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Foobar2000

foobar2000.org

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Re: Foobar2000

#201

Post by ksec »

elabajaba wrote: post #169
ksec wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I think that is a personal listening test. Especially from Kamedo2 whom is quite bias towards Opus LOL.

The last group listening test was in 2014. Which was touched on in this thread [1]. And in general I believe and agree with IgorC. Opus has gotten better, but the last test results still remains largely the same.

On the subject of looking this up my HA account is over 20 years old. Oh My.

[1] https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=118446.0

Re: Foobar2000

#202

Post by antihero »

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…

Can you ABX 256Kbps AAC and the equivalent MPC?

I remember ripping a few things in Musepack a very long time ago.

Now I use ALAC for lossless (it supports 24-bit 192khz now!) and AAC for lossy, because they are standardised, use the MP4 container, and seem to be the most widely supported.

Re: Foobar2000

#203

Post by antihero »

zelag wrote: post #15
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…

oink and what.cd. Ahh, the memories.

what.cd was one the most incredible archive of music ever created, happily spent £10/mo on a seedbox to support it and had a bunch of scripts to auto-seed things to get some sort of ridiculous ratio.

The powers that be truly did destroy something great, if there's a tracker that's anything like it I'd happily rent a seedbox again.

Even now most music streaming services will only give you a single crummy option of the album version to listen to, usually some stupid remaster, AM sometimes gives lets you listen to the original but it's far from perfect.

Re: Foobar2000

#204

Post by antihero »

pkulak wrote: post #35
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…

I forgot about Hydrogen Audio! Remember when Musepack (is that what it was called?) was the greatest audio format ever? Oh man, those were the days. Then I got old and bought a Spotify subscription. Haha

I'm trying to get back to those times, I use Apple Music for most stuff, but I've got a SSD and cheap VPS that I use navidrome on. Nobody can pull the plug on me. AM and Spotify et all is great but the feeling you get when you can't access them for some reason and realise you have become near totally dependent on corporation and laws for something that is core to your soul is a huge realisation.

They can pry my music from my cold dead hands.

Re: Foobar2000

#205

Post by antihero »

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…

> they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery

And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new album and or band by discovering it on your own whims, you are more motivated to share it and discuss it with people as opposed to just appreciating it as an individual.

Sure, there's a time and a place where you do just want to kick on a vibe and do something else (especially at work) and for that AM Stations or Spotify Radio is adequate, however, it is a gilded cage.

Re: Foobar2000

#206

Post by Handytinge »

galdosdi wrote: post #63
r1ch wrote: post #34

I remember writing a Foobar2000 plugin to emulate the Winamp API so my mIRC song spam scripts still functioned. It was buggy as hell as I was still new to C++ programming and it eventually got added to a hard-coded blacklist in the app for causing stability issues. I ended up open sourcing it and it still lives on 19 year later, about three forks deep and a lot more stable and functional. The power of open source!

OMG, "writing a Foobar2000 plugin to emulate the Winamp API so my mIRC song spam scripts still functioned" is such a nostalgia packed sentence for those of us of a certain age. Some of the most fun I ever had was trying to make the utterly ridiculous mIRC script programming language do things it was not meant to do. Pretty sure I recall someone I know writing a primitive web server with it IIRC

It was definitely my intro to socket programming. I wrote entirely mIRC script based IRC services - NickServ, ChanServ, the lot. I c:lined it (is that the right flat? I don't recall), then wrote my own little set of slash commands to perform various fun raw commands - e.g getting ChanServ to message someone and ask how their day is going.

IRC was a way cooler world than the current internet.

Re: Foobar2000

#208

Post by anta40 »

I still use foobar2000 on my Windows system, and still regularly update it. But once Winamp is alive again, I might change my mind...

Re: Foobar2000

#209

Post by slg »

antihero wrote: post #205
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…

> they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new alb…

>It makes you lazy... It kills your soul... Once you have "earned" a new album and or band

You have to understand that this reads like gatekeeping nonsense to a lot of people.

Re: Foobar2000

#210

Post by mariusor »

jopsen wrote: post #116
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.

Try amaroK from KDE, might still be good. I think the 1.x series was the best music player ever. In any case, I just use Spotify these days. Much easier than having a music collection.

Excuse me, but in what world the clean UI and extensibility of foobar2k can be compared to Amarok? (Not to mention that Amarok has been left behind by the KDE community a long time ago for a new kid on the block called Elisa). Not even in its prime (which personally I consider to be in the Amarok 2.X days) did it have half the niceties foobar had.

Concerning having a library, I still need one because I buy a lot of sound tracks with my Steam games. Spotify does not have, as an example, the awesome British Sea Power OST for Disco Elysium. (It can be found on bandcamp though: https://britishseapower.bandcamp.com/album/disco-elysium)

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