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Foobar2000

foobar2000.org

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Re: Foobar2000

#161

Post by slg »

thelettere wrote: post #133
slg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

But Spotify isn't stopping you from dedicating that time and doing that work if you still have that desire.

Re: Foobar2000

#163

Post by bingohbangoh »

devonkim wrote: post #85
bingohbangoh wrote: post #9

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

The ability to downvote on reddit changes this dynamic.

Reddit has, for good or bad, always attracted a "help all newbies" mentality too.

Re: Foobar2000

#164

Post by remram »

deergomoo wrote: post #156
remram wrote: 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…

I think there’s two things at play. One, small screens were never a good fit for that style of multi-panel UI. You could perhaps get away with it now, but we had years of small phones and iPods that were definitely not big enough. (FWIW, iTunes—or “Music” as it’s now called—has a UI option much like what you describe, though not enabled by default. It’s a trash fire of an app these days, but it bears mentioning.) Two…

Being able to scroll out swipe left and right would be quite enough. Foobar2000 has swipe gestures, but that brings you to the "now playing" view (for that one I'd prefer an always-visible area at the bottom, like VLC does, since it's only a single track).

Re: Foobar2000

#165

Post by chipotle_coyote »

theptip wrote: post #139
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…

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.

> 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.

Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for.

(N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)

Re: Foobar2000

#166

Post by ropeladder »

stereolambda wrote: post #110
ropeladder wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Deadbeef comes close but it doesn't support all my foobar2000 metadata.

Can people who feel similar share what metadata do they miss the most? Maybe I'm a caveman, but I feel mostly satisfied with artist/title/album, plus maybe the year at most. I came to use filesystem directories for genre/mood tagging and then also artist/album obviously. It's crude, but usable and easily portable. I'm not claiming this is all one can wish for, but I'm curious. For this kind of library I found Audacio…

Now that I think about it it may have been that there was info in foobar's media library database that wasn't supported, not necessarily id3 tags. Play count and last played date are some I'm partial to that I couldn't get working.

I also use album artist a lot, though that's probably supported.

Re: Foobar2000

#167

Post by pvarangot »

bingohbangoh wrote: post #9
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…

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.

I like https://everynoise.com to get started on discovery. It kinda replaced looking at tags on last.fm for me, it uses Spotify metadata.

Re: Foobar2000

#168

Post by aasasd »

unixhero wrote: post #100
bingohbangoh wrote: post #9

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.

Wait a second, 4chan had a music section?

There were even decent releases made on /mu/. Specifically, never having been on 4chan myself, I've heard of that scene by the way of Loli Ripe—whose music is basically j-core a-la DJ Sharpnel, but with more breakcore. I only wish that they would better normalize the volume between tracks.

IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).

(Dammit, this all was really long ago.)

Re: Foobar2000

#169

Post by elabajaba »

ksec wrote: post #160
elabajaba wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The last listening test put Opus at ~90Kbps = 128kbps Mp3.

https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,117489.0.html

No? Opus 1.3 96k is slightly worse than mp3 192k CBR. Previous listening tests just always compared 96k opus+AAC to mp3 128k because mp3 is just that bad (and mp3 would still lose).

Re: Foobar2000

#170

Post by majkinetor »

mariusor wrote: post #97

Foobar2000 and TotalCommander are the only pieces of software I ever regretted moving from the Windows ecosystem. Nothing I found on other platforms came even close to the level of functionality they provide for their respective classes.

Double Commander is near 100% clone of TC and cross-platform.
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