I'm more so for completely free options than Bass myself. Bass is great for freeware games, which any beginner would be doing, however as development gets more serious and beginners become novices, this choice in mp3 playback may scare away potential continuing usage of the game library once all the basics have been learned.

Even as beginners, us independent developers let our heads get big at the start. We all want to be able to release the next big thing and small things like shareware license fees can seem like large limitations so we will seek out newer alternatives. That's kind of what it was like in the days of DelphiX before 3D hardware acceleration was put in. Other game libraries were first spawned because of this missing feature.