Comment by grinchygrinch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grinchygrinch | Hacker News Reader

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I sigh every time someone says deadbeef is great alternative to foobar2000. The greatest thing about foobar2000 is media library which deadbeef doesn't even have. Actually, no other player on the planet can compete with foobar's media library. I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it and I can access it in foobar. Sometimes, I listen to a random track and decide I want to hear everything from this artist that I have in library. I press 'a' on a selected track and I see everything from this artist. I press 'A' on a track and I get everything from this album. I press 'q', type few letters in search bar, press enter and I get new playlist with the results. I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it. Quite useful if I want to move it somewhere else or copy it or rename or whatever. These are all my custom shortcuts but I love the fact that you can assign shortcut to virtually anything. There's also tag editor and format converter. There's also really cool feature that you can queue any file you double click in file explorer in its own playlist (I call this playlist Inbox), so that the playlist I'm currently listening is unmodified.

Closest thing I found on Linux is ncmpcpp and it's still a far cry from everything I can do in foobar2000.

Let me introduce you to Tauon Music Box https://tauonmusicbox.rocks/

It's Linux only and it's amazing. It does not automatically re-scan the folder for music but it's instant, may be in future it can do that.

I'm yet to find a music player that is so simple, uncluttered and powerful.

This thread for me exemplifies the glory and frustration of the Linux application ecosystem: numerous recommendations for obscure apps that fulfill a basic function. No obvious answer. I use a different solution from all of them, and it's fine, but who knows which ones will be supported a year or two from now. It's great that there are many viable options, and depressing that they are so fragmented and hard to discover.

Closest thing to foobar2000 is Clementine, an Amarok 1 fork...

The media library features are almost as good, if not for a nasty bug where using the filter in the library "tree view" can lock the app for many seconds for no reason. The normal search window/panel is not affected and is always instantaneous tough.

I've tested dozens of media players on linux, most choke on my huge library, but clementine is perfectly capable. It also has the same feature of adding new files automatically via inotify, along every other functionality you specified in your post!

It also seems to be lacking maintainers.. it has been on the same run of rc releases for years now! That means that bugs have creeped up unfortunately, but honestly, nothing better for people who really cares for their oversized music library.

There's https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/, a fork of Clementine, apparently created due to Clementine's inactivity. I've used it on and off on MacOS, but had some nasty locks which crashed the application.

But speaking of Clementine: I'm amazed that development seems to have picked up again, commits are happening on Github ( https://github.com/clementine-player/Clementine) Last time I checked the repo it was silent.

jup. unfortunately, strawberry has some gtk6 issues after they upgraded. with gtk6 dark skins seem to be broken.

Strawberry Qt6 looks fine here. Anything particular?

Yeah, i used qt6ct to setup a dark theme. Only, parts of colors are applied on my arch system. The funny thing is it looks good, while qt6ct is open. when i close qt6ct, it reverts to a mix of colors from the theme and the default colors.

Actually, the closest thing in media library regard is Quodlibet, and its under active development.

I would agree with that, and indeed I used it for many years, were it not for it's performance. It's just atrocious under a big library. I would constantly get assaulted with what I could only assume were garbage collection pauses, the interface would constantly freeze in the most inopportune times.

It also had a pretty silly bug that went unfixed the entire time I used it where it would (rarely, triggered while moving around the playlist) say it's playing song X but in reality it's playing song Y.

What kind of storage was that library on? We have users with 100, 150k files who are largely happy.

If you can replicate this on a new release (4.4.0 was out recently), please file a bug! [1]

[1] https://github.com/quodlibet/quodlibet/issues

MusicBee whips it, and all the other Amazon 1.4 forks. I was a massive Amarok 1.4 fan, and I think MusicBee is the dog's bollocks. On Linux, you need to install via wine though. But it's rock solid. You need to go for the 3.0 release though - after that, drag ordering of files doesn't work in Wine. There isn't a compelling reason to use the latest version anyway.

> I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/obtain... ; the Linux equivalent is "inotify".

> I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13680415/how-to-open-exp...

On Linux, you'd have to do some kind of GNOME integration I am not familiar with. The Windows shell integration is a very handy API, although you have to do the usual digging for explanations and examples.

i always just used foobar in wine. I wonder if its so quick when doing so.

It is absolutely bonkers how well foobar works under Wine.

I too have a large library and foobar just picks it up immediately.

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