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Foobar2000

foobar2000.org

141–150 of 193 posts

Re: Foobar2000

#141
post #26

It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :) It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing. It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Wi…

[deleted]

Re: Foobar2000

#142
post #26

It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :) It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing. It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Wi…

Foobar2000 was always better than WinAmp. WinAmp was the best example of why standard UI affordances evolved.

Re: Foobar2000

#143
post #26

It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :) It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing. It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Wi…

Despite somehow liking WinAmp 2 more than WinAmp 3, I could never understand why do people consider WinAMP 3 awful. Nevertheless I just switched to foobar2000 on Windows and DeaDBeeF on Linux because their UIs just are perfectly bullshit-free practical pragmatic tools and I came to feel I want a tool rather than a show.

I guess you might wonder the same thing if installing Windows Vista on a recentish computer.

Re: Foobar2000

#144
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A remnant of simpler times. Foobar and VLC, any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?

IrfanView. I tried replacing it several times with something slicker-looking, but no other picture viewer is as fast as IrfanView.

I thought "I doubt it is faster than FastStone" but when I went looking for benchmarks all I could find was this forum post from 2011.

https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25334.0

Which does confirm that Faststone is faster but much water has passed under the bridge since 2011.

Re: Foobar2000

#145
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A remnant of simpler times. Foobar and VLC, any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?

"simpler" is not how I remember foobar2000. I used to use it (±15 years ago) because of its extreme configurability (e.g. in terms of layout). Configuring foobar2000 felt kind of like building your own music player. YMMV

I remember installing some VERY pretty but very complicated setups from deviantart, and then having to fix the inevitable bugs in the panel layout scripts, every one of which was just one right-click away which was extremely cool.

IIRC, they were in a sort of PHP-looking scripting language? I had very little coding experience before then, so it was kind of a trip trying to debug why the lyrics panel would freak out under certain scenarios :D

Re: Foobar2000

#146
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IrfanView. I tried replacing it several times with something slicker-looking, but no other picture viewer is as fast as IrfanView.

I thought "I doubt it is faster than FastStone" but when I went looking for benchmarks all I could find was this forum post from 2011. https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=25334.0 Which does confirm that Faststone is faster but much water has passed under the bridge since 2011.

That's an interesting benchmark, but I am more interested in a cold start test on a much smaller file (think 2MP, not 1200MP), because that's my usual use case.

Re: Foobar2000

#147

The author on why Foobar2000 is not open source: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,31222.msg270982.html#...

>The SDK is there to allow people to add whatever features they want. If there is something they can't add with what the SDK provides, then either it requires changes breaking component compatibility (which only I could do even if the source was open), or person trying to implement the feature is doing something seriously wrong (happens very often). "Implementing that feature would break component compatibility" is n…

> Somehow no one has written fully functional foobar2000 clone yet.

Deadbeef [0] may not be "fully functional" because it doesn't support foobar2000 plugins or some such silliness but it is close enough to play the music library I played under Windows with foobar2000.

Sometimes you just have to build over a Zax [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeaDBeeF

[1] https://i.postimg.cc/YS1syndT/image.png

Re: Foobar2000

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing that requirement makes sense to me (in the current release or the previous releases), but I'm curious why the previous releases are deemed worth maintaining alongside the current release. What did they do feature-wise in newer versions that makes the old versions desirable to some people, to the point that a user would prefer to upgrade them rather than upgrade to the newest version? It's not about system co…

> It's not about system compatibility: the 2.x line supports Windows all the way back to Windows 7. I wouldn't be surprised if a decent amout of people were still running Windows XP, esp. on old hardware.

I don't know how many, but it's a decent enough choice for a jukebox machine or something.

Re: Foobar2000

#150
post #16

foobar2000 is so good, and so unmatched, especially with its plugins ecosystem, I use it for my music playback needs under wine on Linux.

Foobar2000 is parasitic in the sense that many of the plugins that give foobar2000 its value are open-source ports of open-source software, yet the foobar2000 software that hosts the plugins is proprietary.

Feels like when Disney makes a movie version of a public domain folktale and then lobbies to perpetually extend the copyright on it.

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