decent audio player?

Hopefully this is the right forum for this:

I update my music collection very often. As far as I can tell, iTunes is HORRIBLE at monitoring folders for updates. It looks like with iTunes 9, I can now copy all new music to the new "automatically added..." folder, but that's extremely limiting. I want to store all of my music in one or two primary folders that can be accessed from different computers running different OSes, and different players. In other words, I am not, and cannot be iTunes centric. If I put all new music in that one "automatically added..." folder, then I have to let iTunes organize my music. Doesn't do me any good on my other platforms. I organize my music. I have to, or else have multiple duplicates of my entire library--one for each platform/player. In other words, I want to dump my music that I get from different sources into one or two "root" directories, and then let my players monitor those directories and update their libraries.
Is there a good music player for OS X that does this. It's really sad to say this, and I'm really not trying to start a flame war, but Windows Media Player does this beautifully.
With iTunes, I 're-add' directories to the library and then I'm constantly dealing with duplicates of the same songs.
The ability of a player to monitor directories for new music is a deal breaker or maker. If it can't do this, I won't use the player.

Any suggestions? (sorry for the long post, but I tried to anticipate questions or answers that don't apply to my situation).

Thanks

To clarify: yes, I tediously create my own sub-directories for artists as I add music.

I use VLC for lots of media. I'm happy with its performance.

VLC Player ... +1.

I love VLC for video playback and it plays FLAC and Ogg natively BUT..

It does not handle audio files anywhere near as robustly as WMP, iTunes etc..

Secondly, VLC may sometimes distort audio with high gain playback. It wasn't designed to primarily be an Audio only, media app. That said:

I am totally with you Cjaynes. I hate iTunes with a passion. It makes me work WAY too hard in order to ALMOST get things the way I'm used to having them be (which mind you shouldn't take one ounce of effort and never has on any other media player I've ever used in my life)

I went through this recently and received help from a couple of people and now iTunes is somewhat better. Yet not totally the way it needs to be.

Before I even get into that, however, let me point your attention to : Songbird

This media player is NEARLY perfect. It does what you and I need it to in the context of the purpose of your post. However, I don't use it for one simple and extremely maddening reason. I store and playback all of my music files from an external HD. Songbird for some reason, doesn't buffer my external HD enough to ensure constant, flawless playback. Every couple of songs or every other perhaps, there will be pauses or gaps in the playback. I can not accept this as being reasonable.

Yet I keep praying they'll fix this because in every other aspect (memory usage aside) Songbird is what you and I need. I'm totally appalled by the fact that only a couple of people seem to appreciate how crappy of an job iTunes does with such basic things like watched folders, (or lack thereof) and how stupid it is that iTunes simply copies everything you have and re-arranges things in nonsensical redundant folders, only to make you delete the sensible order which your original files and folders had been, in the first place !

I like doing my own folder and file house keeping. I only want a media player to query my database and look for new information and add or remove data when necessary. That's it. So I totally understand.

Now... putting Songbird aside for a moment, let me point you to something else which you might find useful. It's an Apple Script which was developed for iTunes and essentially acts as a watched folder function. It has its quirks though.

Folder Actions and iTunes

The quirks: I think that you have to manually add each and every folder that might receive new files or folders. I don't think that child directories are automatically added. So for instance: I just put The Blueprint 3 into my Jay Z folder. But it wasn't added to iTunes. Why ? Because I didn't tell the script to watch the Jay Z Folder. Instead, I told it to watch its parent folder, which happens to be "F-K".

So if I take the entire Jay Z folder out from the F-K folder and remove those songs from the database, then put The Blueprint 3 into the Jay Z folder and then put the entire Jay Z folder back into "F-K", the script should now see all the new Jay Z stuff. Yeah.. FAR from perfect. In fact.. almost pointless.

There's actually another quirk, which I can't quite remember at the moment, but perhaps it is just me, who is missing something and you'll have better luck with the iTunes script. Try it. The instructions for installation are on that page.

Also try Songbird and see if it works any better for you.

Doug