I am using a XP sp3 laptop with Echo Indigo IO card. For a player I use MediaPlayer.
A big plus for me is the easy way to make playlists and/or adding request songs on the fly using drag&drop. Another importand thing for me is the display of the total playing time of a playlist.

I have back-up for live-situations of all my backingtracks and some playlists on an iPod Touch. Should all else fail I can even fall back on MiniDisk.

I wouldn't rely on CD's for they scratch easily and the mechanics of the players allow for skipping during playback (much less then the old vinyl, but nevertheless......)