Foobar2000
foobar2000.org
foobar2000.org
So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.
Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS.
Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!"
Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.
I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.
One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)
Reddit has, for good or bad, always attracted a "help all newbies" mentality too.
edit - it's not as fun as I remember it used to be
IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).
(Dammit, this all was really long ago.)
/mu/ collaboratively produces albums all the time. I was present for and might have contributed to this one: https://millennialdreamcorp.bandcamp.com/album/drake-josh-jo...
Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.
Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.
edit: ok I did confuse them, see reply
It might be a little late now, but in the early days, they seemed more than happy to have former What.CD users (provided they were in good standing) on board. There was an interview, but it wasn't a big deal.
Some of What's Vanity house stars are now real stars with tours around the world, like "The Flashbulb"
It put things into perspective for many.
red, ops, slsk
The powers that be truly did destroy something great, if there's a tracker that's anything like it I'd happily rent a seedbox again.
Even now most music streaming services will only give you a single crummy option of the album version to listen to, usually some stupid remaster, AM sometimes gives lets you listen to the original but it's far from perfect.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/
But as we have so much storage space and bandwidth the interest of newer, better audio codec wind down. 20 years later we still dont have anything that gives CD / 128kbps MP3 quality at half the bitrate. Instead we all went with 256Kbps AAC, and may be soon lossless. I wish MPC ( Musepack ) has taken off though, I still think it sounds better than AAC.
The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties.
Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.
No? Opus 1.3 96k is slightly worse than mp3 192k CBR. Previous listening tests just always compared 96k opus+AAC to mp3 128k because mp3 is just that bad (and mp3 would still lose).
The last group listening test was in 2014. Which was touched on in this thread [1]. And in general I believe and agree with IgorC. Opus has gotten better, but the last test results still remains largely the same.
On the subject of looking this up my HA account is over 20 years old. Oh My.
I remember ripping a few things in Musepack a very long time ago.
Now I use ALAC for lossless (it supports 24-bit 192khz now!) and AAC for lossy, because they are standardised, use the MP4 container, and seem to be the most widely supported.
https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.
They can pry my music from my cold dead hands.
Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.
But what you describe takes work and Spotify radio and similar features from their competitors don't.
As someone who also built up a big library during the golden ages of music piracy, the primary benefit of the Spotify-like services is not their libraries. It is that they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy.
Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?
And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new album and or band by discovering it on your own whims, you are more motivated to share it and discuss it with people as opposed to just appreciating it as an individual.
Sure, there's a time and a place where you do just want to kick on a vibe and do something else (especially at work) and for that AM Stations or Spotify Radio is adequate, however, it is a gilded cage.
You have to understand that this reads like gatekeeping nonsense to a lot of people.
It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.
I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.
Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for.
(N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)
I was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.
I ended up open sourcing it and it still lives on 19 year later, about three forks deep and a lot more stable and functional. The power of open source!
Some of the most fun I ever had was trying to make the utterly ridiculous mIRC script programming language do things it was not meant to do. Pretty sure I recall someone I know writing a primitive web server with it IIRC
The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the "captcha" (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad -- think "jh412ec@[12.34.56.78]" -- that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC.
The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs.
It then read the body of the email and "clicked" every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials... and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined.
Being k-lined wasn't an issue though. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute.
Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.
AWESOME memory you describe there.
OMG, fond memories of the day me and my IRC friends in high school somehow figured out that there was a bug in our network's ircd that allowed us to cause the server to segfault simply by setting a strange combination of a large number of modes on a channel.
The ops were pissed but they got less pissed after I submitted a patch, after I went looking in the C source code and figured out it was probably a buffer overrun.... Something like maxing out an undersized buffer by using every zero argument mode possible, duplicating modes and as many one argument modes with long nicknames... like MODE #channel +mmmvv LongNickGuy1asdfasf LongNickGuy2skldjfaklsjd
...and that was my first non toy experience with C!
IRC was a way cooler world than the current internet.
I had my own learning experience when I accidentally deleted all my plugins’ sources and couldn’t recover it. That was an important lesson on the reason for backups and version control. I burned a ton of time on those plugins.
So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums.
I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks...
[edit: screenshot to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4]
iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).
Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix.
It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.
Itunes and MusicBee seem like they would fit your requirements.
Been using them both for what seems like forever. Late 90s for IrfanView and foobar2000 since it came out, I remember switching to it from Winamp back in the day.
Given how many positive comments there are for this tool, I think it's safe to say efficiency is a primary factor when choosing desktop apps. It's hard to replace something that works great, opens instantly and uses practically no resources. I forgot what box I had back then but I'm pretty sure it was a Pentium III 700@933mhz CPU, it was super smooth back then too.
17 years later and it is still my music player of choice. I've gone through maybe 6 different UIs/skins with it, all of them wildly different. My most recent being a sort of "return to form" [0].
I've since also set up a Raspberry Pi with OMV installed to act as my music server, so I can access my library from around the house.
Additionally, I use the 'Fira Code' font for the UI, so you must have that installed if you want your foobar to look the same. That font is freely available here: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software/vendor lock-in.
I like Foobar for some utility tasks, but I recently had to twist into a pretzel just to add a playback speed feature that at this point should be both standard and upfront in the UI, so I don't think Foobar is thaaat great.
Foobar2000 was the breath of fresh air opposite of "software/vendor lock-in" and a model that software today still often fails to live up to.
But, my music library is long gone (or on some deprecated google offering). I moved to Spotify 10+ years ago and haven’t really looked back. I use it for multiple hours a day and don’t really have any complaints.
even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i'd love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.
I remember using FooBar simply because my system had so little RAM, iTunes was off the table.
I remember 12 years ago trying to get 30 or so FLAC albums into Foobar on a windows laptop I was taking with me on holiday. In order to display them as one collection the only obvious way to do this was to create individual playlists of each album and I think group them. When I shut my machine down I had the habit of using Ctrl+w to close everything but Foobar took this instruction as close and delete the playlist. When I revisited the app my library was empty. Back then I did not have the patience to rice Foobar up or explore the display configurations so that's where I gave up on Flac playback on a temp win machine.
For OSX I was a big fan of the original incarnation of Vox and bought a Swinsian license which is still my primary music player. I hope with the cli app resurgence we get something that improves on Cmus as I have a lot of 24/96 Flac that isn't supported and would love to have something run near seamless in Linux.
Props to all those sticking with winamp or playing .mod files
Foobar2000 is still what I use to listen to my FLAC collection while on my desktop computers.
It's ability to let you do everything, rename, transcode, copy, tag, replaygain, etc is a throwback to when software respected your personal agency.
I don’t actually miss curating a collection of mp3s.
On my personal laptop (PCLinuxOS), Quodlibet is working fine.
Both audio players are pretty bare bones until you start to customize them with their add-ons.
Their speed, small size, and customization with drop-in (like, literally drop a plugin into a folder) plugins has been a standard I try to meet with my own projects.
I remember the thing I really liked about it was all the custom skins it had.
Wow, I thought FUBAR was an acronym invented specifically to be polite and not use the f-word explicitly.
SNAFU situation normal all fouled up
FUBAR fouled up beyond all repair
leading to the temp variable names "foo", "bar", and "baz"
I've tried the suggested steps in the Foobar2000 FAQ on this (enable an always play feature) but playback still stops for me.
Gonna install wine and foobar again sometime in the coming days anyways. this one won't even let me edit the date field as YYYYMMDD, apparently it's an invalid format, and I use it for sorting..
In any case, I just use Spotify these days. Much easier than having a music collection.
Concerning having a library, I still need one because I buy a lot of sound tracks with my Steam games. Spotify does not have, as an example, the awesome British Sea Power OST for Disco Elysium. (It can be found on bandcamp though: https://britishseapower.bandcamp.com/album/disco-elysium)
I have not seen any replacements for Total Commander and it doesn't work well enough under Wine so I keep a Windows VM around to use Total Commander over SMB.
Now that I had to comment about both foobar and TC, I realize that probably why I was so found of them both was their large plugin ecosystem that allowed less mainstream usages for them.
I am telling you as someone who uses both constantly - the reason I do so is because DC is great but it still have one bug with network path freezing that is very annoying to me so I still use TC for that reason. Some TC plugins don't work fully in DC. That is all that is wrong. Plugin problem is rare and its not that big, but network glitch is bad. The moment it goes away TC goes away from my life too.
DC is getting momentum and the more people that support it, the better it will be.
- DC: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/dcc-unlit
- TC: https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/tcc-unlit
You also have there bunch of plugins for both:
- https://community.chocolatey.org/packages?q=tag%3Atcplugin
I use both foobar2k and deadbeef depending on which OS I'm booted at.
deadbeef is most blatantly missing a library; It has the playlists, but no library.
I switched to FooBar2000 shortly after it was started. IIRC it was mentioned in a /. thread and I enjoyed it right away. At this stage the available extensions were almost non-existent but the framework for depth & breath was there and looked promising.
It was also one of my favorite interactions with contact directly with the programmer. At the time, there was some conflict in the forums with the developer about the distinction between "shuffle", and "random". Whenever you played songs from your playlist with 'Random' selected the same songs would play in the same order. I'd have a playlist containing over 100 songs and (for example) it would always play: 13, 72, 55, 31, 85, etc... until eventually restarted that order (without playing all songs in the playlist).
The developer insisted the play order was random and he wouldn't fix it. He claimed that people were looking for a 'shuffle' feature and they refused to create one.
The interaction always reminded me of this strip: https://xkcd.com/221/
With Linux you can setup a streaming server and stream your music across different devices.
You can automatically download covers and lyrics for each song and automatically organize and index your collection for search.
I did this in like 2008 already, on windows.
I like cli software, and should be drawn to beets, but yet...
but yet, i still paid 20 for mp3tag and i would do it again
Also back then they had this concept of an "Inbox" for new albums, which was a special playlist of newly scanned music that you then could "move" to your library. It was good for vetting new albums before the era of streaming/YouTube.
Then I just ended up with lots of musical clutter in my library.
For this kind of library I found Audacious (minimalistic, supports Winamp skins) and QMPlay 2 to be good. The latter supports and remembers your folder tree, has a very cool widget system and can be also used for videos (music or otherwise).
At least for some artists, there's a huge number of show recordings out there. The guy who maintains the (unofficial, although known and tolerated by the artist) live archive for Nine Inch Nails is up to >1,000 recordings, for example.
I also use album artist a lot, though that's probably supported.
Linux, Mac -> cmus
Some may handle sample rate conversion better than others.
Foobar's FAQ says as much: https://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ
Not sure about linux, but on windows, macos, android difference is huge if you have some good DAC & headphones
I use it for like 15 years now. No other player is that versatile.
Client/Server, very stable, small resource footprint.
Recently I used mpd to play audiobooks and live radio streams on my headless server. MPD uses icecast to make the stream available in my local network so I can use chromecast and/or google assistants to listen to the streams. Its more or less running transparent in the background and iam very glad I found this solution.
What is the latency like? I tried something like this but there was so much lag between a remote control input and player state changes that it was unbearable.
That all basically ended -- instead of being an active process and participating in vibrant communities my music listening changed to just that, listening. The eventual switch to Spotify was much less dramatic for me. Sure it was replaced with something else to tinker on, but some of my fondest computing memories are thanks to foobar2000.
Who is dreaming now?