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Comment by kileywm | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for a new audio player on Windows, you may want to try out foobar2000. I've been using it for several years and have really enjoyed it.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

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The foobar2000 library is a great example of why I and others still use Winamp. I haven't seen a single "modern" player whose library layout is anywhere near as useful as Winamp's.

I didn't use Winamps library feature much, at least I can't remember anything notable about it. What's special about it?

I like it because it has clear separation from the Playlist. Something that most other players seem to lack. You start playing one song they go on playing everything else in your library. Other than that it had a nicely customizable display and as a sibling commenter said it had built-in tag editing.

It was one of the main reasons I liked it. It was just really well laid out, and could do ID3 tag updates before it was a common feature.

foobar's layout is entirely customizable if you use the columns UI plugin[0] which I think should just be included in the default distribution. Everybody I've ever known who's stuck with foobar uses it. The plugin ecosystem is decent for foobar; I suggest checking them out and seeing what you might use. They have plugins for caching, transcoding, tagging, the works. In the past they tried to raise money to port to Android and iOS, but I wish they would raise money to port to OSX and Linux.

[0]: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_ui_columns

Without foobar2000 I would probably have switched to Linux quite a bit earlier. Linux had nothing even close, and I did try quite a few -- Amarok, Songbird, gmusicbrowser, can't even remember any more.

I've found my peace with Clementine, but sometimes I still miss foobar's superb collection management, vibrant community, and endless avenues for customisation.

Foobar runs great for me in Wine on OS X and Linux.

I still use foobar but stopped updating it. The developers went out of their way to discourage plugin development.

I really love foobar's minimal approach, but I've had serious crash problems that lose my playlists rather frequently (and it doesn't automatically save them).

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