Hi,
Foobar is definitely well respected and worth trying for yourself. WinAmp is also good and the free version will probably do everything you need, though I think you have to pay a small amount for the version that allows you to rip. It's worth trying a few for yourself, as user interfaces are a matter of personal taste.
Personally I'm a big fan of JRiver Media Centre - it's easy to use, and I really like the "Theater View" mode which you can drive from a cheap IR PC remote to flip through albums by the artwork, and easily build playlists on the fly. There's a 30 day full demo available for download.
I built a dedicated Media PC to run JRiver Media Centre for my music, and Window Media centre for recording and playing back stuff off the telly. It's in a decent case, sitting in my rack, hooked up to a Chord DAC64 via optical link to keep the PC out of the signal path. I'm very happy with the sound quality, and the convenience of being able to access all of my non-vinyl music this way is a real luxury.
If you've not ripped all of your CDs yet, and you're ripping to FLAC or other lossless formats, and you want to be paranoid about the quality of your rips, then I'd recommend DBPowerAmp for ripping, which compares the checksums of CD tracks to a central database, so you can be confident about the quality of the data that was read from the CD. NB: This is just my preferred software, there are several other ripping programs that can do this if you Google.
Hope this helps,
Simon