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 Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.
It's hard to come back from that.
variety of reasons.
mine: it broke a huge amount of visualizers/dsps/skins.
I think it has more to do with the authors and their principles, and less with the times. There are plenty of counterexamples from that era: all major browsers, the Sonique audio player (which I loved for the UI novelty), Winamp itself, etc.
> any other software that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?
mpv is in that league for me, and it's much more recent. Then, of course, there are very stable CLI and power user software that has existed for decades: Vim, Emacs, BSD and Linux coreutils, etc. Some of these are not necessarily simple under the hood, but I use them because they do one thing well (or in the case of Vim/Emacs as much as I want them to do :)), and I know that they're not going to disappear or drastically change as so many software does.
Irfanview is another “goes on every desktop install”. I even use it on Linux via wine.
Easy to do when you don't have bosses breathing down your neck about adding in podcasts and audiobooks, then nudging users into engaging with that stuff first so that they don't have to pay as much to the music rights holders.
Want to mirror your front channels to your back channels? Easily done in foobar2k, while many other media players already fail here, even those whose main task is to do audio output.
Haha, it's not the same even for any specific version. With plugins and ability to move panels around, it's hard to say all these UIs are the same player. Search for "foobar2000 theme" in google images
Of all these programs (and there were many), fb2k is the one that I still use on regular basis while almost all the others have faded away.
If Microsoft could find one good path forward for UI development on Windows, we'd want those small boutique apps to get with the times.
A "well designed" interface with "good" UI/UX from a proper designer may have best practices, but additional layers of abstraction from the functionality which makes everything feel less direct.
It is still my go to player, it works great in Windows 10.
Foobar2000 v2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718802 - April 2023 (2 comments)
Foobar2000 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30054239 - Jan 2022 (215 comments)
Foobar2000 - the ultimate audio player - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305796 - April 2010 (2 comments)
of course it's doable in any player but not with such ease
Just checked, it still works great, although, the limited codec support and no scrobbling is a dealbreaker for me. Same reason I had to ditch it years ago.
Would love to peek at the source code of that program. One of the last messages its developer Heikki Ylinen left on his website reads:
If you want to know what the future of digital music looks like, I recommend giving Spotify a go. And before anyone says anything, I know it has been done before, but this time it looks like it's been done right. And this is just the beginning.
VLC. Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player
In the browser mode you can just right click and add the folder to your playlist. Just like in foobar2000.
"Implementing that feature would break component compatibility" is not a valid reason not to release the source. If someone wants to modify the software to implement a feature they want even if it would break compatibility, that's their business.
>As for porting to different OSes, sourcecode release won't magically spawn people capable of doing that properly. Somehow no one has written fully functional foobar2000 clone yet.
The point of having it open source is that the possibility is there. Right now it's impossible. Someone has to go through the trouble of documenting all the features and then reimplementing them.
>Sourcecode loss argument is not really valid, I keep backups on multiple redundant devices. I'd be surprised if someone who spent as much time on programming as I have wouldn't know well enough how to handle this.
Two words: bus factor.
I see attempts to refute reasons to open source the code, but no reasons not to do it. If the reason is simply "I don't want to", that's perfectly fine, and it's all that needs to be said.
I recall it pushed away a chunk of the community at least once in the past.
It's just one of those types of projects.
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].
By the way, I haven't seen the author in that thread, just other commenters. Here, however, he addresses the open sourcing idea: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,119676.0.html
Also, this is cool for all those über random playlisters: a tool you can use to create a random playlist of X amount of songs from your entire library [edit: and make copies of the random files to a new folder. Useful for making playlists on portable media]. Sorry it was a long time ago and I don't recall what it was called.
Feels like when Disney makes a movie version of a public domain folktale and then lobbies to perpetually extend the copyright on it.
That for GUI.
If you like CLI, mpd+any UI it's a beast. Mocp if you are a minimalist.
Assorted foobar2000 plugins support every obscure tracker format, every obscure video game music format (.vgz, etc.), and then foo_midi lets you render MIDIs not just with Soundfonts but with whatever VSTi DLLs you like. Also support for music files in ZIP files as well as music files in ZIP files in ZIP files (don't ask). That's hard to compete with.
I even had a bunch of Winamp plugins that could automatically handle my NSFs, SID files, tracker files—any format I threw at it, it could handle them seamlessly.
It used very little CPU, it never crackled, it never popped, and it never crashed. This wasn't even using any low-latency ASIO drivers or anything fancy.
Fast forward decades later and I'm sitting on my Mac M1 desperately trying to find anything that even comes CLOSE to this.
The closest thing I found is Cog, but it takes minutes to queue up larger folders. It's ridiculous, and of course I'm one of the lucky individuals who ended up with a Mac with core audio issues where if I'm using more than 35% to 40% of my CPU, the audio pops once every minute/minutes despite clearing out the plist files and trying every other trick, it seems like the basic core audio drivers of Mac are awful stuff. I had a better DAW experience on my Windows machine with ASIO4ALL which shouldn't even be possible.
For iOS I would suggest my own app Muziqi https://apps.apple.com/us/app/muziqi-for-music-lovers/id6468...
VLC? Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player
Works with any media file. Takes like 2 seconds to open my Youtube local backup folder with +10k videos
It's a wonderful music player that handles large libraries and is quite customisable (especially smart playlists).
Musicbee https://www.getmusicbee.com/ was kinda promising for a while but bloated and clunky.
VLC and Foobar get the job done but the UI is meh.
Streaming and iTunes really wrecked everything.
> unintended SSE CPU requirement present in previous releases has been removed.
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 compatibility: the 2.x line supports Windows all the way back to Windows 7.
I'm content to dig into the docs but I was wondering about people's personal experiences with it. One hint in the release notes is that some, but not all, old plugins work in the new version...
A lightweight audio player/converter without any bloat.
Is there some feature to make it ask me if I want to close a playlist or just disable that hotkey? I sometimes get frustrated when the wrong window has focus. I was even thinking about implementing such thing myself, but somehow never got around to do it
Edit: Also iirc the shuffle function in deadbeef is weird, because it always shuffled tracks in the same order (if the playlist did not change and you started on the same track). It somehow has a 'shuffle' and 'random'. Maybe that's intended
It loads the previously-open playlist by default, which I find a little annoying but apparently is your preference. Audacious has the bare-bones GUI of foobar2000 / deadbeef and also a plug-in architecture.
There's a Winamp clone for Linux though, Audacious: https://audacious-media-player.org/
the only similarity I could see is that it plays music
So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or if there are better (zero cost) tools that could fix my issue, please advise (I'm looking for Android tools as I don't have a usable Windows/MacOS/Linux machine)
1. Ensure that your music player has loudness normalization enabled. It's normally called ReplayGain and is disabled by default.
2. Replaygain information is written to the audio file's tags. So check the audio file's tags to see if the tags are there. They start with "replaygain_" for most formats and "r128_" for opus files.
You can install termux on your phone and then it basically becomes a linux computer btw.
Eventually I just gave up and decided that if I was going to listen to music on my Windows machine, I'd just use Plex in a browser. Eliminated the need to scan for files on a network volume every time I used it too.
Even though I have spotify, I prefer to listen to my own mp3s. The only time I use spotify is when someone says, "You should check out <band or album>". I'll listen to the album a few times on spotify, and if I like it, I will buy the album and then listen to my own mp3s.
I also own physical copies for vast majority of the music that I download but I basically only buy them to support the artist and to read the booklet.
https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-co...
I think the moment to release the sources was when Nullsoft went down. Back then Winamp still had a smidgen of mindshare left. Now everyone has moved on to either streaming or other players.
Same for paint.net
I found it's been ported to iOS, though: https://apps.apple.com/id/app/winamp/id1664497725
But you know, everyone is different and some folks had memorised a sequence of characters that were something like "FCKGW-...", install limewire, just to play that live acoustic version of Everlong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
* FOO 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.*
https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
A similar injustice, theft of the commonweal, was Microsoft was granted a trademark for "windows", as if that was the generic term for... well, "windows"
Does the "2000" in foobar2000 qualify it somehow? No. Do you make sure to say Windows NT 3.1 every time you mention it? no, you say only the qualifying part that makes your point: Windows, or NT, or 3.1 because the term is decomposable. fsckboy does not suggest "decompose me" other than etymologically suggesting "this guy uses unix; this guy doesn't use the gui; this guy is a wheel"
Economists use the term "widgets" in their examples. "Let's say a factory makes widgets, and the cost function is given by..." If you as a professor were to say "let's say a factory makes cars..." you would get responses from the class of "that doesn't make sense! cars blah blah blah" it's very convenient to use a variable that does not come freighted with meaning.
then there's the case of Little Bobby Tables...
