91–100 of 219 posts
Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.
Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.
Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.
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.
Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software/vendor lock-in.
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/
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.
Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery (mostly through piracy forums) for me in my teens, used to spend hours upon hours customising it and posting the results on Hydrogen Audio while weird and wonderful music was downloading from yousendit, rapidshare, soulseek, and megaupload. Bands I now go see live and support through bandcamp now that I'm not poor! So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spo…
Music Forums (and 4chan) were amazing for discovery because you had people with extremely hard opinions arguing vociferously against others over which album was best or why such-and-such was awful. 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.