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Foobar2000

foobar2000.org

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Re: Foobar2000

#121

Post by pferde »

entropie wrote: post #90
matheusmoreira wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like music player daemon on Linux. Is foobar actually superior at reproducing sound?

> music player daemon 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 backgro…

I too used MPD in various scenarios for maybe a decade, but sometimes last year it stopped working with pulseaudio, and no amount of tinkering seemed to fix it (other apps worked with PA like a breeze, but not MPD). So I replaced it with Qmmp, and am slowly forgetting about it.

Re: Foobar2000

#122

Post by hadem »

unixhero wrote: post #102
sidpatil wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what.cd was one of the greatest resources available on the Internet, in my opinion. Still sad it's gone. :-(

What.cd was a massive loss for the entire internet. Some of What's Vanity house stars are now real stars with tours around the world, like "The Flashbulb"

You too found The Flashbulb via what.cd? Soundtrack to a Vacant Life is an incredible album.

Re: Foobar2000

#123

Post by slg »

antihero wrote: post #3

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…

>Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery... So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.

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)?

Re: Foobar2000

#124

Post by elabajaba »

ksec wrote: post #30
antihero wrote: post #3

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…

The good old days of listening test on Hydrogen Audio and Divx / Xvid video testing on Doom9. 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 thin…

Opus at 64k~=Mp3 128k. There's still interest in better audio codecs in the commercial world, it's just more focused on streaming audio and voice chat these days.

Re: Foobar2000

#125

Post by robtherobber »

sidpatil wrote: post #28
zelag wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oink and what.cd. Ahh, the memories.

what.cd was one of the greatest resources available on the Internet, in my opinion. Still sad it's gone. :-(

This article came out soon after it was gone: https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-great...

It put things into perspective for many.

Re: Foobar2000

#126

Post by remram »

I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp's. Basically it had three panels, in order: Artists, Albums, Tracks (you could enable "Genre"/"Year"/... as well but I rarely did).

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]

Re: Foobar2000

#127

Post by jszymborski »

distances wrote: post #49
NikolaeVarius wrote: post #6

Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.

Foobar2000 was the hardest app to replace when I switched from Windows to Linux. I finally settled with Clementine which is great too, but that was basically the end for my music collection, organization and rating hobby. I had even built my own replacement to Last.fm/Audioscrobbler backed with a local database as I wasn't happy with their feature sets, and I meticulously kept all tracks uniquely identifiable with fu…

Clementine development seems to have slowed down these days, but there is an active fork called Strawberry which I'm a big fan of.

https://strawberrymusicplayer.org/

Re: Foobar2000

#128

Post by unixhero »

pferde wrote: post #118
unixhero wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Oink was VERY good and also very friendly. They also had a silly rule that "all avatars MUST be cute"

I think it was even "all avatars MUST be cute animals".

Yeah spot on, cute rule, I have carried that over into other community forums I used to run :)

Re: Foobar2000

#129

Post by dest »

slg wrote: post #123
antihero wrote: post #3

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…

>Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery... So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio. 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 w…

At some point Subsonic/Airsonic had an integration with Last.fm to make smart playlists with music from your library

Re: Foobar2000

#130

Post by unixhero »

hadem wrote: post #122
unixhero wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What.cd was a massive loss for the entire internet. Some of What's Vanity house stars are now real stars with tours around the world, like "The Flashbulb"

You too found The Flashbulb via what.cd? Soundtrack to a Vacant Life is an incredible album.

Yes I sure did. That album may have been a vanity house "staff pick" too, I don't recall. Pink and What felt like magical places... Terra Firma, what a massive tune. https://youtu.be/HwbVnFR-XP4
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