At least with winamp, there weren't really any major changes since Justin Frankel left, and what made it amazing back then is still in the program now.
Thank you for the tip. The facet plugin is great - exactly what I wanted.
the other component i use is the ipod manager i forget what its called but you can find it easily. it lets you add/delete songs pretty easily & if you use flac/wav/whatever it can even convert to mp3 on the fly if you set up the encoder right. that way you can keep lossless on comp but have mp3 on ipod without making an mp3 directory