was amazed to find that JRiver uses significantly less CPU than Winamp. After confirming that it all worked with MonkeyMote (including a playlist of Internet radio stations imported from my desktop machine), I went back to my desktop computer and bought a JRiver license.
I now have a "turnkey" music server on the laptop that starts JRiver automatically in Audio Only mode when I turn it on (a feature JRiver itself provides, with no need to put a shortcut in the secret startup folder). I'm using ASIO rather than WASAPI, as the JRiver Wiki recommends. And, of course, I can use JRiver to rip CDs and watch DVDs on my desktop computer.
Free software is often a good option, but not always. The cost of the JRiver license was money well spent.