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Foobar2000

foobar2000.org

It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :)

It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing.

It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.

re: Quod Libet; thank you, these kinds of recommendations are invaluable for finding good tools. Especially these days with all the noise.

Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful. Nevertheless I just switched to foobar2000 on Windows and DeaDBeeF on Linux because their UIs just are perfectly bullshit-free practical pragmatic tools and I came to feel I want a tool rather than a show.

WinAmp 3 was bloated, slow, and unstable. It was bad enough that they threw out the code and released WinAmp 5 which was based on the code from WinAmp 2.

Yep, Wasabi, the XML driven UI toolkit was just too slow for PC's of the time.

People got used to a fairly simple and efficient UI. Version 3 was a bit of an abrupt change. A bit like today when your favourite social network completely revamps its UI for no apparent reason and makes it look fancier without adding any interesting functionality (and usually removes a couple).

It's hard to come back from that.

>Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful

variety of reasons.

mine: it broke a huge amount of visualizers/dsps/skins.

I guess you might wonder the same thing if installing Windows Vista on a recentish computer.

Winamp 3 with its default "Modern" skin was very sluggish, even on decently specced computers in 2003. If you replaced the default with a Winamp classic skin, it immediately sped up, but defaults are powerful, so most users probably left it as is.

> the same UI

Haha, it's not the same even for any specific version. With plugins and ability to move panels around, it's hard to say all these UIs are the same player. Search for "foobar2000 theme" in google images

A remnant of simpler times. Foobar and VLC, any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?

VLC is getting a a major UI overhaul, it's pretty much finished actually and should be released soon.

> A remnant of simpler times.

I think it has more to do with the authors and their principles, and less with the times. There are plenty of counterexamples from that era: all major browsers, the Sonique audio player (which I loved for the UI novelty), Winamp itself, etc.

> any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?

mpv is in that league for me, and it's much more recent. Then, of course, there are very stable CLI and power user software that has existed for decades: Vim, Emacs, BSD and Linux coreutils, etc. Some of these are not necessarily simple under the hood, but I use them because they do one thing well (or in the case of Vim/Emacs as much as I want them to do :)), and I know that they're not going to disappear or drastically change as so many software does.

Total Commander

"simpler" is not how I remember foobar2000. I used to use it (±15 years ago) because of its extreme configurability (e.g. in terms of layout). Configuring foobar2000 felt kind of like building your own music player. YMMV

Simple to use, with a smart editable layout configuration for those that chose to go down that rabbit hole.

I'm still using it to this day, with little more than an album tree, a playlist window, and an album art thumbnail that optionally all fold away.

I've been down the configuration | plugin trail, good fun for those of us that enjoy that kind of thing but it is | was simple and clean from a fresh install.

I started using it again recently and was struck by just how much config I had to do to get it back as I remembered it. It is both annoying and amazing

I remember installing some VERY pretty but very complicated setups from deviantart, and then having to fix the inevitable bugs in the panel layout scripts, every one of which was just one right-click away which was extremely cool.

IIRC, they were in a sort of PHP-looking scripting language? I had very little coding experience before then, so it was kind of a trip trying to debug why the lyrics panel would freak out under certain scenarios :D

mIRC

IrfanView. I tried replacing it several times with something slicker-looking, but no other picture viewer is as fast as IrfanView.

Anyone knows what they do different to achieve such speed?

I thought "I doubt it is faster than FastStone" but when I went looking for benchmarks all I could find was this forum post from 2011.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25334.0

Which does confirm that Faststone is faster but much water has passed under the bridge since 2011.

That's an interesting benchmark, but I am more interested in a cold start test on a much smaller file (think 2MP, not 1200MP), because that's my usual use case.

I agree. That is another problem with the benchmark- it gives the gold medal to ACDsee, which in my experience has the longest cold start of the three.

The batch editing is also handy

I was a fan of AcdSee, currently using DirectoryOpus, never got close yo the feel as in tbose days... so I get it...

Media Player Classic The current actively maintained incarnation I use is https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc

Irfanview is another “goes on every desktop install”. I even use it on Linux via wine.

I use Audacious on Ubuntu as I can almost get the same UI configuration as foobar2000, tabs of playlists which can be made on the fly or from saved files. A music player app is something I always use on the background, so all the fancy visualizations or album art are not so useful for me. It's also sad that the default music player on Ubuntu (Mate) doesn't have a volume control out of the box.

Foobar2000 was always better than WinAmp. WinAmp was the best example of why standard UI affordances evolved.

Disagree. Winamp skins are the highlight of a better era of computer interfaces.

Some people don't enjoy meandering through a puzzle game of arbitrary, standards-ignoring UI instead of getting stuff done.

No, Winamp was the last example of broadly used "appliance" software that wasn't inextricably tied into a megacorp's business model. iTunes and Windows Media Player were both bloated because of the e-store baked into the back end.

There was no store in iTunes when it was released in 2001, and those of us using SoundJam MP knew there would be no further updates so we started using it and enjoyed its bulk metadata editing and album art embedding capabilities, with an interface that was intuitive for managing playlists and music. And scriptable!

It wasn’t until two years later that the store was integrated as part of an update.

Although there was an (Carbon?) OS X version for a while, Winamp was Windows-only from what I knew, so my opinion of it was always coloured by having to use Windows to interact with it, although I used CrossOver on Mac and Mint as well.

EphPod was 100% free and didn't bury its functionality in an Advent-calendar UI. It was simple, clean, and did something that iTunes/Music doesn't to this day: automatically sync new files you added to your music directory, with no need to "add to library" every time you acquired them.

iTunes, when tied to a "megacorp's business model," still suffered from piss-poor UI. Take, for example, the "LCD" display at the top of the UI that was even depicted as having a transparent cover over it... yet had undemarcated clickable controls in it (which you were likely to never discover).

So I don't see the relationship between good or bad UI and business models in this case.

It also just has superior functionality.

Want to mirror your front channels to your back channels? Easily done in foobar2k, while many other media players already fail here, even those whose main task is to do audio output.

> It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago.

Easy to do when you don't have bosses breathing down your neck about adding in podcasts and audiobooks, then nudging users into engaging with that stuff first so that they don't have to pay as much to the music rights holders.

There is certainly something intangibly attractive on this era and style of software. On top of my head I'm thinking fb2k, mpc (and its forks), virtualdub, utorrent (the original 1.x series), irfanview, kerio firewall (classic 2.x series), putty, even maybe mirc and notepad++ to some degree. Small programs, classic Windows style controls, emphasis on staying out of your way, somewhat minimalistic and barebones but still remarkably powerful and capable. These to me represent the golden age of Windows.

Of all these programs (and there were many), fb2k is the one that I still use on regular basis while almost all the others have faded away.

I feel like (with no research) these interfaces were designed by programmers first and foremost and have a tight coupling to the actual underlying code.

A "well designed" interface with "good" UI/UX from a proper designer may have best practices, but additional layers of abstraction from the functionality which makes everything feel less direct.

I think (with no research) that people were more respectful of HCI guides. And even skeuomorphic is hard to do well, it’s more grounded in terms of UX. Buttons were actually buttons and icons were more understandable. Now, design is an abstract art challenge.

Seeing this from the outside, I can't shake the idea that Microsoft's complete fumbling of offerings for UI development is to blame. There are so many new paradigms in user interface on Windows that led nowhere, are completely inadequate for modern development, and yet are still supported by Microsoft. The company has lost the plot, and we're left with Microsoft even devolving into web apps for the desktop, with the success story of VS Code leading the charge.

If Microsoft could find one good path forward for UI development on Windows, we'd want those small boutique apps to get with the times.

Wow, that brings back memories! foobar2000 was my go to player. I used to spend hours curating all my folders with albums and playlists. Funny how fast I switched to a streaming platform when they became widely available around here.

> foobar2000 was my go to player

It is still my go to player, it works great in Windows 10.

It's my go-to in macOS 14.5 as well. I tolerate using Spotify as a player for it's library. A plain list is all I actually want 99% of the time.

I haven't consumed audio and video from files for a while now. Streaming has become so convenient (partly because of internet prices and availability) that I don't see myself coming back.

There are times when songs from streaming platforms go away or I get somehow reminded of one very old song from some unknown band that's still somewhere on my hard disk, that I think about going back. I love to have all my songs in one single playlist and then just have them on random. I remember having that from my saved files and then some of those very rare songs come up every now and then. It feels somewhat magical. There are a handful of songs that barely any people know, but they trigger some very nice memories.

I think soon (tm) I'll go back. Yes, streaming is convenient, but the algorithm is just unable to recommend me such rare treasures

Hey, I'm a "one giant playlist on shuffle" person too! :D

I hear this a lot. I find it always leaves me bemused.

The main time I want music is at times when I can't stream: for instance, when travelling, especially when on planes.

I specifically want my own music for when I don't have internet. When I do have internet, I mostly listen to digital radio.

I have no streaming accounts with anyone, except free accounts. I do not have any payment method set up on my Apple account, and I never have in the ~28 years I had the account. I don't pay for wifi or other additional connectivity, either.

I keep a local library of MP3s on my phones, and videos on my set-top computer. I use Foobar for music on my phone, and VLC for video on my STB.

It's a bit odd to me that what was hi-tech is now almost Luddite in its refusal of novelty.

I really don't see how paying subscriptions for access to stuff that I don't own is any kind of improvement.

It can be great for checking out stuff, like a membership to some club or a library. As soon as I find something I like, I need it to be locally so I can listen without tracking and possible interference by third-parties. And browsing a curated collection is calmer than searching in those apps.

Sure, but a free Spotify or Youtube account lets me do that no problem. No need to pay for anything, no need for Apple Music or whatever.

How do you even buy music these days?

How do you even buy music these days? I know of Bandcamp but its kind of limited in the selection.

Well, anachronistic as it may seem, I buy physical media, and rip them. I know it sounds very 20th century, but it works, you really own the stuff in an irrevocable sort of way, and second-hand CDs and DVDs are really cheap these days. I fill about 75% of a 128GB SD card with MP3s.

I like paper books, too. I have many thousands of them.

And it has iOS/Android versions too, which is great if you still prefer file-based players: https://www.foobar2000.org/mobile

I can recommend Blackplayer to fill that niche in a more modern (yet still simplistic) way. I don't see it mentioned much but it is regularly updated and extremely feature-dense.

Streaming is convenient but their interface is not the greatest for curation and focus listening. Especially with their “lots of whitespace” design. There’s a reason we have list and tables in managers like itunes, calibre and file explorers. I tried adding my favorite albums to Apple Music and it quickly became untenable. Spotify is also awful for that. I have ~500 albums in my main library and various series and collection and it’s a breeze to manage, browse and listen with MPD, MOC, beets, Kid3 and the file explorer.

One of the great music players out there. Clean, simple UI. Easy to use. Supported far more formats than anything mainstream. Replaygain was a killer feature, and it mostly boggles my mind that it still isn't widespread, (…like non-broken, i.e., dB, volume knobs).

Foobar2000 v2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718802 - April 2023 (2 comments)

Foobar2000 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30054239 - Jan 2022 (215 comments)

Foobar2000 - the ultimate audio player - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305796 - April 2010 (2 comments)

Wow, so 12 years without a post about fb2k on HN. That's a lot of time.

It's kind of strange I have never seen any other player where you can just click on a folder and play music from it. Like two clicks, one on a folder (which loads the list of tracks) and second to start playing this list

of course it's doable in any player but not with such ease

My workflow of playing music for about 20 years was right-clicking on a folder in Windows Explorer and selecting "Play in Winamp" from the context menu.

Before foobar2k there was an outstanding player named Apollo[1] with almost a perfect UI: basically, just a playlist grid. It supported associating with directories, of course, so playback was also two clicks away.

Just checked, it still works great, although, the limited codec support and no scrobbling is a dealbreaker for me. Same reason I had to ditch it years ago.

Would love to peek at the source code of that program. One of the last messages its developer Heikki Ylinen left on his website reads:

  If you want to know what the future of digital music looks like, I recommend giving Spotify a go. And before anyone says anything, I know it has been done before, but this time it looks like it's been done right. And this is just the beginning.

Pretty ironic.

[1] https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/apollo.php

Hardly ironic. It's not a stretch to say they were right, Spotify is pretty synonymous with digital music even for all of its flaws. (Disclaimer, I don't use it myself.)

What's ironic is that the tone of that message is pretty positive, even though it comes from an author of a pretty successful freeware media player for a PC. You'd think they should have known better.

If you liked Apollo then you might like Boom now - https://perkele.cc/software/boom

No scrobbling (that I now of), codecs up to August 2022, and recommended by the maker of Foobar2K as "more minimal, simpler, uncluttered" than F2K.

>I have never seen any other player where you can just click on a folder and play music from it.

VLC. Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player

yes, but this requires alt-tabbing from VLC first, so more than two clicks.

I used to use 1by1 for this. It's a very minimalistic music player (200 KiB) doing exactly this.

I still use 1by1, more than 15 years.

Deadbeef does exactly this. It is more minimalistic / gets more out of your way, so I love it!

On MacOS, I used IINA for that. You drag a folder and it plays it, switching by default to Music Mode if it’s audio files..

I was looking for a player that had this functionality when I switched to Linux. Finally settled on Clementine which has both a library & "file browser" mode.

In the browser mode you can just right click and add the folder to your playlist. Just like in foobar2000.

+1 for Clementine

Consider switching to strawberry, it's a fork of Clementine. Clementine hasn't really been updated in many years (aside from auto translation merges and a typo here and there).

The author on why Foobar2000 is not open source: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,31222.msg270982.html#...

>The SDK is there to allow people to add whatever features they want. If there is something they can't add with what the SDK provides, then either it requires changes breaking component compatibility (which only I could do even if the source was open), or person trying to implement the feature is doing something seriously wrong (happens very often).

"Implementing that feature would break component compatibility" is not a valid reason not to release the source. If someone wants to modify the software to implement a feature they want even if it would break compatibility, that's their business.

>As for porting to different OSes, sourcecode release won't magically spawn people capable of doing that properly. Somehow no one has written fully functional foobar2000 clone yet.

The point of having it open source is that the possibility is there. Right now it's impossible. Someone has to go through the trouble of documenting all the features and then reimplementing them.

>Sourcecode loss argument is not really valid, I keep backups on multiple redundant devices. I'd be surprised if someone who spent as much time on programming as I have wouldn't know well enough how to handle this.

Two words: bus factor.

I see attempts to refute reasons to open source the code, but no reasons not to do it. If the reason is simply "I don't want to", that's perfectly fine, and it's all that needs to be said.

The maintainers of foobar have always been very opinionated, for better or worse.

I recall it pushed away a chunk of the community at least once in the past.

It's just one of those types of projects.

It seems like those types of projects are fairly common in Windows-land, but not at all for other OSes.

I’m not so sure about that. As a GNU/Linux user, I don’t think Windows-land has anyone who can cause as much community division as Lennart Poettering did (does?).

I think people like this strive for control. Their projects are like their little kingdoms where they have the last say. You might say that they can still retain such total control even in an open source project (OSS doesn't necessarily imply "democracy"), but there's still a possibility of a vim/neovim-like split. Bram was also quite opinionated, which led some developers to fork vim. Bram was very clearly quite unhappy about the split in the community, and keeping sources closed will prevent such a scenario.

> Somehow no one has written fully functional foobar2000 clone yet.

Deadbeef [0] may not be "fully functional" because it doesn't support foobar2000 plugins or some such silliness but it is close enough to play the music library I played under Windows with foobar2000.

Sometimes you just have to build over a Zax [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeaDBeeF

[1] https://i.postimg.cc/YS1syndT/image.png

All of the listed reasons are humbug, as someone in that threads points it out. The only real reason is that the author wants it so, and that's why it happens. No particular reason or supporting argument is stronger than this will alone.

By the way, I haven't seen the author in that thread, just other commenters. Here, however, he addresses the open sourcing idea: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,119676.0.html

This was the one piece of software I missed when I made the switch to Linux 15 years ago. Not enough to miss Windows, of course. It worked in Wine but didn't feel quite right. It was sort of the end of me building a curated music collection. It takes time and I just moved on to other things. In all this time I've never found anything as good as foobar2000 was back then and my music collection has languished.

I'm surprised that AIMP hasn't been mentioned yet. It's also a great old school audio player that was released back in 2006. I transitioned to it when Winamp development was fizzling out. Not sure when that was but I've been using it for a long time. With the 'Pandemic' skin it looks like classic Winamp and has support for visualizations and many other features people tended to like from Winamp.

https://www.aimp.ru/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIMP

AIMP is great! I have using it with my Android phone.

One of the things I loved about Winamp was programming my own visualizations - can't remember if this was a plugin or was built into the main app. But it was most satisfying to generate trippy visuals with extreme granular control. I also liked having control over my skin and panel setup.

Also, this is cool for all those über random playlisters: a tool you can use to create a random playlist of X amount of songs from your entire library [edit: and make copies of the random files to a new folder. Useful for making playlists on portable media]. Sorry it was a long time ago and I don't recall what it was called.

I didn't realize Foobar2000 had a Mac release. And here I've been using Apple Music like a fool!

Oh really when did that come out? I remember missing Foobar when I switch to OSX about 15 years ago before switching to Spotify not long after.

foobar2000 is so good, and so unmatched, especially with its plugins ecosystem, I use it for my music playback needs under wine on Linux.

plugins were great. Measured the speakers at my desk (I built them). generated an inverse impulse response filter, and fed it through a plugin to do full frequency equalization. It was a fun project to play with full range speakers that had no passive filter network whatsoever, all done via software.

Meh. Audacious + pulseaudio/alsa-plugins >>>>> foobar 2000.

That for GUI.

If you like CLI, mpd+any UI it's a beast. Mocp if you are a minimalist.

The problem (at least for me) is input format support.

Assorted foobar2000 plugins support every obscure tracker format, every obscure video game music format (.vgz, etc.), and then foo_midi lets you render MIDIs not just with Soundfonts but with whatever VSTi DLLs you like. Also support for music files in ZIP files as well as music files in ZIP files in ZIP files (don't ask). That's hard to compete with.

mocp opens MODs/S3M's and so on. Everything else it's handled by fluid/timidity.

VSTi's? Pipewire now can do that at system level.

>Zip

Here in Unix I can just mount archives and disk images.

> Here in Unix I can just mount archives and disk images.

This is so true! And it's much easier than just having the music player support zip files. Especially for zip-in-zip like GP described. Can you imagine double clicking an archive and have it play, rather than simply do:

    cd Downloads/
    ls
    mkdir tmp
    mount-zip myfile.zip tmp
    ls tmp
    mkdir tmp2
    mount-zip tmp/myinnerfile.zip tmp2
    audacious --new-instance tmp2 --play
    while killall -0 audacious; do
        sleep 1
    done
    umount tmp2
    umount tmp
    rmdir tmp2 tmp

Foobar2000 is parasitic in the sense that many of the plugins that give foobar2000 its value are open-source ports of open-source software, yet the foobar2000 software that hosts the plugins is proprietary.

Feels like when Disney makes a movie version of a public domain folktale and then lobbies to perpetually extend the copyright on it.

Bit of a tangent but it's kind of infuriating to me that I still haven't found anything better than Winamp (or Foobar for that matter) on a modestly powerful Windows machine. Even 20 years ago, I could literally just right-click on an entire folder sitting on my external hard-drive, and it would immediately enqueue all of those files into Winamp.

I even had a bunch of Winamp plugins that could automatically handle my NSFs, SID files, tracker files—any format I threw at it, it could handle them seamlessly.

It used very little CPU, it never crackled, it never popped, and it never crashed. This wasn't even using any low-latency ASIO drivers or anything fancy.

Fast forward decades later and I'm sitting on my Mac M1 desperately trying to find anything that even comes CLOSE to this.

The closest thing I found is Cog, but it takes minutes to queue up larger folders. It's ridiculous, and of course I'm one of the lucky individuals who ended up with a Mac with core audio issues where if I'm using more than 35% to 40% of my CPU, the audio pops once every minute/minutes despite clearing out the plist files and trying every other trick, it seems like the basic core audio drivers of Mac are awful stuff. I had a better DAW experience on my Windows machine with ASIO4ALL which shouldn't even be possible.

Totally agree. On Windows, Dopamine https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine is close to giving me what I want but it crashes frequently and simple things like dragging a directory of music onto it just don't really work. Has to be imported to the DB first.

Musicbee https://www.getmusicbee.com/ was kinda promising for a while but bloated and clunky.

VLC and Foobar get the job done but the UI is meh.

Streaming and iTunes really wrecked everything.

>Even 20 years ago, I could literally just right-click on an entire folder sitting on my external hard-drive, and it would immediately enqueue all of those files into Winamp.

VLC? Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player

Works with any media file. Takes like 2 seconds to open my Youtube local backup folder with +10k videos

Have you used VLC? It's powerful and compatible, sure, but the UI is janky as all get out.

Yes I'm using it every single day

Thanks I'll give it a shot, I've never even tried VLC with audio files before - but I just did some reading up and apparently it has built-in support for SPC and other game music formats out of the box.

For macOS Ionica is really really good: https://ionica.app/

For iOS I would suggest my own app Muziqi https://apps.apple.com/us/app/muziqi-for-music-lovers/id6468...

I use mpd and plexamp, but thank you for sharing...I really UX/UI of Ionica and hadn't seen it before.

On a mac you could give my new app a try:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

I can recommend Swinsian on macOS: https://swinsian.com/

It's a wonderful music player that handles large libraries and is quite customisable (especially smart playlists).

Try Deadbeef.

I spent more time configuring the darn thing than listening to music!

Why does the author backport fixes to the 1.5 and 1.6 versions? What's significant about recent changes that makes those worth keeping alive?

They mention one reason in the release notes:

> unintended SSE CPU requirement present in previous releases has been removed.

Removing that requirement makes sense to me (in the current release or the previous releases), but I'm curious why the previous releases are deemed worth maintaining alongside the current release.

What did they do feature-wise in newer versions that makes the old versions desirable to some people, to the point that a user would prefer to upgrade them rather than upgrade to the newest version? It's not about system compatibility: the 2.x line supports Windows all the way back to Windows 7.

I'm content to dig into the docs but I was wondering about people's personal experiences with it. One hint in the release notes is that some, but not all, old plugins work in the new version...

Yeah almost certainly plugin ecosystem

> It's not about system compatibility: the 2.x line supports Windows all the way back to Windows 7.

I wouldn't be surprised if a decent amout of people were still running Windows XP, esp. on old hardware.

I don't know how many, but it's a decent enough choice for a jukebox machine or something.

1.5 is the last version that supports Windows XP.

1.6 is the last version before the big rework.

Back in the day this was the hardcore nerds' Winamp!

Back in the day? It still is.

I still use Winamp on my desktop and Foobar2000 on my ARM laptop because they got a ARM64 build.

A great example of what software can and should be.

A lightweight audio player/converter without any bloat.

DeaDBeeF is a clone for Linux.

I've been using VLC for Linux and mobile mp3s haven't tried FLAC though

xmms was my go to back in the day for Linux. Hard to beat the small, unobtrusive WinAmp interface and skin support. Now I use Audacious as it still supports WinAmp skins and interface. It's really hard to beat.

That's a funny name considering it was the Winamp creator's nickname and Foobar2000 itself is a Winamp clone.

It's a phrase that fits into a hex value. 0xdeadbeef, 0xcafebabe, etc.

How do you fit r into hex?

I don't know. How?

Yeah he loves that stuff.

https://github.com/kichik/nsis/blob/b4f28a7071dcd0bf3bcdb766...

in what way is foobar2000 a winamp clone

the only similarity I could see is that it plays music

Not sure how fb2k is a Winamp clone.

There's a Winamp clone for Linux though, Audacious: https://audacious-media-player.org/

Sorry, clone might not be the right word here. Foobar2000 was created out of spite because the creator didn't like what Winamp was doing. I vaguely recall something about bitrate limits and ogg support? It was so long ago and on IRC so no history saved. So it's a replacement?

Edit: some more context here:

https://forums.winamp.com/forum/developer-center/winamp-deve...

https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/lqu9u/a_brief_his...

> foobar2000 was first released in 2002 and developed by Peter Pawłowski, who had previously worked at Nullsoft and developed plugins for Winamp. He created foobar2000 with the audiophile community in mind. The software's mascot and logo icon consists of a white "alien cat".

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 . It has WinAmp's DNA somewhere in there, and IIRC it was kicked off soon after AOL had bought WinAmp/Nullsoft.

Winamp clones for Linux/BSD began with X11AMP, later XMMS, which had a huge amount of plugins, similar to Winamp. Then XMMS was forked upon the GTK2 release with Audacious and another one I can't remember its name.

Should also mention that Foobar2000 works flawlessly with WINE.

I do like deadbeef. It's a nice player, but what I absolutely hate about it is that ctrl-w closes the current playlist (well, that's the hotkey I close my tabs with, too, so that's fine), but you cannot restore that (or am I missing some feature?). And I am a lazy guy that doesn't save his playlist regularly.

Is there some feature to make it ask me if I want to close a playlist or just disable that hotkey? I sometimes get frustrated when the wrong window has focus. I was even thinking about implementing such thing myself, but somehow never got around to do it

Edit: Also iirc the shuffle function in deadbeef is weird, because it always shuffled tracks in the same order (if the playlist did not change and you started on the same track). It somehow has a 'shuffle' and 'random'. Maybe that's intended

You might like Audacious[0].

It loads the previously-open playlist by default, which I find a little annoying but apparently is your preference. Audacious has the bare-bones GUI of foobar2000 / deadbeef and also a plug-in architecture.

https://audacious-media-player.org/

With all due respect, but it's very, very far from being a clone from the point of view of the functionality that foobar provides.

A clone in appearance and layout configurability, but it's far from having feature parity from foobar.

I dunno what the experience is like on other distros, but on Arch I've tried 3 or 4 times to run it and something is always going awry, either with the software itself or with some plugin I consider indispensable.

I downloaded it on my mobile device, because I have the issue where some songs are very quiet and some are very loud, so I was looking for a volume normalizer and this is the one (that's zero cost) that was recommended, but I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between using this one and just the normal Metro Music Player.

So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or if there are better (zero cost) tools that could fix my issue, please advise (I'm looking for Android tools as I don't have a usable Windows/MacOS/Linux machine)

Can't say for sure. But I have two ideas.

1. Ensure that your music player has loudness normalization enabled. It's normally called ReplayGain and is disabled by default.

2. Replaygain information is written to the audio file's tags. So check the audio file's tags to see if the tags are there. They start with "replaygain_" for most formats and "r128_" for opus files.

You can install termux on your phone and then it basically becomes a linux computer btw.

A long time ago, I had a music player for windows, which had separate volume control for each track, in 10% steps. With that I could make tracks match volume the best, while of course being a bit of manual effort involved. But one could do it iteratively, when one noticed it was too low or high volume on a track, compared to the others. The player was probably not so good in other regards, but I remember using it for quite some time. It was called Ashampoo media player or similar.

I used to use Foobar2000 a lot like 20 years ago and a couple of years ago I tried to use it again when I got myself a Windows gaming PC, and I have no idea how I even used it back then. I felt completely lost trying to replicate what I have these days with MPD (+ ncmpcpp and assorted things).

Eventually I just gave up and decided that if I was going to listen to music on my Windows machine, I'd just use Plex in a browser. Eliminated the need to scan for files on a network volume every time I used it too.

I like the concept of directory players. I don't want playlists, my files are arranged in directories just fine. I use players like 1by1, VUPlayer, Resonic. Straightforward, usable players. I miss this functionality in foobar, implemented as native, not cumbersome plugins that need a lot of tinkering.

Still my daily driver when I'm at my PC.

Where do you get your music from? Back in the old days we used cd rips and sharing platforms to get the mp3s from but nowadays streaming got so convenient.

I'm not the person you are replying to but ... I started buying CDs in 1985 to replace my vinyl collection. Around 2001 is when I ripped all my CDs (800 or so) to mp3, but I kept buying new CDs and ripping them up until CD players disappeared as a standard PC feature. I now buy mp3s from amazon or bandcamp or wherever.

Even though I have spotify, I prefer to listen to my own mp3s. The only time I use spotify is when someone says, "You should check out <band or album>". I'll listen to the album a few times on spotify, and if I like it, I will buy the album and then listen to my own mp3s.

Sharings platforms still exist, they just get less mainstream exposure, for obvious reasons. They are also more exclusive and generally require more effort than back in the days.

It's still extremely simple to get music without having to put up with snobbish exclusive communities. Most basic solution is getting JDownloader and just copying a YouTube link with a song or playlist. If you want album releases, I could list half a dozen publicly accessible sites off the top of my head that don't require you to sign up and don't require you to beg somebody for an invite and don't require you to fulfill absurd seeding requirements.

I don't know where you get that snobbish vibe from (maybe my comment, in which case it wasn't intentional), but of course it's easy to just use yt-dlp or whatever. The places I frequent come with curation, organization, quality control and a community of people who deeply care about music which is something I value a lot.

Seeding, uploading and staying in it for the long haul is a lot more work than just buying a Spotify subscription and certainly not for everyone, but as someone who is constantly disappointed by the selection available on streaming services and also need local files for DJing, I couldn't imagine living without it.

I got the snobbish vibe from being in these communities and wasting my time on them. It's just another form of gatekeeping.

You do you. After the takedowns of its predecessors (Napster, Oink, What.cd) some quite literal gatekeeping is required IMO.

As someone who uses foobar daily, I get my music mainly from the streaming platform Deezer. With the hi-fi subscription you get access to high quality audio and there are some unofficial tools that make it possible to download the flac files. It is super convenient for they have extensive metadata, album art and more recently lyrics as well. Occasionally I may download torrents but that is rare nowadays.

I also own physical copies for vast majority of the music that I download but I basically only buy them to support the artist and to read the booklet.

I mostly listen to my existing collection. Rarely when there is something new I like - music filesharing is still quite healthy. I still use Spotify on mobile, and for the recommendation engine, but the interface is bad and they don't have everything I listen to.

Soulseek never went away either

Bandcamp, traxsource, beatport, beatsource .. they all allow you to legally buy tracks in decent quality.

Anyone know of a supported Foobar2000 Subsonic plugin? The ones I've seen seem to be abandoned.

Unfortunately no.

I daily use foobar2000 as my main music player. It is very good and simple music player.

I used to use xmplay on windows back in the day.. Anyone remember that one?

XMPlay crashed so often on SID files from HVSC that I switched to Foobar2000.

I do -- I use WinAmp myself, mostly, but xmplay was updated as recently as 2020 so it's still a thing.

It is the only player I use after winamp. I like music, and it very convenient, to goto folder and ther just right click and play. Thank you foobar.

I've been setting up a media player console, and foobar is the sole reason it's running windows. Fantastic piece of software.

Probably runs perfectly under wine https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

It runs great on wine provided you don't need access to the plugin/skin ecosystem. If you need either of those, something almost always breaks in some totally cryptic way. It's the reason I stopped using it on Linux. Sadly nothing even comes close to foobar2000. It's one of those little Windows gems that make you resent being on Linux just a little bit.

Foobar2000 was and still is the only software I missed since uninstalling Windows as a teenager (rhythmbox is pretty good though).

try https://github.com/olegantonyan/mpz/ not even close in terms of features, but it could be enough

+ columns ui + waveform minibar you need more?

I use foobar2000 to play back my super high quality dsd files. So far the best option to listen via my headphone amp.

I love Foobar but it does not whip the llama's ass. Incidentally, Winamp is apparently going open source:

https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-co...

I wonder if this will be the new Winamp-in-nothing-but-name or the old-new Winamp 5x builds, or even older builds?

To be honest, while I used and loved Winamp for a long time and it would be nice to have the sources even for a 2.x version, the reason it was popular back in the day was because it was the only one (or close enough). Nowadays there's a million ways to play audio files. Audacious even has a mode that imitates the Winamp aesthetics, and I think it can even load Winamp skins. There's not much value in the Winamp sources beyond nostalgia, and if it's about that you can still run ancient builds on modern Windows, although they're not able to play anything.

I think the moment to release the sources was when Nullsoft went down. Back then Winamp still had a smidgen of mindshare left. Now everyone has moved on to either streaming or other players.

Winamp also had visualizations. It seems that none of the modern players have that.

Audacious + ProjectM.

VLC has 5-6 audio visualizers built-in that you can make fullscreen.

Not sure about anything else being discussed (Audacious, etc) but im guessing there mist be visualizer plugins for foobar.

Did they add support for .m3u with .cue files yet?

Foobar prevents me from switching to Linux

Same for paint.net

I use it on my macos

How?

I found it's been ported to iOS, though: https://apps.apple.com/id/app/winamp/id1664497725

It's insensitive to have Rammstein on their example screenshot.

Why's that insensitive?

Nope. Even way back then, I was using iTunes on mac and windows to rip and organise my music collection. A quick rsync or an smb mount from a Linux machine made it easy to access my media in VLC or Rhythmbox. The winamp/foobar aesthetics were really cool, but overall offered nothing to the practically or ease of actually buying/ripping/playing your music.

But you know, everyone is different and some folks had memorised a sequence of characters that were something like "FCKGW-...", install limewire, just to play that live acoustic version of Everlong.

This. With alsa-plugins and any console music player (cmus or mocp, cmus it's more collection oriented, mocp enforces you to just use directories and files) and a -rt kernel it was more than enough (if not better) to play huge collection files under Linux.

the music player that never disappoints, also shout out to the guy who made Giorgia UI skin

foo and bar, and foobar, have meanings and utility that is undermined by people giving them new definitions and polluting our public namespace. Instead, call the project "farting in an elevator" because that's what you're doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable

* FOO 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.*

https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html

A similar injustice, theft of the commonweal, was Microsoft was granted a trademark for "windows", as if that was the generic term for... well, "windows"

You are aware that foobar2000 is 21 years old, right?

you don't realize I railed against it at the time, and before that the "windows" debacle?

Wasn't aware of that, thanks for the context.

Isn't it similar to how your nickname is fsckboy, cleverly iterating over the well-established fsck utility? Or is that something else, because fsckboy is not a published product in the IT space?

fooboy would be perfectly fine: a doghouse is not a dog. and the namespace for humans is much more "lexically bound" so we don't tend to get confused when multiple people are named John, just as we don't get confused with multiple cases of foo used as a metasyntactic variable; in fact, we expect it, unlike foobar2000 which demands exclusivity.

Does the "2000" in foobar2000 qualify it somehow? No. Do you make sure to say Windows NT 3.1 every time you mention it? no, you say only the qualifying part that makes your point: Windows, or NT, or 3.1 because the term is decomposable. fsckboy does not suggest "decompose me" other than etymologically suggesting "this guy uses unix; this guy doesn't use the gui; this guy is a wheel"

Economists use the term "widgets" in their examples. "Let's say a factory makes widgets, and the cost function is given by..." If you as a professor were to say "let's say a factory makes cars..." you would get responses from the class of "that doesn't make sense! cars blah blah blah" it's very convenient to use a variable that does not come freighted with meaning.

then there's the case of Little Bobby Tables...

Valid point! This makes foobar2000 not good in a way that fsckboy passes.

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