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Comment by prell | Hacker News Reader

I come from the times where winamp was the go-to music player. Today, even in the age of streaming services I still keep a local music library organized in folders. So, just as others here in the comments I built myself an old-school music player as a hobby project to listen to my music offline. It's a 1 page html/js app, has full keyboard controls and also features a simple queue mechanism functionality Check it out: https://nobsutils.com/mp

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I also came to say, some 27 years later, I still think winamp had the right UI. So simple:

* A collection of files in directories

* Ability to randomize full collection, or play just one directory

the only reason I've preferred foobar for many years is that I can have many playlists "loaded" at the same time. If Winamp's playlist panel had tabs (and a bigger font)...

I love it, I was looking for a simple music player like this! FYI Currently the standard bookmark shortcut `cmd + d` changes the theme instead of bookmarking the website :-)

To me the go-to music player has always been foobar2000. (Replaced today by Cog app)

2025 and im still rockin foobar2000 with 2000 plugins. wish a native linux binary was out though through wine is okay, just lacks native dark mode

Foobar2000 is the irfanview for audio, apps I still use regularly more than 20 years and counting.

foobar2000, IrfanView, Total Commander. The 3 apps I still miss after 15+ years of not using Windows (went through 10 years of OSX, now on Linux for probably 5 years).

There's just nothing like this trio on OSX or Linux.

i never got the hang of Total Commander; i only use the file browser on windows as the cli form is so terrible compared to bash..

irfan was fun though, i do like Emulsion even though its not really under development anymore

im currently happy with foobar2k via wine, havent yet loaded all my plugins yet but will eventually load up the 7.1 upmixer and test it out. if you have not used the later versions of f2k, its worth checking out

I've used foobar2000 and irfanview when I was a windows user 20 years but I am struggling to figure out what these have that make them more desirable than comparable apps on linux.

I have all my image browsing / viewing / light editing usage covered with gthumb on Linux and rythmbox does it for me in term of music listening as it can play both my local files as well as net radios. I think kde users are naturally more into Amarok or Clementine but they are all probably fine enough. I have the feeling music listening is a problem that have been solved decades ago an all operating systems. Well with the exception of iOS apparently.

In the early 2000's I discovered Irfanview, and used it because it was lightweight and loaded jpeg's much faster than anything else I was using at the time - this was on a 133Mhz Pentium 1 running Windows ME with 56MB of RAM.

I also like Irfanview because:

A) It has every basic editing function you might need (crop, color adjust, blur/sharpen), great for ad-hoc one-off things. It has all these functions but loads just about instantly on my older laptop. For example, if I need to rotate a picture real quick, it's convenient to open it in Irfanview and just press L/R to orient it.

B) I like it for one-off converting pics from one format to another, and it's the only GUI program I've seen that lets you save as jpeg, but also specify the target size. So I can convert a 10MB PNG to a 256KB jpeg easily. I know this is trivial to do in Linux with the convert command but when, for example, working with pics from my phone, I'm already previewing it in Irfanview in the first place. Irfanview's save GUI actually exposes a lot of knobs for many image formats that I don't see on other programs.

C) If you want to extract images from a PDF, you can open the PDF in Irfanview and Irfanview will let you save out the individual images. At least for the PDFs I've tried it with.

D) The batch mode it has is decently implemented and is easier to use than Linux command line stuff for small jobs if Irfanview can take care of the need (less than 50 images), especially if the images are all over the place and not in one folder.

I'm so used to it I'll probably use it in Wine (if possible) if/when I actually make the jump to everyday desktop Linux, which Windows 11 may make me do finally.

You can get Foobar for the Mac. https://www.foobar2000.org/mac

No idea if it's any good, I just use Music.

I haven't used it and you might already be familiar, but I've seen people mention fooyin[1] as similar enough to foobar2000 for them to make the switch. Might be worth checking out.

[1]: https://www.fooyin.org/

What plugins do you use? I cannot imagine to add even 10 plugins to foobar2K, especially now,when "exclusive" access to sound card is built-in and doesn't require WASAPI/ASIO plugin anymore.

i try to install them all and only remove ones that break or really bother me - its fun to play with things from time to time. in terms of which ones i use:

  - decoders
  - asio output, virtual audio cable setup as needed (but for the most part the output i rarely change anymore)
  - DSPs, audio (i upmix to 7.1 depending on output; but not exactly a requirement due to equalizer apo), video stuff for funzies
  - Network related stuff (control, upnp)
  - theme related stuff though i think this is lacking for my use
  - lots of tooling stuff (though ive slowed down on a lot of that as of lately)

the app is a powerhouse for power users

edit formatting

foobar2000 is awesome on Windows, but on Mac its a very different and lackluster app. At least it was some years ago.

This works great! Nice one.

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