mpd
I have a laptop and I often use it at home, on the couch. I have a workstation on the other side of the room that my wife frequently uses (which is one of the reasons why I mostly use the laptop), which has decent speakers. I like to listen to music. I think you can see where I'm going with this.
In the past we've used various media players. The one that worked best for remote control was xmms with a homebrew xmlrpc client I made, and now that I have lirc working that would be another option for remote control. But my wife kept closing xmms and xmms is lame anyway. I got into quod libet for a little while but even though there's several ways to control it apart from the gui, it's still not very remote friendly.
Von and I have kicked around the idea for a better music player many times, and the other day I had an epiphany: it should be a sort of stereo daemon, with clients connecting over the network and driving it. I've learned that most good ideas I have have already been had, so I searched a bit and sure enough, mpd. mpd is nifty, wholesome, and flexible. Your wife can't close it, you can control it with simple command-line, ncurses, gtk, qt, etc. clients (still need a good osx client, but the ncurses one is good enough for a cli junkie like me). If I have music playing and she wants to stop it, she just has to fire up her client if necessary and hit stop. No fuss, no excuses. If she's closed her client and left the room and I want music I don't have to stand up, futz around with ssh, nohup, and DISPLAY, or even think two thoughts. I just fire up my client and hit play. Highly recommended.
