rFileList
rFileList is a little program that I wrote quite a while ago to teach myself a little about using FMOD to play music and the Win32 SDK to crawl a directory structure. Give it the root directory for your mp3 collection and it'll scan every file within the structure and catalog each mp3 file's ID3v1 data. You can then run a query using a very natural structure to play exactly the music you want to listen to.
Have no fear if you have a huge mp3 collection, it will cache your file structure and ID3 information in a file named "dir_cache.mdr" and then only search for changes in the file system on subsequent executions. (A warning on that, however. It's not written in unicode, so unicode directory structures will crash it.) The time to scan depends heavily on how good your hard drive is at random access, but even a 50 GB mp3 collection only takes between 30 seconds and a minute upon first run (and usually less than a second on each subsequent run).
Queries are done in an easy method, and you could probably figure it out without any explanation. After entering a directory, the program prompts you with "Play songs" and you just complete the sentence. For example, if you wanted to play songs by Dave Matthews Band, you would type "by dave matthews" and hit enter. If you just wanted to listen to the album "Crash" you would type "on crash by dave matthews" (specifying the artist to make sure you don't get anything like the soundtrack to the movie "Crash"). If you wanted to listen to "Ants Marching" you could just type "named ants marching" and hit enter.
It also understands words like "or," "not," and "and." So if you wanted to listen to Dave Matthews Band and Symphony X, you would type "by dave matthews or by symphony x." Or if you liked Eric Clapton but didn't feel like listening to acoustic versions, you could type "by Eric Clapton and not on Unplugged."
I know it sounds weird and dificult to get used to, but if you drop it in your quicklaunch, it's probably one of the fastest ways to access your music. Especially if you want to listen to something specific.
You can download a copy here. (ZIP 199KB)
Just unzip somewhere and run, but be sure that both files end up in the same directory. Keep in mind that it's just something I threw together for fun, however, and that it probably won't replace your favorite mp3 player.