all about pc and audio thoughts ...

Jplay is a plugin for use in iTunes, Foobar and J.River that loads up the track in RAM, and plays back from there. The hard drive is never touched during playback. Jplay supports playback using Kernel streaming and WASAPI, has several settings to optimize memory management, like the size of the buffer, how much to commit your processor, etc. It's a little quirky in iTunes, but this little program took the sound quality of my PC audio to a new height using iTunes. Stock iTunes will not output sound using WASAPI or Kernel streaming, but Jplay enables this, so if you like the iTunes interface, this could be an answer for you.
To my knowledge, J.River and Foobar both support WASAPI, and maybe Kernel streaming, but I don't think either of these play back the music from RAM. Jplay does this. Improvements made by Jplay in iTunes were astounding, Jplay improvements to be made in J River or Foobar will be less so.
To rip CDs, lots of folks use EAC, which is free, but doesn't support AIFF or Apple Lossless. Also dBpoweramp is widely recommended here. Have not tried dBpoweramp, but EAC was frustrating because its integration with iTunes isn't there. Also had some problems with automatic tagging.

One thing Jplay definitely does do in iTunes is utilize WASAPI and Kernel Streaming, which iTunes does not do, at least not in its most current version. The sound quality upgrade on my system is significant. Foobar: won't recognize AIFF files, cannot display album art...and J.River was hard to work with on my laptop, too many options, couldn't get sound out of it for some reason, but I was probably just impatient, and will try it out again someday. It's true that this is my work laptop and I am running programs that are memory intensive, like 3dsMAX and photoshop, while playing music, this is not a dedicated music laptop. Jplay makes a massive improvement in SQ in my situation.

Dtc - did not know that about JRiver, not sure if memory playback is as important on a PC as WASAPI and/or kernel streaming, as we must avoid the windows audio mixer. I do think JRiver would be an excellent product, but just not for me. I have owned an iPod for 8 years, use it extensively at work, and using JRiver for home audio while maintaining iTunes for iPod support was too much for me. Much simpler to just get Jplay so iTunes can utilize kernel streaming. I suppose it's possible for JRiver and iTunes to use the same library of lossless music, but did not investigate this option as it would needlessly complicate my life. I already have enough tech-based stress.