11 ms·

Wine is a godsend for the still very lackluster linux desktop experience. I just started listening to music locally rather than relying on streaming music agai

Wine is a godsend for the still very lackluster linux desktop experience. I just started listening to music locally rather than relying on streaming music again. I used to do curate my music on Windows with MP3Tag, which lets you import data from 3rd party services, has an amazingly fast and efficient UI, and lets you quickly batch rename files based on their tags. I looked at all the Linux alternatives and none of them even come close. I used to use foobar2000 to listen to music. Again, on Linux, nothing comes close. Both worked out of the box at native speed on wine. Hats off to the devs.

nunodonato 10y ago
Of all the things you could use wine for.. an mp3 player, really? I can name maybe a dozen that do all that foobar2000 does
- maxerickson 10y ago
  I can name maybe a dozen that do all that foobar2000 does Do it. Be sure to show how the mass tagger works in each one of them. Especially the pattern matching to extract data from filenames, I really like that feature.
  - necessity 10y ago
    Why use MP3 tags anyway? I don't understand, they're so burdensome to manage. I just do: ./Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3 It'll work with any music player and you can organize it even on a toaster, as long as it has coreutils. I use plain old mplayer to listen to music, just cd into the directory I want and call a script I made which is basically a glorified `find | xargs mplayer` (actually outputs the filenames to a playlist and makes mplayer read from it in slave mode so I can control it with keyboard shortcuts - from other workspaces, etc).
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      Because a database is more powerful than a bunch of strings (I treat the tags in the file as the canonical representation; foobar2000 is happy to build an index from that info.). For instance, add listening to tracks where an artist is featured to your system and you start having to account for it each time you bust out your coreutils. Move it into a tag and you only have to account for it when it is of interest.
    - colanderman 10y ago
      Many song titles have characters which are not legal in a filename, and this varies by OS.
      - darklajid 10y ago
        While I agree with the rest of the features missing (folders vs. tags, basically), can you name these characters for me? I would expect that most operating systems can accept most characters. Right, path separators are out, there are binary characters that aren't allowed (but then again - you have a hard time printing those on your CD booklet), so I'm genuinely curious where this falls short.
        CrazedGeek 10y ago
        The problem isn't the quantity of characters disallowed, it's that they cover some reasonably common characters in tags. From the list of restricted characters on NTFS: \ / : * ? " < > | There are a lot of artists, albums, and songs that use the forward slash (AC/DC, Less Than Jake's TV/EP), colon (Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution's "Intro: This is a Call to Arms"), asterisk (some releases of Serj Tankian's "Beethoven's Cunt"), question mark (Arctic Monkeys' "What If You Were Right the First Time?", David Bowie's "Life on Mars?"), and double quotation mark (David Bowie's "Heroes", Fall Out Boy's ""Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today""). As a stickler for having a well-organized music library, not being able to use those characters in my organization would be a bit grating.
    - wander_homer 10y ago
      And by that you lose quite a lot of flexibility. How do you listen to all the classical music that was composed in the 19th century, and was added during the last month to your library? With foobar2000 (or other players) this can be done in a matter of seconds, and you can create an auto playlist based on those criteria which updates automatically when you add new songs or songs no longer match.
      - necessity 10y ago
        Well if you need that then use mp3 tags. I never had that need.
    - awqrre 10y ago
      Can you filter by genre? I know that you could do something like ./Genre/Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3 but there is possibly other elements that are useful in mp3 tags... and what if one song could be classified in multiple genres? would you keep multiple copies?
      - necessity 10y ago
        symlinks.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
    - gnud 10y ago
      Then you can't find symphonies by different composers, performed by different orchestras, but with the same conductor. Unfortunately, this is also close to impossible in online music services, in my experience.
      - necessity 10y ago
        Sure you can , find | grep.
  - CrazedGeek 10y ago
    Quod Libet/Ex Falso have pattern matching for tags: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/editing_tags.html https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/editing_tag...
  - jakobdabo 10y ago
    Not the GP, but DeaDBeeF is a really good and extendable (by plugins) audio player. I myself switched from foobar2000 years ago and there isn't much that I miss. I'm not sure whether there is the pattern matching feature (or a plugin), but I think it may be achieved using the Shellexec plugin and some scripting.
    - wander_homer 10y ago
      DeaDBeeF is great - I'm one of the developers - but there's still a lot to do before we come to feature parity with foobar2000 and have the same quality. E.g. an often requested feature which is still missing is a media library, with a proper query language so you can do stuff like: %genre% HAS progressive AND %added% DURING LAST 4 WEEKS
      - morsch 10y ago
        Store the metadata in SQLite and expose the SQL SELECT interface.
        wander_homer 10y ago
        Yes, we already discussed that at some point but we haven't decided yet how to implement it. We don't like how most players perform which use SQLite as their database backend, but we do like how foobar2000 performs with its custom database and ~100,000 tracks with arbitrary tag fields. Maybe others who use SQLite do something wrong, maybe SQLite isn't the right tool for the job and maybe there's a third option worth considering. Once we get some time and motivation to build some prototypes we'll hopefully find that out.
        rockdoe 10y ago
        SQLite is nice but using it blindly leads to suffering. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Avoid_SQLite_In_Your_Next_Firefox_Feature https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Avoid_SQLite_In_Your_Ne...
  - btschaegg 10y ago
    To me, listening to and tagging music seem to be two rather orthogonal problems. There are very good tagging applications that don't actually play the files. My current favorite definitely is beets (http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/), although it may take some minutes to set up (at least if you want the hashing feature where the audio itself is used to look up metadata). Another (rather old) Windows-Application that was very useful for tagging was "The GodFather".
    - eikenberry 10y ago
      Another decent tagging application is tagtool (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tagtool/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/tagtool/), which is packaged for Debian and its offspring.
    - btschaegg 10y ago
      As an addendum for beets: If you're willing to experiment with a more radically different concept than most audioplayer applications provide, I would also recommend looking into MPD. There's a rather nice framework around it called Mopidy [1] which provides plugins for things like Spotify/Soundcloud support - and one such plugins provides integration with beets [2]. [1]: https://www.mopidy.com/ https://www.mopidy.com/ [2]: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Mopidy-Beets https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Mopidy-Beets
  - topranks 10y ago
    EasyTAG works quite well for me on Linux for just that. Not sure if it has all the other features you need, and it's a standalone tagger, but works very well.
- curiousgal 10y ago
  I use it to run 1password and it works almost perfectly.
kensai 10y ago
As your handle is "wineisgreat", I assume your know your shit! :D
- gield 10y ago
  He created the account just for that comment
merb 10y ago
well I used mp3tag a lot, too. however I changed to MusicBrainz Picard after having a mac. For converting I actually found 'Soundconverter' the linux app the best, even tough dbpower amp is really great for mac and windows (and they have more functions) but their UI is so noisy and I don't need the extra fueatures. And a Mp3Tag is actually EasyTag not as good as Mp3Tag, but together with MusicBrainz Picard I was actually faster than with Mp3Tag. For listening music I actually like/liked Clementine besides the horrible UI but for Mac I liked iTunes, as well which a lot of people don't like. Before the akward update on iTunes it also had a pretty neat way to create dynamic playlists for certain types of genres, now you can only do that globally since than I also started to use Clementine.
nkkollaw 10y ago
You might want to take a look at Spotify, they offer a Linux version.
dedosk 10y ago
Amarok? Have you tried that one?
- purerandomness 10y ago
  In case you're being serious, Amarok is highly unstable, bloated ("unresponsive UI"/"high CPU"), is a great academic example of extremely bad usability, and doesn't even want to start trying to compete feature-wise with foobar.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    Amarok has been horrible since they redesigned it for version 2/ kde 4. Amarok 1.4 was the best music player I've seen and, I believe, one of the inspirations for foobar2000
    - wander_homer 10y ago
      foobar2000 and Amarok both did their first public releases roughly at the same time (foobar2000 end of 2002, Amarok June 2003).
    - rockdoe 10y ago
      foobar2000 was written by a former Winamp/Nullsoft contractor and the initial version was jokingly called "notepad" to emphasize functionality over skinning. It's safe to say it has exactly nothing whatsoever to do with Amarok.
    - santix 10y ago
      I agree. You should check out Clementine, a port of Amarok 1.4.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
    These days I just use mpd for playing music and icecast to stream it to wherever I want to listen to it.
  - dedosk 10y ago
se6 10y ago
Have a look at gmusicbrowser. You might be surprised. I also used to use foobar2000 on windows... years ago...
michaelmrose 10y ago
This reminds me so much of several people I've heard complaining that Linux doesn't have nodepad++.
- rockdoe 10y ago
  And the prize for the worst analogy goes to... Linux doesn't have anything like foobar2000. Note even close. The feeble attempts to name alternatives in this thread are evidence of it. You need to compose several other tools to get the major functions and you'll still end up with half the functionality (and 10 times the bloat!).
  - michaelmrose 10y ago
    So did you mean to say you can get 95% of the functionality with a few lightweight tools?
    - wander_homer 10y ago
      And can you name those lightweight tools, which work together nicely, use fewer resources and do almost everything foobar2000 does? Here's a short list of requirements: 1. proper gapless-playback (which eliminates all GStreamer based players) 2. DSP support (during playback and when converting files) 3. ReplayGain support 4. Something like: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title_Formatting_Reference http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title_... which works everywhere (converter, tagger, searching, UI (columns, window title, status bar, ...), album art fetching, grouping, ...) 5. an SDK to allow equally powerful plugins 6. Custom keyboard shortcuts for everything (e.g. quickly switch the current DSP profile when you plug in headphones) 7. Auto-playlists 8. Automatically detect changes in the file system and update library accordingly 9. A powerful query language: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Query_syntax http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Query_... 10. CUE sheet support
amlib 10y ago
Try Musicbrainz picard for a tagger. As for foobar2000... I think nothing on any other platform replaces it, even on windows. You could try quodlibet which has tons of features, but it isn't as fast when dealing with hundreds of thosands of songs on a music library and only supports gstreamer as a decoder (which i think sucks). But it has a good interface, multiple ways of displaying your library, proper tag support (instead of just fully supporting a few tags for sorting and stuff). In my setup I end up selecting audacious as the default player, which has a lot of similarities to winamp and some with foobar, but audacious sucks for music libraries. Instead, I keep quodlibet for that task. When I open a random file from the internet or from the file browser, audacious steps in with it's great audio format support, simple and fast interface. When I want to include a song or an album into my collection, it goes trough Musicbrainz picard, then properly installed in the music library directory hierarchy and finally it's available in quodlibet.
agumonkey 10y ago
foobar2000 still surprises me even years after using it on Windows, and years of dropping it since moving to archlinux. That thing is as small as beautiful, and small it is. The mp3 editor which not even an editor, just a "collection" aware property dialog is unbelievably efficient. I was about to ask for contribution (code then money) to this project now that I'm old enough to appreciate that.
cmiles74 10y ago
I've been happy with Beets for the organizing. It'll fetch data from MusicBrainz, Discogs, Beatport, etc. It'll weed out duplicate tracks, etc. http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/

nunodonato 10y ago

Of all the things you could use wine for.. an mp3 player, really? I can name maybe a dozen that do all that foobar2000 does

maxerickson 10y ago
I can name maybe a dozen that do all that foobar2000 does Do it. Be sure to show how the mass tagger works in each one of them. Especially the pattern matching to extract data from filenames, I really like that feature.
- necessity 10y ago
  Why use MP3 tags anyway? I don't understand, they're so burdensome to manage. I just do: ./Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3 It'll work with any music player and you can organize it even on a toaster, as long as it has coreutils. I use plain old mplayer to listen to music, just cd into the directory I want and call a script I made which is basically a glorified `find | xargs mplayer` (actually outputs the filenames to a playlist and makes mplayer read from it in slave mode so I can control it with keyboard shortcuts - from other workspaces, etc).
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    Because a database is more powerful than a bunch of strings (I treat the tags in the file as the canonical representation; foobar2000 is happy to build an index from that info.). For instance, add listening to tracks where an artist is featured to your system and you start having to account for it each time you bust out your coreutils. Move it into a tag and you only have to account for it when it is of interest.
  - colanderman 10y ago
    Many song titles have characters which are not legal in a filename, and this varies by OS.
    - darklajid 10y ago
      While I agree with the rest of the features missing (folders vs. tags, basically), can you name these characters for me? I would expect that most operating systems can accept most characters. Right, path separators are out, there are binary characters that aren't allowed (but then again - you have a hard time printing those on your CD booklet), so I'm genuinely curious where this falls short.
      - CrazedGeek 10y ago
        The problem isn't the quantity of characters disallowed, it's that they cover some reasonably common characters in tags. From the list of restricted characters on NTFS: \ / : * ? " < > | There are a lot of artists, albums, and songs that use the forward slash (AC/DC, Less Than Jake's TV/EP), colon (Bandits of the Acoustic Revolution's "Intro: This is a Call to Arms"), asterisk (some releases of Serj Tankian's "Beethoven's Cunt"), question mark (Arctic Monkeys' "What If You Were Right the First Time?", David Bowie's "Life on Mars?"), and double quotation mark (David Bowie's "Heroes", Fall Out Boy's ""Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today""). As a stickler for having a well-organized music library, not being able to use those characters in my organization would be a bit grating.
  - wander_homer 10y ago
    And by that you lose quite a lot of flexibility. How do you listen to all the classical music that was composed in the 19th century, and was added during the last month to your library? With foobar2000 (or other players) this can be done in a matter of seconds, and you can create an auto playlist based on those criteria which updates automatically when you add new songs or songs no longer match.
    - necessity 10y ago
      Well if you need that then use mp3 tags. I never had that need.
  - awqrre 10y ago
    Can you filter by genre? I know that you could do something like ./Genre/Artist/Year - Album/Track - Title.mp3 but there is possibly other elements that are useful in mp3 tags... and what if one song could be classified in multiple genres? would you keep multiple copies?
    - necessity 10y ago
      symlinks.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - gnud 10y ago
    Then you can't find symphonies by different composers, performed by different orchestras, but with the same conductor. Unfortunately, this is also close to impossible in online music services, in my experience.
    - necessity 10y ago
      Sure you can , find | grep.
- CrazedGeek 10y ago
  Quod Libet/Ex Falso have pattern matching for tags: https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/editing_tags.html https://quodlibet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guide/editing_tag...
- jakobdabo 10y ago
  Not the GP, but DeaDBeeF is a really good and extendable (by plugins) audio player. I myself switched from foobar2000 years ago and there isn't much that I miss. I'm not sure whether there is the pattern matching feature (or a plugin), but I think it may be achieved using the Shellexec plugin and some scripting.
  - wander_homer 10y ago
    DeaDBeeF is great - I'm one of the developers - but there's still a lot to do before we come to feature parity with foobar2000 and have the same quality. E.g. an often requested feature which is still missing is a media library, with a proper query language so you can do stuff like: %genre% HAS progressive AND %added% DURING LAST 4 WEEKS
    - morsch 10y ago
      Store the metadata in SQLite and expose the SQL SELECT interface.
      - wander_homer 10y ago
        Yes, we already discussed that at some point but we haven't decided yet how to implement it. We don't like how most players perform which use SQLite as their database backend, but we do like how foobar2000 performs with its custom database and ~100,000 tracks with arbitrary tag fields. Maybe others who use SQLite do something wrong, maybe SQLite isn't the right tool for the job and maybe there's a third option worth considering. Once we get some time and motivation to build some prototypes we'll hopefully find that out.
        rockdoe 10y ago
        SQLite is nice but using it blindly leads to suffering. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Avoid_SQLite_In_Your_Next_Firefox_Feature https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Avoid_SQLite_In_Your_Ne...
- btschaegg 10y ago
  To me, listening to and tagging music seem to be two rather orthogonal problems. There are very good tagging applications that don't actually play the files. My current favorite definitely is beets (http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/), although it may take some minutes to set up (at least if you want the hashing feature where the audio itself is used to look up metadata). Another (rather old) Windows-Application that was very useful for tagging was "The GodFather".
  - eikenberry 10y ago
    Another decent tagging application is tagtool (http://sourceforge.net/projects/tagtool/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/tagtool/), which is packaged for Debian and its offspring.
  - btschaegg 10y ago
    As an addendum for beets: If you're willing to experiment with a more radically different concept than most audioplayer applications provide, I would also recommend looking into MPD. There's a rather nice framework around it called Mopidy [1] which provides plugins for things like Spotify/Soundcloud support - and one such plugins provides integration with beets [2]. [1]: https://www.mopidy.com/ https://www.mopidy.com/ [2]: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Mopidy-Beets https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Mopidy-Beets
- topranks 10y ago
  EasyTAG works quite well for me on Linux for just that. Not sure if it has all the other features you need, and it's a standalone tagger, but works very well.
curiousgal 10y ago
I use it to run 1password and it works almost perfectly.

kensai 10y ago

As your handle is "wineisgreat", I assume your know your shit! :D

gield 10y ago
He created the account just for that comment

merb 10y ago

well I used mp3tag a lot, too. however I changed to MusicBrainz Picard after having a mac. For converting I actually found 'Soundconverter' the linux app the best, even tough dbpower amp is really great for mac and windows (and they have more functions) but their UI is so noisy and I don't need the extra fueatures. And a Mp3Tag is actually EasyTag not as good as Mp3Tag, but together with MusicBrainz Picard I was actually faster than with Mp3Tag. For listening music I actually like/liked Clementine besides the horrible UI but for Mac I liked iTunes, as well which a lot of people don't like. Before the akward update on iTunes it also had a pretty neat way to create dynamic playlists for certain types of genres, now you can only do that globally since than I also started to use Clementine.

nkkollaw 10y ago

You might want to take a look at Spotify, they offer a Linux version.

dedosk 10y ago

Amarok? Have you tried that one?

purerandomness 10y ago
In case you're being serious, Amarok is highly unstable, bloated ("unresponsive UI"/"high CPU"), is a great academic example of extremely bad usability, and doesn't even want to start trying to compete feature-wise with foobar.
- fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
  Amarok has been horrible since they redesigned it for version 2/ kde 4. Amarok 1.4 was the best music player I've seen and, I believe, one of the inspirations for foobar2000
  - wander_homer 10y ago
    foobar2000 and Amarok both did their first public releases roughly at the same time (foobar2000 end of 2002, Amarok June 2003).
  - rockdoe 10y ago
    foobar2000 was written by a former Winamp/Nullsoft contractor and the initial version was jokingly called "notepad" to emphasize functionality over skinning. It's safe to say it has exactly nothing whatsoever to do with Amarok.
  - santix 10y ago
    I agree. You should check out Clementine, a port of Amarok 1.4.
- fiddlerwoaroof 10y ago
  These days I just use mpd for playing music and icecast to stream it to wherever I want to listen to it.
- dedosk 10y ago

se6 10y ago

Have a look at gmusicbrowser. You might be surprised. I also used to use foobar2000 on windows... years ago...

michaelmrose 10y ago

This reminds me so much of several people I've heard complaining that Linux doesn't have nodepad++.

rockdoe 10y ago
And the prize for the worst analogy goes to... Linux doesn't have anything like foobar2000. Note even close. The feeble attempts to name alternatives in this thread are evidence of it. You need to compose several other tools to get the major functions and you'll still end up with half the functionality (and 10 times the bloat!).
- michaelmrose 10y ago
  So did you mean to say you can get 95% of the functionality with a few lightweight tools?
  - wander_homer 10y ago
    And can you name those lightweight tools, which work together nicely, use fewer resources and do almost everything foobar2000 does? Here's a short list of requirements: 1. proper gapless-playback (which eliminates all GStreamer based players) 2. DSP support (during playback and when converting files) 3. ReplayGain support 4. Something like: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title_Formatting_Reference http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title_... which works everywhere (converter, tagger, searching, UI (columns, window title, status bar, ...), album art fetching, grouping, ...) 5. an SDK to allow equally powerful plugins 6. Custom keyboard shortcuts for everything (e.g. quickly switch the current DSP profile when you plug in headphones) 7. Auto-playlists 8. Automatically detect changes in the file system and update library accordingly 9. A powerful query language: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Query_syntax http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Query_... 10. CUE sheet support

amlib 10y ago

Try Musicbrainz picard for a tagger. As for foobar2000... I think nothing on any other platform replaces it, even on windows. You could try quodlibet which has tons of features, but it isn't as fast when dealing with hundreds of thosands of songs on a music library and only supports gstreamer as a decoder (which i think sucks). But it has a good interface, multiple ways of displaying your library, proper tag support (instead of just fully supporting a few tags for sorting and stuff). In my setup I end up selecting audacious as the default player, which has a lot of similarities to winamp and some with foobar, but audacious sucks for music libraries. Instead, I keep quodlibet for that task. When I open a random file from the internet or from the file browser, audacious steps in with it's great audio format support, simple and fast interface. When I want to include a song or an album into my collection, it goes trough Musicbrainz picard, then properly installed in the music library directory hierarchy and finally it's available in quodlibet.

agumonkey 10y ago

foobar2000 still surprises me even years after using it on Windows, and years of dropping it since moving to archlinux. That thing is as small as beautiful, and small it is. The mp3 editor which not even an editor, just a "collection" aware property dialog is unbelievably efficient. I was about to ask for contribution (code then money) to this project now that I'm old enough to appreciate that.

cmiles74 10y ago

I've been happy with Beets for the organizing. It'll fetch data from MusicBrainz, Discogs, Beatport, etc. It'll weed out duplicate tracks, etc. http://beets.io/ http://beets.io/