Personally, I've been pretty happy with XAudio. It's a multi-platform, asynchronous, proprietary (free for personal use), mp3 playing library. There is, of course, a C library (SDK) and someone has already written MPEG::MP3Play to interface with it. Alternatively, you can just download the xaudio player and use the 'rxaudio' binary to control a player via an IPC connection.

I've found it to be very stable (the library and the perl module), it keeps playing in many instances where mpg123 would die in buffer handling, and it offers a fairly clean and tidy interface to the player as well as a decent amount of state information while it's playing.