Though I haven''t contributed in this conversation yet, I had the good luck to stumble upon it just as I was wondering the same question myself, and I want to thank you all for giving the info!

I wouoldn''t reccommend directSound for something simple like a mp3 player.. it''s not very easy to get going well, and managing it is a lot lower level than the likes of fmod or bass. As for openAL, even thought it''s now run by creative, it doesn''t actually work on my sb live, so I won''t comment on it.
For vorbis you can use the static vorbis decoding libraries, but these are a real pain to use if you arn''t loading directly from a file.. And you still need to do something with the loaded raw data..
I looked into mp3 a while ago but ended up going for vorbis..

for a mp3/wav/ogg converter, I use dbPowerAmp converter. has a nice right-click-> convert feature. And has a P4 vorbis encoder. which seems to produce much better results than others I''ve tried. Free also which is nice.

If your program is going to need to show a VIS, then you may just need to have the raw data of the mp3 decoded.. in which case you might need to use the likes of directSound and an mp3 decoding library or *shudder* code... I''ve seen examples that do mp3 decoding and it''s not pretty.

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I had a similar project a while back and found FMod really easy to use. I had it playing a song within 15 minutes of downloading the library. And about 15 minutes later, I had the music affecting the visuals.