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Comment by nyanpasu64 | Hacker News Reader

I no longer recommend VLC for music playback. They resample audio (change its playback rate and pitch away from nominal hardware rate / audio file rate) for some reason, and this algorithm breaks down especially when you seek, causing files to randomly be pitched up and down by nearly a semitone at worst. The bug has been reported for many years now, I recently found the exact circumstances, reproduction instructions, and a workaround (disable audio resampling), but not a fix: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287. Note that disabling audio resampling may impair AV sync.

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What about Foobar2000 and Deadbeef

Foobar2000 isn’t open source, so that probably disqualifies it for many VLC users. It also has UI weirdness like VLC, but differently weird. I guess that’s less of an issue than it could be, but the Android version of foobar2000 doesn’t have an obvious Play All/Shuffle All button when in shuffle mode, among other quirky situations that other players handle better.

Haven’t tried DeaDBeeF to my knowledge, but it seems vaguely familiar, so maybe I did way back in the day.

I haven’t really used local music much since I started streaming music. I never would have guessed that shift would occur. I’m finding the value in local media lately, though. I know that remote streaming assets can disappear anytime, and now plan for that eventuality. Building a local media library feels sustainable and fun again, and discovery has a companion goal of collecting.

foobar2000 works on Windows and runs fairly well on Wine, and has a lot of game music emulation plugins (which I use heavily unlike most people). Audacious runs on Linux, and has some game music emulation plugins (not as rich and configurable as foobar2000 though). I haven't noticed audible pitch shifts yet, but don't know for sure whether they ever resample, drift, or drift audibly. Another option is mpv and the various UIs, which support video as well as audio.

I use Clementine (or its more recent fork, Strawberry) as my FOSS music player on Windows. It's also available for GNU/Linux, but I just use mpd + vimpc on my Linux machine.

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