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Comment by cbozeman | Hacker News Reader

I had used Winamp since its original release, but when development on it seemed to die off and it looked like it was becoming abandonware, I switched to MusicBee, which I thoroughly love.

Maybe there's better software out there, but I've yet to find it.

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I personally love foobar2000. Tons of customization, lots of plugins and honestly it's just amazing imho. edit: http://foobar2000.com/

Foobar2000 is also in the microsoft store which avoids a load of 'find the right download button that isnt an ad pretending to be a download button' nonsense

https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9PDJ8X9SPF2K

Eh? I don't think there are any issue with finding download section on foobar homepage and installer link.

You're probably right but in general it's a problem with downloading windows software

  choco install -y foobar2000

Are people actually using chocolately?

I never could get over the way they get you to install it with the equivalent of piping curl into. Or the way it kept advertising the paid version, which is really disconcerting when something has become effectively the only way to manage what software you have installed (or will be eventually).

If the limitations of the free version and/or the pestering bugs you, consider looking into Scoop.

I use both. They complement each other (Scoop has a smaller repo). Topgrade runs both (and Windows Update) in one command.

I do.

But to your second point, I don't think of chocolatey as a package manager to rely on. I just see it as an alternative download location, and uninstall the software through the Control Panel later.

It just seems like a big red bullseye, hack it and have your spyware spread to a lot of computers

they haven’t had a package injected with malware is impressive

If its good enough for Wendell Wilson (Level1Techs), its good enough for me.

https://chocolatey.org/packages mentions download numbers for each package, which seem to indicate people do use it.

We use it via the ChocolateyGet PS provider. I.e. installing most software (but not all) is now just 'Find-Package foobar' and 'Install-Package winamp' etc.

I've been using it for years, it drastically reduces the pain of setting up Windows machines and it has at least 90% of the software I want. I would recommend it to any technically competent user.

Only if you don’t have adblock

I think having a MS account connected to your OS is also a problem.

http://www.foobar2000.org/ however is a pretty straight forward site.

Also to add, a new feature in Edge is copying Chrome style browser sign in. If you sign into the store, it gets added to your OS level accounts. Then Edge sees that and signs you into the browser. Google got enough shit for signing into Google in Chrome signing your Chrome installation into your google account.

Also if you're not paying enough attention, the default signing into the Windows Store is to turn your local Windows login into a Microsoft Account login.

Personally, I hate this attitude. Using a big corps walled garden just for a tiny bit of convenience. With just a tiny amount of effort you can find reputable places to download software. But most people have your attitude and now pc's have become like consoles, where a big corp monitors all your activity and decides what you can and cant do with your machine, and the idea of the pc as a personal universal computing machine is dying.

Reminds me of the Benjamin Franklins qoute

"Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."

Just replace security with convenience. Also, yeah thats super melodramatic, but it is qualitatively the same imo.

If you don’t want Microsoft knowing what you do use Linux. If you’re in Windows the store is the way to go for installing software.

It doesn't even provide any convenience, because it's more difficult to figure out the correct url https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9PDJ8X9SPF2K than to find a download button.

I'm not sure I feel any safer downloading from the microsoft store given some of the items that show up in search results. I don't think it's reasonable to assume something is trustworthy just because it's in the Microsoft Store.

I have very fond memories of foobar2000. Mostly I just loved how fast it was to use!

Does anyone know of an equivalent for the Mac?

Deadbeef maybe? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeaDBeeF

While Deadbeef is a great player in general, it doesn't buffer the data when playing from a network drive, which causes a playback interruption every time there's a connection problem, even for a split second.

For this reason I've been resorting to using mpv as an audio player, even though it's interface is not really designed with music playback in mind.

QuodLibet is an excellent minimal yet customizable music player. It is a GTK app but the Mac version looks and works great.

I'm with you there. I switched to foobar2000 back in the early 2000's after getting royally fed up with WinAmp becoming crashy and to be honest I just hated the UI (I never found a skin I liked). I still use it today as my main music player, it deserves more attention.

Does foobar allow you to just start playing music without adding it to a playlist yet? I remember trying to switch off of Winamp years ago and was shocked that I needed to add files to a playlist before they'd even play. With Winamp you just search for the song, play it, and the whole album is added to a temporary unsaved playlist that automatically changes depending on what album is being played.

Foobar just makes the hidden playlists of other players all explicit. That doesn't preclude what you're asking for. The best way to do what you're talking about is probably with the Facets component or the search functionality of the columns_ui interface. You can do it with the default library search but it will switch out the playlist that's playing as soon as you search for something else.

There's an option in fb2k to send opened files to a named playlist (e.g. 'New'), in which case it doesn't disrupt any other playlists you have open and just plays the file like Winamp.

I've ditched Winamp during moving to Vista and I'm using foobar ever since; I think the reading archive files feature is most interesting

One thing I can't do with foobar2000 (I've installed the version from Microsoft store) is keep it playing while my Windows 10 tablet screen is off.

There's a "Edit -> Preferences -> Playback -> Prevent screensaver & monitor standby option when playing" option which I have enabled, but playback still pauses when I turn off the screen.

I have read that I have to adjust my Win 10 power saving options but I was wondering that surely there's a better way. Microsoft's Groove player can play with the screen off without adjusting my current power options.

Also, I highly recommend Foobar2000 Mobile. I use it on Android as my primary player.

I though more people would have this problem, but most players actually didn't support it.

What I wanted to do is mirror the stereo signal playing from the front speakers to the back speakers. Simple really, but Foobar2000 was the only player that could do that out of the box.

I wholeheartedly recommend AIMP (http://www.aimp.ru). I've used this player for the last 8 years and it only gets better.

FYI - https://www.myaimp.com

Wow, I really love that clean look. Thank you for sharing this.

+1 for AIMP, been using it forever and it's rock solid. A great alternative to Winamp.

Not too excited by Ru made software, but perhaps that is just me being excessively worried.

If you're worried, you should probably upgrade your suspicion of all software, not just Russian-made software. The fact that it's made in Russia should not matter much: You should audit the code, compartment it from the rest of your system (e.g. with virtualization), or not run the software.

You're right to be worried about what software you run, but Russia is not necessarily the most relevant threat actor. Take this as an opportunity to develop your threat model and apply mitigations where sensible.

How do you audit the code of aimp and foobar? You can't. Use free software instead, like mpc.

Yeah, right. Russian developers have no time fixing bugs as they need to write the reports for their detailed FSB curator on how many backdoors they coded in this day.

On a serious note, there's thousands of ex-USSR coders involved in many important software projects. Does it really worry you? It does worry me as long as the software is not Free or at least Open Source, but then it doesn't really matter where the coders came from.

Anyone remember Songbird?

Sure, https://www.my-old-version.com/songbird/

I remember it! Oh My God! This was 15 years ago...

The Hype Machine is still up, it was one of the bookmarks/start pages in it IIRC: https://hypem.com/

I'm surprised anyone still does. Unfortunately that was deeply tied into the Mozilla stack, and they didn't want to be a platform vendor, so just running an old version isn't really tenable.

(To bring things back on topic, I believe a couple of people involved in Songbird was previously related to Winamp.)

Yes. It was a pig for resources and altogether miserable to use.

Yes, I was working in Silicon Valley for a company that was also using Mozilla technologies.

I remember the XULRunner meetups with them, in Mozilla HQ where the Moz people were basically saying:

- OK, our product is Firefox. We focus on fixing bugs that affect Firefox, so if the bug in XULRunner doesn't affect it you're on your own. Feel free to send a patch.

- Yeah we did that, the patch have been sitting in Bugzilla for 2 years

- ... shrug

Anyway even with full support of Mozilla they probably wouldn't have survived to iTunes+iPod, but clearly using a technology that the vendor has no interest in didn't help them.

foobar2000 is my go to when I'd like to use something that supports Windows 10 properly.

https://www.foobar2000.org/

Happy to see Winamp isn't completely done, been using it since 1999

VLC in playlist mode has been working great for me. To enable it, just go to View > Playlist.

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