7 ms·

DeaDBeeF – A modular audio player for Unix-like systems

157 points by marcodiego 6y ago

minimaul 6y ago
I'm a big DeaDBeeF user on mac, and it has reasonable Cocoa UI (so it looks and feels native!) - this is actually pretty unusual for players on the platform! I make a few tweaks (it's open source, so you can!), but it is very pleasant to use and lets me treat my music as just a collection of playlists rather than railroading me into a big complicated media library tracking system. Additionally, the main developer is pretty active and it is getting a lot of love in bugfixes and updates for newer macOS, and pull requests and issues get actively looked at as well. edit: oh, and the codebase was quite nice and easy for me to dig into as well :)
- brazzledazzle 6y ago
  What tweaks do you make? (If you don’t mind sharing.)
  - minimaul 6y ago
    They're all visual appearance tweaks - the mac version doesn't have as many customisation options yet - but it's being worked on!
gourneau 6y ago
I have been looking for a good media player for m4a files with lots of tracks. This is the only one I have found that supports titles for all tracks correctly.
broodbucket 6y ago
deadbeef is good. took a lot of setting up to get it the way I like it. I always found things to nitpick about music players, at least with deadbeef you fight with the layout editor then you have noone to nitpick but yourself
ShroudedNight 6y ago
I used Foobar2000 for years in order to keep using OzoneMP after Winamp had fallen off the wagon. Based on what I remember of the software license for plugins (modified BSD with a no reverse engineering clause added if I recall correctly), it seemed clear that the devs felt that there was some secret property to their implementation that they wanted to protect. It wasn't obvious to me what that was, though, beyond maybe replaygain or floating point audio. Was there something specific? Does DeaDBeeF player also provide this alleged advantage?
- rockdoe 6y ago
  The plugin license didn't allow hooking/injecting into the program to modify the behavior outside of the provided APIs. The reasons are pretty simple: those kind of plugins would break and cause crashes when the internals of the player were changed.
Toutouxc 6y ago
I used to be a huge foobar2000 fan with a huge FLAC library. A bit later I got used to iTunes, because there was no good foobar2000 alternative on macOS, and I dialed back the library. Then I said fuck it and moved all the way over to Spotify, trading music quality (and UI) for discoverability. And I don't see myself going back.
- p1necone 6y ago
  If a music streaming service came out that had a good API for integrating with 3rd party UIs I would switch in a heartbeat. For now Spotify is still a better experience than maintaining my own collection though.
  - voltaireodactyl 6y ago
    For what it’s worth, Roon + Tidal has been exactly that for me and since I started using both together, I’ve heard (and subsequently purchased) more good music in the four months I’ve been using in than in the four years before.
    - pixiemagic 6y ago
      I've always thought it looks great, but it's incredibly expensive. $700 for a lifetime license... even if it was $300 it'd be easier to stomach. What makes it worth it for you?
      - voltaireodactyl 6y ago
        I was right there with you in terms of expense/looks-great uncertainty. What ultimately changed my mind was last year they did a 4-months-for-$4 deal, and that was finally a long enough time for me to really test it out and see if I dug it. The short version is: if you have a large local library I think Roon at least is great, and Tidal makes it a little more fun. The long version: I know it's a lot of money, and I'm not looking to die on this hill, but here's the bullet point list of why it really works for me: - I have a large (400gb) lossless local library, and I really wanted an intelligent way to just put it on "random", if that makes sense. So the truly killer feature for me is being able to play an album/song -- and then have that mood continue afterwards without my interaction. My own local Spotify is worth quite a bit to me, as it turns out. - related to the above -- I'm aware lifetime license means just the company, and I've been bitten before. But the people behind it have specifically stated that, in the event of a buyout or closing of shop, they would release a final "untethered" version of their product. They also apparently have a history of supporting products in similar ways, since I believe their previous, defunct companies servers are still operational. - The metadata/connections are pretty fabulous. They have coverage for a significant amount of niche artists, and plenty of backup photos/notes. They do a great job of connecting musicians in the same "scenes" too, so I've had fun exploring my own library wiki-style and learning influences and collaborations I would never know otherwise. - the wide cross-compatibility with other audio hardware. Not something I've explored much, but very reassuring since I can make it play out of pretty much anything I want. - I realize Tidal is somewhat opposed to the local-Spotify goal I listed up top, but Tidal also had a deal at the same time, so I figured why not. - What ends up happening is that I listen to an album or two I own, get busy in something -- then realize it's switched to Tidal and it's something I've never heard/like. I then go on Bandcamp and buy the album, thus adding it to my local library. So it's given me this nice loop of discovery, to collection, to adding it to the main queue for when I switch to library-only mode. ()I was also fortunate enough to have a job during this pandemic, so I figured I could use the stimulus for something I would not otherwise purchase -- the lifetime license.) CONS: - Lossless music isn't a dealbreaker in a streaming service for me, so I do wish they integrated with something a little cheaper like Apple Music or even Spotify. But I get that's against their Audiophiliac Code of Conduct, and I can live with it. - No good way to use it remotely, like in the car. Hopefully that'll be a part of 2.0.
imiric 6y ago
Looks great, foobar2000 was my player of choice many years ago on Windows. But these days I prefer the simplicity of mpv even for audio. It supports most audio formats, M3U playlists and HTTP, since I don't keep music locally anymore, and shows metadata and album art just fine, with a consistent UI across platforms and very lightweight on resources. Turns out I don't need much more than that. It's even extensible with Lua, so scrobbling is also supported: https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli/blob/master/last.fm/mpv-lastfm.lua https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli/blob/master/last.fm/mpv-l... .
- scaladev 6y ago
  mpv also works fine as an image viewer if you don't view many high-res photographs (I don't). https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7983 https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7983
asicsp 6y ago
When I switched to Linux, I installed Wine just so I can use foobar2000. The main things I wanted was multiple playlists, shuffle (which should remain in that order until changed again - one of the reasons to shift from other players) and play again exactly from where it was left off on a reboot. Once I came to know about deadbeef and found these features were present, I switched to it.
benrbray 6y ago
How is the tagging system in DeaDBeef? My music library has grown exponentially in the past year or so, due to boredom during covid, and I've come to the conclusion that playlists (as in, static lists of music files that you need to update manually) are functionally useless for large libraries. What I've been looking for, but so far haven't been able to find, is a system that creates playlists from queries to my music database, based on tags I assign to individual songs. Even better if I can use a logic programming / query language like Datalog to help simplify tagging! For instance, if I have songs with the following tags: (Song 1) japan 1971 japanese jazz funk fusion female (Song 2) japan 2004 instrumental math-rock (Song 3) japan 1983 japanese enka female (Song 4) korea 1983 japanese rock male (Song 5) brazil 1973 spanish jazz instrumental (Song 6) mali 1979 blues rock folk tuareg (Song 7) algeria 1974 french folk I should be able to define logic rules that make tagging easier. Ideally, the tagging system should automatically write any deduced tags as metadata for the original files (for compatibility with other music players), with some way to keep track of which tags were added automatically vs manually, in case the deduction rules change. asia(x) :- japan(x) OR korea(x) or ... africa(x) :- algeria(x) OR egypt(X) OR ... latin(x) :- mexico(x) OR brazil(x) or ... rock(x) :- math-rock(x) etc I should be able to create playlists from the following queries that automatically update themselves when I add new music: (playlist 1) ?- language(x,"french") AND region(x, "africa") AND (1960 < year < 1970) (playlist 2) ?- region(x,"asia") AND genre(x,"rock") Apologies for the inconsistent syntax, but hopefully you get the rough idea. Does anything like this exist? The built-in Rhythmbox music player for linux has decent support for saving playlists based on tags, but there's no built-in system for logic programming based on tags.
- brnt 6y ago
  I use Quodlibet and it allows you to construct such queries.
- butz 6y ago
  I vaguely remember one music player having support for SQL queries for playlist building, seemed novel at the time, but now I cannot find the name of it.
  - 6y ago
4bpp 6y ago
Happy long-term user here. I switched to DeaDBeeF from foobar2k shortly after I made the move to desktop Linux a good decade ago, since fb2k only ran very awkwardly in Wine at the time. One advantage of DB is how simple and elegant its plugin API is. I remember fb2k's being the worst of the early-2000s high corporate C++ style (with a thicket of templated factory classes that were completely opaque to debuggers and IDEs); in comparison, DB's is a straightforward plain C interface with nary an unnecessary moving part.
raziel2p 6y ago
Looks amazing! I really miss foobar2000 for its album organization possibilities - but at the same time I don't miss having to maintain mp3 files on my hard drive, so I'm still contempt enough with Spotify even though its interface is designed for a completely different target audience than me.
ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
DeadBeeF is probably the best nix-first GUI player out there, but even though it's not a new project, some parts of the UI still seriously lag behind Foobar2000. Some wishes from me, from memory: - You can't use more than one scrobbling service simultaneously. - You can't tweak parameters of burnt-in converter settings - You can't easily switch the language of the interface (It just drives me nuts when software and internet pages assume the language)
- mariusor 6y ago
  > You can't use more than one scrobbling service simultaneously. Well, I have the perfect solution for you. :) It's not a deadbeef plugin, but a user daemon that can load the track information from any player and can submit to Last.fm, Libre.fm and ListenBrainz. The project is on github[1] and I believe it's packaged for Archlinux, Fedora, openSUSE. [1] https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler
haspok 6y ago
Happy long-term user here. I'm probably one of the few people who have an extended mp3 collection in "physical files" (is that a thing nowadays?) stored on a physical hard drive, some of which I actually grabbed myself from CD, casettes, even vinyl. I've never used iTunes or any online streaming service. If I need something I don't have on my disk, I just go to Youtube. In the late 90s I was a happy Winamp user, because back then it was just a player and not much else. Deadbeef is exactly that, it works perfectly under linux (KDE), it is very unobtrusive, can be controlled by the media keyboard buttons if needed, in general, it just gets out of the way and does one thing and one thing well (play music, that is, preferably in the background).
dgellow 6y ago
In the same idea of "foobar2k clone", I used Foobnix when I was using linux as my main OS: http://foobnix.com/en/index.html http://foobnix.com/en/index.html.
knuthsat 6y ago
Nothing came close to the Foobar conversion interface. I didn't have to bother with splitting album flac files, tagging, picking v0/v2/v3, everything just a click away once it's inside Foobar. I've been using Flacon, MusicBrainz and a combination of shntools but Foobar experience was miles ahead. Will give this one a try.
grinchygrinch 6y ago
I sigh every time someone says deadbeef is great alternative to foobar2000. The greatest thing about foobar2000 is media library which deadbeef doesn't even have. Actually, no other player on the planet can compete with foobar's media library. I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it and I can access it in foobar. Sometimes, I listen to a random track and decide I want to hear everything from this artist that I have in library. I press 'a' on a selected track and I see everything from this artist. I press 'A' on a track and I get everything from this album. I press 'q', type few letters in search bar, press enter and I get new playlist with the results. I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it. Quite useful if I want to move it somewhere else or copy it or rename or whatever. These are all my custom shortcuts but I love the fact that you can assign shortcut to virtually anything. There's also tag editor and format converter. There's also really cool feature that you can queue any file you double click in file explorer in its own playlist (I call this playlist Inbox), so that the playlist I'm currently listening is unmodified. Closest thing I found on Linux is ncmpcpp and it's still a far cry from everything I can do in foobar2000.
- pjc50 6y ago
  > I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/obtaining-directory-change-notifications https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/obtain... ; the Linux equivalent is "inotify". > I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13680415/how-to-open-explorer-with-a-specific-file-selected https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13680415/how-to-open-exp... On Linux, you'd have to do some kind of GNOME integration I am not familiar with. The Windows shell integration is a very handy API, although you have to do the usual digging for explanations and examples.
  - totetsu 6y ago
    i always just used foobar in wine. I wonder if its so quick when doing so.
globular-toast 6y ago
For me, foobar2k was never really about the UI. It was about the audio engine. It was the only player at the time I could trust to just do the right thing. Whenever I have tried any "fb2k-like" players they have only focussed on the UI but have the same shoddy audio engine as everything else. Is this any different?
jasperry 6y ago
Could anyone comment on how deadbeef compares to audacious on Linux?
- greatquux 6y ago
  I'd be interested in that too, since audacious is what I usually run when I just want to listen to some random file, or live music where I need gapless mp3 support (what other players support it?) If I want access to my library I've been using Strawberry for that which is pretty good.
person_of_color 6y ago
I’m surprised Spotify didn’t kill people’s music libraries.
- hulitu 6y ago
  The problem with streaming services is quality. They do not offer a minimum quality, just a maximum (up to xxx kbps). For some music it is just not enough.
- npteljes 6y ago
  The mainstream changed, but the collectors still collect.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Not everyone wants to rent their music, and have it taken away from them on a whim.
infernalsaint 6y ago
winamp succesor? how's it do with reskins?
jeffnappi 6y ago
All I could think about when I saw the title was 0xDEADBEEF: > 0xDEADBEEF or 3735928559 is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. 0xDEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized—when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the 0xDEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[1] [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html
- capableweb 6y ago
  I don't know anything about DeaDBeeF that this submission is about, but seems to also be a modular audio player, just like foobar2000, so feels like the name is a tribute to foobar2000.
raffraffraff 6y ago
But there is no library right? No database? I've always used a library, so how do I switch? Example: I have 50k tracks, and I've been using MusicBee (in wine) up to now. That lets me search using any tag, including user-defined tags, like a multi-value "instrument" tag, multi-value "moods" tag etc. (And these tags don't just live in the database, they're written to the track file so the data is portable, and I'm not locked into MusicBee) If DeaDBeeF has no library, how can I search for tracks that have mood tag "uplifting" and instrument tag "piano"? How do I create smart playlists based on some combination of rating, last played, moods, genres and instruments? My guess is, it can't. Or if it can, it's via adding all of my tracks to a playlist, waiting for the metadata to load up, and then search. Have I got that right?

157 points by marcodiego 6y ago

I'm a big DeaDBeeF user on mac, and it has reasonable Cocoa UI (so it looks and feels native!) - this is actually pretty unusual for players on the platform! I make a few tweaks (it's open source, so you can!), but it is very pleasant to use and lets me treat my music as just a collection of playlists rather than railroading me into a big complicated media library tracking system. Additionally, the main developer is pretty active and it is getting a lot of love in bugfixes and updates for newer macOS, and pull requests and issues get actively looked at as well. edit: oh, and the codebase was quite nice and easy for me to dig into as well :)

brazzledazzle 6y ago
What tweaks do you make? (If you don’t mind sharing.)
- minimaul 6y ago
  They're all visual appearance tweaks - the mac version doesn't have as many customisation options yet - but it's being worked on!

gourneau 6y ago

I have been looking for a good media player for m4a files with lots of tracks. This is the only one I have found that supports titles for all tracks correctly.

broodbucket 6y ago

deadbeef is good. took a lot of setting up to get it the way I like it. I always found things to nitpick about music players, at least with deadbeef you fight with the layout editor then you have noone to nitpick but yourself

ShroudedNight 6y ago

I used Foobar2000 for years in order to keep using OzoneMP after Winamp had fallen off the wagon. Based on what I remember of the software license for plugins (modified BSD with a no reverse engineering clause added if I recall correctly), it seemed clear that the devs felt that there was some secret property to their implementation that they wanted to protect. It wasn't obvious to me what that was, though, beyond maybe replaygain or floating point audio. Was there something specific? Does DeaDBeeF player also provide this alleged advantage?

rockdoe 6y ago
The plugin license didn't allow hooking/injecting into the program to modify the behavior outside of the provided APIs. The reasons are pretty simple: those kind of plugins would break and cause crashes when the internals of the player were changed.

Toutouxc 6y ago

I used to be a huge foobar2000 fan with a huge FLAC library. A bit later I got used to iTunes, because there was no good foobar2000 alternative on macOS, and I dialed back the library. Then I said fuck it and moved all the way over to Spotify, trading music quality (and UI) for discoverability. And I don't see myself going back.

p1necone 6y ago
If a music streaming service came out that had a good API for integrating with 3rd party UIs I would switch in a heartbeat. For now Spotify is still a better experience than maintaining my own collection though.
- voltaireodactyl 6y ago
  For what it’s worth, Roon + Tidal has been exactly that for me and since I started using both together, I’ve heard (and subsequently purchased) more good music in the four months I’ve been using in than in the four years before.
  - pixiemagic 6y ago
    I've always thought it looks great, but it's incredibly expensive. $700 for a lifetime license... even if it was $300 it'd be easier to stomach. What makes it worth it for you?
    - voltaireodactyl 6y ago
      I was right there with you in terms of expense/looks-great uncertainty. What ultimately changed my mind was last year they did a 4-months-for-$4 deal, and that was finally a long enough time for me to really test it out and see if I dug it. The short version is: if you have a large local library I think Roon at least is great, and Tidal makes it a little more fun. The long version: I know it's a lot of money, and I'm not looking to die on this hill, but here's the bullet point list of why it really works for me: - I have a large (400gb) lossless local library, and I really wanted an intelligent way to just put it on "random", if that makes sense. So the truly killer feature for me is being able to play an album/song -- and then have that mood continue afterwards without my interaction. My own local Spotify is worth quite a bit to me, as it turns out. - related to the above -- I'm aware lifetime license means just the company, and I've been bitten before. But the people behind it have specifically stated that, in the event of a buyout or closing of shop, they would release a final "untethered" version of their product. They also apparently have a history of supporting products in similar ways, since I believe their previous, defunct companies servers are still operational. - The metadata/connections are pretty fabulous. They have coverage for a significant amount of niche artists, and plenty of backup photos/notes. They do a great job of connecting musicians in the same "scenes" too, so I've had fun exploring my own library wiki-style and learning influences and collaborations I would never know otherwise. - the wide cross-compatibility with other audio hardware. Not something I've explored much, but very reassuring since I can make it play out of pretty much anything I want. - I realize Tidal is somewhat opposed to the local-Spotify goal I listed up top, but Tidal also had a deal at the same time, so I figured why not. - What ends up happening is that I listen to an album or two I own, get busy in something -- then realize it's switched to Tidal and it's something I've never heard/like. I then go on Bandcamp and buy the album, thus adding it to my local library. So it's given me this nice loop of discovery, to collection, to adding it to the main queue for when I switch to library-only mode. ()I was also fortunate enough to have a job during this pandemic, so I figured I could use the stimulus for something I would not otherwise purchase -- the lifetime license.) CONS: - Lossless music isn't a dealbreaker in a streaming service for me, so I do wish they integrated with something a little cheaper like Apple Music or even Spotify. But I get that's against their Audiophiliac Code of Conduct, and I can live with it. - No good way to use it remotely, like in the car. Hopefully that'll be a part of 2.0.

imiric 6y ago

Looks great, foobar2000 was my player of choice many years ago on Windows. But these days I prefer the simplicity of mpv even for audio. It supports most audio formats, M3U playlists and HTTP, since I don't keep music locally anymore, and shows metadata and album art just fine, with a consistent UI across platforms and very lightweight on resources. Turns out I don't need much more than that. It's even extensible with Lua, so scrobbling is also supported: https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli/blob/master/last.fm/mpv-lastfm.lua https://github.com/l29ah/w3crapcli/blob/master/last.fm/mpv-l... .

scaladev 6y ago
mpv also works fine as an image viewer if you don't view many high-res photographs (I don't). https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7983 https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/7983

asicsp 6y ago

When I switched to Linux, I installed Wine just so I can use foobar2000. The main things I wanted was multiple playlists, shuffle (which should remain in that order until changed again - one of the reasons to shift from other players) and play again exactly from where it was left off on a reboot. Once I came to know about deadbeef and found these features were present, I switched to it.

benrbray 6y ago

How is the tagging system in DeaDBeef? My music library has grown exponentially in the past year or so, due to boredom during covid, and I've come to the conclusion that playlists (as in, static lists of music files that you need to update manually) are functionally useless for large libraries. What I've been looking for, but so far haven't been able to find, is a system that creates playlists from queries to my music database, based on tags I assign to individual songs. Even better if I can use a logic programming / query language like Datalog to help simplify tagging! For instance, if I have songs with the following tags: (Song 1) japan 1971 japanese jazz funk fusion female (Song 2) japan 2004 instrumental math-rock (Song 3) japan 1983 japanese enka female (Song 4) korea 1983 japanese rock male (Song 5) brazil 1973 spanish jazz instrumental (Song 6) mali 1979 blues rock folk tuareg (Song 7) algeria 1974 french folk I should be able to define logic rules that make tagging easier. Ideally, the tagging system should automatically write any deduced tags as metadata for the original files (for compatibility with other music players), with some way to keep track of which tags were added automatically vs manually, in case the deduction rules change. asia(x) :- japan(x) OR korea(x) or ... africa(x) :- algeria(x) OR egypt(X) OR ... latin(x) :- mexico(x) OR brazil(x) or ... rock(x) :- math-rock(x) etc I should be able to create playlists from the following queries that automatically update themselves when I add new music: (playlist 1) ?- language(x,"french") AND region(x, "africa") AND (1960 < year < 1970) (playlist 2) ?- region(x,"asia") AND genre(x,"rock") Apologies for the inconsistent syntax, but hopefully you get the rough idea. Does anything like this exist? The built-in Rhythmbox music player for linux has decent support for saving playlists based on tags, but there's no built-in system for logic programming based on tags.

brnt 6y ago
I use Quodlibet and it allows you to construct such queries.
butz 6y ago
I vaguely remember one music player having support for SQL queries for playlist building, seemed novel at the time, but now I cannot find the name of it.
- 6y ago

4bpp 6y ago

Happy long-term user here. I switched to DeaDBeeF from foobar2k shortly after I made the move to desktop Linux a good decade ago, since fb2k only ran very awkwardly in Wine at the time. One advantage of DB is how simple and elegant its plugin API is. I remember fb2k's being the worst of the early-2000s high corporate C++ style (with a thicket of templated factory classes that were completely opaque to debuggers and IDEs); in comparison, DB's is a straightforward plain C interface with nary an unnecessary moving part.

raziel2p 6y ago

Looks amazing! I really miss foobar2000 for its album organization possibilities - but at the same time I don't miss having to maintain mp3 files on my hard drive, so I'm still contempt enough with Spotify even though its interface is designed for a completely different target audience than me.

ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago

DeadBeeF is probably the best nix-first GUI player out there, but even though it's not a new project, some parts of the UI still seriously lag behind Foobar2000. Some wishes from me, from memory: - You can't use more than one scrobbling service simultaneously. - You can't tweak parameters of burnt-in converter settings - You can't easily switch the language of the interface (It just drives me nuts when software and internet pages assume the language)

mariusor 6y ago
> You can't use more than one scrobbling service simultaneously. Well, I have the perfect solution for you. :) It's not a deadbeef plugin, but a user daemon that can load the track information from any player and can submit to Last.fm, Libre.fm and ListenBrainz. The project is on github[1] and I believe it's packaged for Archlinux, Fedora, openSUSE. [1] https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler https://github.com/mariusor/mpris-scrobbler

haspok 6y ago

Happy long-term user here. I'm probably one of the few people who have an extended mp3 collection in "physical files" (is that a thing nowadays?) stored on a physical hard drive, some of which I actually grabbed myself from CD, casettes, even vinyl. I've never used iTunes or any online streaming service. If I need something I don't have on my disk, I just go to Youtube. In the late 90s I was a happy Winamp user, because back then it was just a player and not much else. Deadbeef is exactly that, it works perfectly under linux (KDE), it is very unobtrusive, can be controlled by the media keyboard buttons if needed, in general, it just gets out of the way and does one thing and one thing well (play music, that is, preferably in the background).

dgellow 6y ago

In the same idea of "foobar2k clone", I used Foobnix when I was using linux as my main OS: http://foobnix.com/en/index.html http://foobnix.com/en/index.html.

knuthsat 6y ago

Nothing came close to the Foobar conversion interface. I didn't have to bother with splitting album flac files, tagging, picking v0/v2/v3, everything just a click away once it's inside Foobar. I've been using Flacon, MusicBrainz and a combination of shntools but Foobar experience was miles ahead. Will give this one a try.

grinchygrinch 6y ago

I sigh every time someone says deadbeef is great alternative to foobar2000. The greatest thing about foobar2000 is media library which deadbeef doesn't even have. Actually, no other player on the planet can compete with foobar's media library. I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it and I can access it in foobar. Sometimes, I listen to a random track and decide I want to hear everything from this artist that I have in library. I press 'a' on a selected track and I see everything from this artist. I press 'A' on a track and I get everything from this album. I press 'q', type few letters in search bar, press enter and I get new playlist with the results. I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it. Quite useful if I want to move it somewhere else or copy it or rename or whatever. These are all my custom shortcuts but I love the fact that you can assign shortcut to virtually anything. There's also tag editor and format converter. There's also really cool feature that you can queue any file you double click in file explorer in its own playlist (I call this playlist Inbox), so that the playlist I'm currently listening is unmodified. Closest thing I found on Linux is ncmpcpp and it's still a far cry from everything I can do in foobar2000.

pjc50 6y ago
> I'm not sure what kind of magic it uses, but the second I put new files in directories where my music is, foobar2000 sees it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/obtaining-directory-change-notifications https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/obtain... ; the Linux equivalent is "inotify". > I press 'o' on a track and it opens a file explorer in the location where the track is located and it also selects it https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13680415/how-to-open-explorer-with-a-specific-file-selected https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13680415/how-to-open-exp... On Linux, you'd have to do some kind of GNOME integration I am not familiar with. The Windows shell integration is a very handy API, although you have to do the usual digging for explanations and examples.
- totetsu 6y ago
  i always just used foobar in wine. I wonder if its so quick when doing so.

globular-toast 6y ago

For me, foobar2k was never really about the UI. It was about the audio engine. It was the only player at the time I could trust to just do the right thing. Whenever I have tried any "fb2k-like" players they have only focussed on the UI but have the same shoddy audio engine as everything else. Is this any different?

jasperry 6y ago

Could anyone comment on how deadbeef compares to audacious on Linux?

greatquux 6y ago
I'd be interested in that too, since audacious is what I usually run when I just want to listen to some random file, or live music where I need gapless mp3 support (what other players support it?) If I want access to my library I've been using Strawberry for that which is pretty good.

person_of_color 6y ago

I’m surprised Spotify didn’t kill people’s music libraries.

hulitu 6y ago
The problem with streaming services is quality. They do not offer a minimum quality, just a maximum (up to xxx kbps). For some music it is just not enough.
npteljes 6y ago
The mainstream changed, but the collectors still collect.
reaperducer 6y ago
Not everyone wants to rent their music, and have it taken away from them on a whim.

infernalsaint 6y ago

winamp succesor? how's it do with reskins?

jeffnappi 6y ago

All I could think about when I saw the title was 0xDEADBEEF: > 0xDEADBEEF or 3735928559 is frequently used to indicate a software crash or deadlock in embedded systems. 0xDEADBEEF was originally used to mark newly allocated areas of memory that had not yet been initialized—when scanning a memory dump, it is easy to see the 0xDEADBEEF. It is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. The DEC Alpha SRM console has a background process that traps memory errors, identified by PS as "BeefEater waiting on 0xdeadbeef".[1] [1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DEADBEEF.html

capableweb 6y ago
I don't know anything about DeaDBeeF that this submission is about, but seems to also be a modular audio player, just like foobar2000, so feels like the name is a tribute to foobar2000.

raffraffraff 6y ago

But there is no library right? No database? I've always used a library, so how do I switch? Example: I have 50k tracks, and I've been using MusicBee (in wine) up to now. That lets me search using any tag, including user-defined tags, like a multi-value "instrument" tag, multi-value "moods" tag etc. (And these tags don't just live in the database, they're written to the track file so the data is portable, and I'm not locked into MusicBee) If DeaDBeeF has no library, how can I search for tracks that have mood tag "uplifting" and instrument tag "piano"? How do I create smart playlists based on some combination of rating, last played, moods, genres and instruments? My guess is, it can't. Or if it can, it's via adding all of my tracks to a playlist, waiting for the metadata to load up, and then search. Have I got that right?