>>Well, you can, but the CD player will be sold with the notice that it CAN play MP3s. Many DVD players now say this

Oh dear. If you are going to split hairs as you usually do wouldn't that be a DVD player? I have 7 cd players in the house of which 1 plays mp3's too. The two DVD players play DVDs, CDs and MP3s. So personally I need some things in formats other than mp3 - I would guess other people may have a similar split

dbpoweramp is great but it's only the paid for version (or the old versi0on that some people still have) that works with mp3s - the current version will ask you to purchase a licence to encode or decode mp3s. It also asks you to download additional codecs to be able to deal with WMAs.