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Foobar2000

foobar2000.org

131–140 of 219 posts

Re: Foobar2000

#131

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…

I had a similar experience. I tried every linux music player I could find, nothing came close to foobar. I also settled on Clementine which I still use, but I stopped collecting and organizing music locally as a result of the switch. I even spent some time coding a new music player before deciding to just settle on clementine.

Re: Foobar2000

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software

Home ageing affects someone’s ability to maintain a standalone forum? Do you mean lack of free time?

Probably yes. As I move forward in life, my free time is dwindling faster than I like. Work responsibilities and other fun stuff seeps in.

I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.

Re: Foobar2000

#133
post #123
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…

I would suggest that there's an inherent trade-off at work here. It was more exciting largely because of the time and work involved.

Re: Foobar2000

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software

There's also rateyourmusic.com which has a forum that I always thought of as the online hub for those who enjoy having petty arguments about all things music

Re: Foobar2000

#135
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…

On the Mac front I use and love Swinsian (https://swinsian.com). It's like iTunes as it was in 2001.

Re: Foobar2000

#136
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…

I remember setting up AudioGalaxy on my home machine and using their UI so that I could download stuff "from work" and have it available when I got home. It was great for my use!

Re: Foobar2000

#138
post #126

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…

> 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.

iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).

Re: Foobar2000

#139
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…

Agreed. Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing.

It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.

Re: Foobar2000

#140
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…

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.

It saddens me that I grew up during this time but never availed myself of any of these resources. What a lift that would've been to my lifelong quest to discover my own sound.

Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.

Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.

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