18 ms·

Foobar2000

298 points by niedzielski 5y ago

Kelamir 5y ago
Ah, Foobar2000. I loved using it back in Windows days. It works great, and supports a whole lot of music formats. I recommend it.
idiocrat 5y ago
My music player for the last 2 decades.
antihero 5y ago
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 Spotify radio. Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS. https://cog.losno.co/ https://cog.losno.co/
- konart 5y ago
  > Cog for something similar for macOS. https://swinsian.com/ https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.
- bingohbangoh 5y ago
  Music Forums (and 4chan) were amazing for discovery because you had people with extremely hard opinions arguing vociferously against others over which album was best or why such-and-such was awful. Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!" Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.
  - devonkim 5y ago
    TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software
    - COMMENT___ 5y ago
      Home ageing affects someone’s ability to maintain a standalone forum? Do you mean lack of free time?
      - bayindirh 5y ago
        Probably yes. As I move forward in life, my free time is dwindling faster than I like. Work responsibilities and other fun stuff seeps in. I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.
      - devonkim 5y ago
        Free time is one factor but other factors include declining health (people that have lived the touring lifestyle understand how harsh it can be physically) and dying. Add in children and the complications of having a 10 year old listen to Cannibal Corpse with you as a hypothetical situation. One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)
    - stemlord 5y ago
      There's also rateyourmusic.com which has a forum that I always thought of as the online hub for those who enjoy having petty arguments about all things music
    - bingohbangoh 5y ago
- zelag 5y ago
  oink and what.cd. Ahh, the memories.
  - JTon 5y ago
    <3
  - throwaway48375 5y ago
    RIP
  - sidpatil 5y ago
    what.cd was one of the greatest resources available on the Internet, in my opinion. Still sad it's gone. :-(
    - egeozcan 5y ago
      Yet another rewrite project that went nowhere, if I remember correctly. Or was that waffles.fm? I'm probably confusing the two. edit: ok I did confuse them, see reply
      - marpstar 5y ago
        You're thinking waffles.fm -- what.cd was seized by authorities. waffles didn't even come close to the glory of what.cd
        yawgmoth 5y ago
        Would you happen to know if the story is written out anywhere?
        philamonster 5y ago
        https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-raids-in-france-161117/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report... https://torrentfreak.com/music-group-confirms-what-cd-raid-claims-millions-in-losses-161118/ https://torrentfreak.com/music-group-confirms-what-cd-raid-c...
- timeon 5y ago
  This was same for me + early last.fm and sites like c8 [1]. Now I just obtain music from Bandcamp. And on my phone it is either bandcamp.app or decoupled.app [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/
- ksec 5y ago
  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 think it sounds better than AAC. The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties. Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    > Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022. Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.
  - elabajaba 5y ago
    Opus at 64k~=Mp3 128k. There's still interest in better audio codecs in the commercial world, it's just more focused on streaming audio and voice chat these days.
    - ksec 5y ago
      The last listening test put Opus at ~90Kbps = 128kbps Mp3.
      - elabajaba 5y ago
        https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,117489.0.html 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).
- pkulak 5y ago
  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
  - antihero 5y ago
    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.
- clearing 5y ago
  THANK YOU for this recommendation. I've been trying numerous iTunes/"Music" alternatives but none have stuck, or their price point doesn't make sense for the offering. This looks perfect!
  - noxvilleza 5y ago
    What about Clementine [https://www.clementine-player.org/ https://www.clementine-player.org/]? I used to love Amarok, so been using Clementine on Linux for the last few months.
    - pasdechance 5y ago
      Can't forget the Clementine fork https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
      - clearing 5y ago
        Ooh another good find. Like I mentioned above Clementine doesn't open at all for me, so maybe this is worth a shot.
      - noxvilleza 5y ago
        Ah, wasn't even aware of a fork (but makes sense!).
    - clearing 5y ago
      I was excited by Clementine but it doesn't even open for me on this version of OS X unfortunately.
- leokennis 5y ago
  For people who have multiple computers or are “on the move” a lot I can recommend https://asti.ga https://asti.ga Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.
  - dangravell 5y ago
    Maintainer and operator of Astiga here - thanks for mentioning the service!
- slg 5y ago
  >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 work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy. Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?
  - dest 5y ago
    At some point Subsonic/Airsonic had an integration with Last.fm to make smart playlists with music from your library
  - thelettere 5y ago
    I would suggest that there's an inherent trade-off at work here. It was more exciting largely because of the time and work involved.
    - slg 5y ago
      But Spotify isn't stopping you from dedicating that time and doing that work if you still have that desire.
  - antihero 5y ago
    > 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.
- pwenzel 5y ago
  On the Mac front I use and love Swinsian (https://swinsian.com https://swinsian.com). It's like iTunes as it was in 2001.
- dpcx 5y ago
  I remember setting up AudioGalaxy on my home machine and using their UI so that I could download stuff "from work" and have it available when I got home. It was great for my use!
- theptip 5y ago
  Agreed. Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing. It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.
  - nish_rev 5y ago
    Navidrome added a feature similar to what you're describing (they call it smart playlists https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/releases/tag/v0.47.0 https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/releases/tag/v0.47.0). Beets also has something similar (https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/smartplaylist.html https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/smartplaylist...). I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    > Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing. Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for. (N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)
  - digital_voodoo 5y ago
    That was and still is the main way I use music players. On any (new) platform I always look for the one that provides such possibilities. I was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.
- jeffnv 5y ago
  Ah soulseek! Those were the days. I'm sure I have a hard drive somewhere with like 100Gb of music from there.
beart 5y ago
I spent hours and hours customizing Foobar2000 and maintaining my library. At some point my database file was lost, and shortly after that I subscribed to Spotify. I wish I still had the time, because it was the best music player ever, and Spotify is really bad in every way other than cost.
- monkpit 5y ago
  I had a similar experience, I remember being mesmerized by the scrolling spectrogram as a teenager and wondering how it all worked. I used foobar2000 since it was lightning fast and I had systems with limited resources when I was younger. But, my music library is long gone (or on some deprecated google offering). I moved to Spotify 10+ years ago and haven’t really looked back. I use it for multiple hours a day and don’t really have any complaints.
asicsp 5y ago
When I moved to Ubuntu, I installed Wine just for Foobar2000. Eventually moved to DeadBeef, but I'm thankful to have used Foobar2000. Having a shuffled playlist that stays in that order was enough of a draw for me and the lightweight usage was just a bonus (compared to say itunes).
NikolaeVarius 5y ago
Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Doubtful. With Linux you can setup a streaming server and stream your music across different devices. You can automatically download covers and lyrics for each song and automatically organize and index your collection for search.
  - jjulius 5y ago
    ... you can do all of those things on Windows and Mac, too.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
    > You can automatically download covers and lyrics for each song and automatically organize and index your collection for search. I did this in like 2008 already, on windows.
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    I have yet to find a Linux app as amazing as mp3tag
    - rK5Q58 5y ago
      Idk what you mean by "Linux app" but I use beet[1] and it's superior to any manual tagger software I've used. [1] https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/
    - youngNed 5y ago
      I have to agree, and its a piece of software I think a lot about. It doesn't do anything particularly special, if you look at the list of features you could list off many others that do the same, and many do much more. I like cli software, and should be drawn to beets, but yet... but yet, i still paid 20 for mp3tag and i would do it again
sebow 5y ago
Good player, too bad i've given up on dreaming for a linux version.(Yes i know it 'works' under wine [which is what the snap version is based on])
s_m 5y ago
I loved Foobar2000 back in my Windows days. iTunes just wasn't as fun an experience.
bearjaws 5y ago
Love that this page is stuck in time with Rammstein - Mutter. I remember using FooBar simply because my system had so little RAM, iTunes was off the table.
causality0 5y ago
Foobar is my favorite Android music player. The UI is excellent and it's very fast.
goodguyamericun 5y ago
Why don't they just release foobar 2022? (Or outsource naming to Microsoft?)
r1ch 5y ago
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!
- galdosdi 5y ago
  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
  - stavros 5y ago
    Whereas ICQ already came with one.
  - hug 5y ago
    I wrote a reeaally primitive SMTP server in mIRC's scripting language. The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the "captcha" (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad -- think "jh412ec@[12.34.56.78]" -- that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC. The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs. It then read the body of the email and "clicked" every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials... and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined. Being k-lined wasn't an issue though. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute. Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.
hatware 5y ago
Anyone know why there's never been a linux version?
- totetsu 5y ago
  it always worked great via wine
- blibble 5y ago
  deadbeef is a pretty good cross platform clone
  - snvzz 5y ago
    It tries to, but isn't. I use both foobar2k and deadbeef depending on which OS I'm booted at. deadbeef is most blatantly missing a library; It has the playlists, but no library.
- triactual 5y ago
  It feels like there’s enough interest in these comments to make it happen with some organization.
otterpro 5y ago
If it wasn't for Foobar2000, I would've stayed with Winamp. It's so small, yet so configurable and extendable, that I still consider it the best music player for windows. Also I wished that they had foobar2000 on the Mac, which would replace my dependence on iTunes.
- jimdavenport 5y ago
  They do! It's nowhere near on-par with the Windows release but it can play your music: https://www.foobar2000.org/mac https://www.foobar2000.org/mac
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  There IS a Mac version of Foobar2K now; check the site! Just discovered this myself. However, another commenter mentioned that it's quite incomplete/different.
CA0DA 5y ago
I love foobar. Are there any alternative programs that are similar to Foobar2000 on Linux?
- iypx 5y ago
  As a long time foobar user, when switching to linux I only found quodlibet to be able to sort by multiple columns at the same time, quite buggy but kinda works, for a few days, then it resets for whatever reason. Gonna install wine and foobar again sometime in the coming days anyways. this one won't even let me edit the date field as YYYYMMDD, apparently it's an invalid format, and I use it for sorting..
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  Audacious is somewhat similar as a game emulation (eg. psf/spc) player, though I'm not sure if it's as powerful for building a media library.
  - Raphael 5y ago
    It can import a folder as a giant playlist, which effectively serves as the libary.
- Sniffnoy 5y ago
  I just run Foobar under Wine. It works fine.
nemof 5y ago
foobar2k + soulseek was a heady combination. one abiding memory was how fragmented the components for fbk2 were and how you had to search through the hydrogen audio forums for updates and they often got abandoned/picked up by someone else, and the forum community was incredibly unwelcoming! even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i'd love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.
slothtrop 5y ago
Customization still makes this a must for me. It's cool to have tree-view playlists that can link to youtube, or whatever else. You also don't need to uncompress your zip/rar archives to create playlists from them - which isn't very common, most other players won't allow you to play consecutive tracks from a compressed archive. Saves space and that's how I always liked organizing albums.
JohnTHaller 5y ago
Related: Does anyone have contact info for any of the foobar2000 folks? I'd love to get a portable package up on PortableApps.com.
- soulofmischief 5y ago
  FWIW, here is Peter's account on Hydrogen. I have not been able to find a public email address. https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?action=profile;u=84 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?action=profile;u=84
  - JohnTHaller 5y ago
    Thanks, dropped him a note.
ModernMech 5y ago
Ugh, I almost got detention in middle school because of this app. I was talking about it and the teacher overheard me, thought I was saying FUBAR. He pulled me into the hall and started chewing me out, and I had to be like "No, it's my music player." I remember the thing I really liked about it was all the custom skins it had.
- piaste 5y ago
  > thought I was saying FUBAR Wow, I thought FUBAR was an acronym invented specifically to be polite and not use the f-word explicitly.
  - mellavora 5y ago
    I heard it was military slang designed, so yes to drop the explicit f-word, but not to be polite, rather to have an acronym since so much else is an acronym SNAFU situation normal all fouled up FUBAR fouled up beyond all repair leading to the temp variable names "foo", "bar", and "baz"
Hamuko 5y ago
I used to use Foobar2000 back in the day. Tried to set it up on my gaming PC last year, but I didn't really have a clue as to how to set it up properly. Ended up just setting up Plex and Plexamp instead.
skocznymroczny 5y ago
Foobar2000 has a special place in my heart. Back on an old 486 120MHz machine, WinAmp was too heavyweight to play MP3 files smoothly, but Foobar2000 had no issues.
theandrewbailey 5y ago
I like and use Winamp more (mostly out of inertia and the UI), but I'll reach for Foobar2000 when I need to tag or convert a lot of files.
toastercat 5y ago
Found foobar2000 in 2005 when I wanted a lightweight music player to play heavy metal while I played Counter-Strike Source. 17 years later and it is still my music player of choice. I've gone through maybe 6 different UIs/skins with it, all of them wildly different. My most recent being a sort of "return to form" [0]. I've since also set up a Raspberry Pi with OMV installed to act as my music server, so I can access my library from around the house. [0] https://i.vgy.me/Bwv7Eq.png https://i.vgy.me/Bwv7Eq.png
- wodniok 5y ago
  Hi, can you share this theme?
  - toastercat 5y ago
    Sure. Since it's less of a theme and more of a custom configuration, here is a link to the installation (it's a portable install, so no need for folders in `AppData`. Just place this anywhere, and run foobar.exe): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j9yfv18j8b2mss4/AABgDgZUfm0KuvEi6WWifstQa?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j9yfv18j8b2mss4/AABgDgZUfm0KuvEi6... Additionally, I use the 'Fira Code' font for the UI, so you must have that installed if you want your foobar to look the same. That font is freely available here: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
petarb 5y ago
It’s nice to see this come up. This was my go to on Windows for many years until I switched to MacOS
jccalhoun 5y ago
I use foobar every day for playing streaming radio stations.
clearing 5y ago
Finally a chance to remind a captive music-piracy-nostalgic audience that Soulseek is still alive and well!
racuna 5y ago
I like Quodlibet, but I had to switch to Foobar2000 in my working laptop (Win10) because some library wasn't working properly. On my personal laptop (PCLinuxOS), Quodlibet is working fine. Both audio players are pretty bare bones until you start to customize them with their add-ons.
gglitch 5y ago
I didn't use it, but it looks to me like one of the main draws of foobar2000 was library/metadata management. I've only ever used directories in the filesystem as a "library," and have used many players over the years (mainly moc, which I love, but which doesn't bring anything especially valuable to the table--I mainly just like the UI and out-of-box key commands). Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software/vendor lock-in.
- afterburner 5y ago
  Agreed, I've always made sure that any metadata or info I truly care about in my MP3s is embedded in them and independent of platform. I like Foobar for some utility tasks, but I recently had to twist into a pretzel just to add a playback speed feature that at this point should be both standard and upfront in the UI, so I don't think Foobar is thaaat great.
- symlinkk 5y ago
  Foobar actually reads and writes to the ID3 tags on the actual music files themselves. So there is no lock in
- suby 5y ago
  Foobar had good options for using the filesystem as the library structure. Some of the options were user-made plugins rather than something available out of the box, but it all worked very well.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  I still use foobar2000. The library/metadata management it is quite proud of is entirely built on your existing folder structure (it does not mutate it; it auto-explores/watches it for changes) and your ID3 tags (which it only mutates on your explicit edits). That was a big deal at the time it launched, especially versus how Windows Media Player and iTunes both fought to control your folder structure, rearranged everything form time to time, and would update your ID3 tags at the whims of Microsoft's or Apple's "genius" tagging databases (which were often full of mistakes, especially for rare/weird files). Foobar2000 was the breath of fresh air opposite of "software/vendor lock-in" and a model that software today still often fails to live up to.
mariusor 5y ago
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.
- jopsen 5y ago
  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.
  - mariusor 5y ago
    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 https://britishseapower.bandcamp.com/album/disco-elysium)
- madars 5y ago
  100% agree. I also miss IrfanView. I ended up replacing foobar2000 with mpd+ncmpcpp for the lightweight experience but it is nowhere near the same. I have not seen any replacements for Total Commander and it doesn't work well enough under Wine so I keep a Windows VM around to use Total Commander over SMB.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Double Commander is near 100% clone of TC and cross-platform.
  - mariusor 5y ago
UI_at_80x24 5y ago
I switched to FooBar2000 shortly after it was started. IIRC it was mentioned in a /. thread and I enjoyed it right away. At this stage the available extensions were almost non-existent but the framework for depth & breath was there and looked promising. It was also one of my favorite interactions with contact directly with the programmer. At the time, there was some conflict in the forums with the developer about the distinction between "shuffle", and "random". Whenever you played songs from your playlist with 'Random' selected the same songs would play in the same order. I'd have a playlist containing over 100 songs and (for example) it would always play: 13, 72, 55, 31, 85, etc... until eventually restarted that order (without playing all songs in the playlist). The developer insisted the play order was random and he wouldn't fix it. He claimed that people were looking for a 'shuffle' feature and they refused to create one. The interaction always reminded me of this strip: https://xkcd.com/221/ Not long afterwards, I discovered Amarok from the KDE v3.5 days and stopped caring about Windows audio players.
nickjj 5y ago
Ah yes, foobar2000 and IrfanView. The 2 tools that I'll likely never replace. Been using them both for what seems like forever. Late 90s for IrfanView and foobar2000 since it came out, I remember switching to it from Winamp back in the day. Given how many positive comments there are for this tool, I think it's safe to say efficiency is a primary factor when choosing desktop apps. It's hard to replace something that works great, opens instantly and uses practically no resources. I forgot what box I had back then but I'm pretty sure it was a Pentium III 700@933mhz CPU, it was super smooth back then too.
widg3t 5y ago
My old fb2k - https://i.imgur.com/WVt3oCU.png https://i.imgur.com/WVt3oCU.png. Loved it dearly before Spotify became a thing... Soulseek -> MusicBrainz -> Foobar2000.
remram 5y ago
I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp's. Basically it had three panels, in order: Artists, Albums, Tracks (you could enable "Genre"/"Year"/... as well but I rarely did). So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc. All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums. I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks... [edit: screenshot to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4 https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4]
- HeXetic 5y ago
  > So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc. iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).
- deergomoo 5y ago
  I think there’s two things at play. One, small screens were never a good fit for that style of multi-panel UI. You could perhaps get away with it now, but we had years of small phones and iPods that were definitely not big enough. (FWIW, iTunes—or “Music” as it’s now called—has a UI option much like what you describe, though not enabled by default. It’s a trash fire of an app these days, but it bears mentioning.) Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix. It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.
wejick 5y ago
I used to play all my music using Billy [0]. It's very simple player, just a window with list of files to play. Until today I still see my sister is using it, while I have been spotify user for ages. [0] https://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html https://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html
baragiola 5y ago
Foobar2000 was by far the best player I've used on Windows
sohkamyung 5y ago
Question: How do you make Foobar2000 keep playing music when you close the lid of your laptop / turn off the screen on your tablet under Windows 10? I've tried the suggested steps in the Foobar2000 FAQ on this (enable an always play feature) but playback still stops for me.
surajs 5y ago
senorqa 5y ago
I frequently use foobar2000 on Linux just because of the Discogs Tagger plugin: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_discogs https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_discogs The other great feature is a very nice spectrogram which helps me to easily spot tracks which were converted from a lossy format to a lossless one. I wish the source code was open sourced so that a Linux port could be made without the need to run it via Wine.
- tonto 5y ago
  discogs tagger is amazing. so many cool plugins. another foobar feature I like are the autoplaylists. i really like having (from really any music player) a "recently added" and "recently played" autoplaylists and this can be quite difficult to get. itunes has it built in, foobar enables the autoplaylists, other apps make it...pretty hard
omar_alt 5y ago
Fond memories of What.cd, waffles.fm amongst others. I remember 12 years ago trying to get 30 or so FLAC albums into Foobar on a windows laptop I was taking with me on holiday. In order to display them as one collection the only obvious way to do this was to create individual playlists of each album and I think group them. When I shut my machine down I had the habit of using Ctrl+w to close everything but Foobar took this instruction as close and delete the playlist. When I revisited the app my library was empty. Back then I did not have the patience to rice Foobar up or explore the display configurations so that's where I gave up on Flac playback on a temp win machine. For OSX I was a big fan of the original incarnation of Vox and bought a Swinsian license which is still my primary music player. I hope with the cli app resurgence we get something that improves on Cmus as I have a lot of 24/96 Flac that isn't supported and would love to have something run near seamless in Linux. Props to all those sticking with winamp or playing .mod files
KTallguy 5y ago
I've been using foobar2000 since the 90s. It plays music effortlessly, but I also love the extensive tagging and ripping functionality. Another plus is its interface skinning flexibility. There are recently made "modern" looking themes if that's your thing. I'm currently using Georgia[0]. [0]https://github.com/kbuffington/Georgia https://github.com/kbuffington/Georgia
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  It's initial release was 2002, not that it's a meaningful difference.
  - KTallguy 5y ago
    Haha, thanks. Just more evidence that I'm getting old. It feels like I've been using it since I first touched a computer. But most likely I found my way from Winamp like most folks.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Foobar2000 and its plugin system always impressed me. Another piece of software from that era that had a similar plugin system was Miranda[1]. Their speed, small size, and customization with drop-in (like, literally drop a plugin into a folder) plugins has been a standard I try to meet with my own projects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_IM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_IM
AiAi 5y ago
This is by far the best music player I've ever used, and I tried a bunch of them (on Windows, macOS, and Linux). I would love to go back to foobar2000 again, and I hope to someday. And while I hate Spotify with passion, I do see the practicality of streaming services like that.
hettygreen 5y ago
Kinda strange to see all of the "OMG I remember this.. ". Foobar2000 is still what I use to listen to my FLAC collection while on my desktop computers. It's ability to let you do everything, rename, transcode, copy, tag, replaygain, etc is a throwback to when software respected your personal agency.
- dpark 5y ago
  I miss replaygain every time a playlist/station/whatever starts blasting or going nearly silent on me. I don’t actually miss curating a collection of mp3s.
oogetyboogety 5y ago
I spent many teenage years looking for a GTK Foobar2000 replacement for my Compiz/Gnome desktop. Finally settled on http://gmusicbrowser.org/ http://gmusicbrowser.org/ For large music libraries, UX on Gmusicbrowser was awesome. Wish newer GTK music players would take cues or I could find something similar.
k12sosse 5y ago
"Foobar2000 can do anything.. except a real dark mode" - my friend (I've been hearing about this for years)
anta40 5y ago
I still use foobar2000 on my Windows system, and still regularly update it. But once Winamp is alive again, I might change my mind...

Foobar2000

298 points by niedzielski 5y ago

Ah, Foobar2000. I loved using it back in Windows days. It works great, and supports a whole lot of music formats. I recommend it.

idiocrat 5y ago

My music player for the last 2 decades.

antihero 5y ago

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 Spotify radio. Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS. https://cog.losno.co/ https://cog.losno.co/

konart 5y ago
> Cog for something similar for macOS. https://swinsian.com/ https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
Music Forums (and 4chan) were amazing for discovery because you had people with extremely hard opinions arguing vociferously against others over which album was best or why such-and-such was awful. Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!" Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.
- devonkim 5y ago
  TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software
  - COMMENT___ 5y ago
    Home ageing affects someone’s ability to maintain a standalone forum? Do you mean lack of free time?
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      Probably yes. As I move forward in life, my free time is dwindling faster than I like. Work responsibilities and other fun stuff seeps in. I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.
    - devonkim 5y ago
      Free time is one factor but other factors include declining health (people that have lived the touring lifestyle understand how harsh it can be physically) and dying. Add in children and the complications of having a 10 year old listen to Cannibal Corpse with you as a hypothetical situation. One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)
  - stemlord 5y ago
    There's also rateyourmusic.com which has a forum that I always thought of as the online hub for those who enjoy having petty arguments about all things music
  - bingohbangoh 5y ago
zelag 5y ago
oink and what.cd. Ahh, the memories.
- JTon 5y ago
  <3
- throwaway48375 5y ago
  RIP
- sidpatil 5y ago
  what.cd was one of the greatest resources available on the Internet, in my opinion. Still sad it's gone. :-(
  - egeozcan 5y ago
    Yet another rewrite project that went nowhere, if I remember correctly. Or was that waffles.fm? I'm probably confusing the two. edit: ok I did confuse them, see reply
    - marpstar 5y ago
      You're thinking waffles.fm -- what.cd was seized by authorities. waffles didn't even come close to the glory of what.cd
      - yawgmoth 5y ago
        Would you happen to know if the story is written out anywhere?
        philamonster 5y ago
        https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-reported-raids-in-france-161117/ https://torrentfreak.com/what-cd-shuts-down-following-report... https://torrentfreak.com/music-group-confirms-what-cd-raid-claims-millions-in-losses-161118/ https://torrentfreak.com/music-group-confirms-what-cd-raid-c...
timeon 5y ago
This was same for me + early last.fm and sites like c8 [1]. Now I just obtain music from Bandcamp. And on my phone it is either bandcamp.app or decoupled.app [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/
ksec 5y ago
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 think it sounds better than AAC. The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties. Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
- egeozcan 5y ago
  > Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022. Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.
- elabajaba 5y ago
  Opus at 64k~=Mp3 128k. There's still interest in better audio codecs in the commercial world, it's just more focused on streaming audio and voice chat these days.
  - ksec 5y ago
    The last listening test put Opus at ~90Kbps = 128kbps Mp3.
    - elabajaba 5y ago
      https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,117489.0.html 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).
pkulak 5y ago
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
- antihero 5y ago
  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.
clearing 5y ago
THANK YOU for this recommendation. I've been trying numerous iTunes/"Music" alternatives but none have stuck, or their price point doesn't make sense for the offering. This looks perfect!
- noxvilleza 5y ago
  What about Clementine [https://www.clementine-player.org/ https://www.clementine-player.org/]? I used to love Amarok, so been using Clementine on Linux for the last few months.
  - pasdechance 5y ago
    Can't forget the Clementine fork https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/ https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
    - clearing 5y ago
      Ooh another good find. Like I mentioned above Clementine doesn't open at all for me, so maybe this is worth a shot.
    - noxvilleza 5y ago
      Ah, wasn't even aware of a fork (but makes sense!).
  - clearing 5y ago
    I was excited by Clementine but it doesn't even open for me on this version of OS X unfortunately.
leokennis 5y ago
For people who have multiple computers or are “on the move” a lot I can recommend https://asti.ga https://asti.ga Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.
- dangravell 5y ago
  Maintainer and operator of Astiga here - thanks for mentioning the service!
slg 5y ago
>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 work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy. Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?
- dest 5y ago
  At some point Subsonic/Airsonic had an integration with Last.fm to make smart playlists with music from your library
- thelettere 5y ago
  I would suggest that there's an inherent trade-off at work here. It was more exciting largely because of the time and work involved.
  - slg 5y ago
    But Spotify isn't stopping you from dedicating that time and doing that work if you still have that desire.
- antihero 5y ago
  > 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.
pwenzel 5y ago
On the Mac front I use and love Swinsian (https://swinsian.com https://swinsian.com). It's like iTunes as it was in 2001.
dpcx 5y ago
I remember setting up AudioGalaxy on my home machine and using their UI so that I could download stuff "from work" and have it available when I got home. It was great for my use!
theptip 5y ago
Agreed. Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing. It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.
- nish_rev 5y ago
  Navidrome added a feature similar to what you're describing (they call it smart playlists https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/releases/tag/v0.47.0 https://github.com/navidrome/navidrome/releases/tag/v0.47.0). Beets also has something similar (https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/smartplaylist.html https://beets.readthedocs.io/en/stable/plugins/smartplaylist...). I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  > Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing. Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for. (N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)
- digital_voodoo 5y ago
  That was and still is the main way I use music players. On any (new) platform I always look for the one that provides such possibilities. I was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.
jeffnv 5y ago
Ah soulseek! Those were the days. I'm sure I have a hard drive somewhere with like 100Gb of music from there.

beart 5y ago

I spent hours and hours customizing Foobar2000 and maintaining my library. At some point my database file was lost, and shortly after that I subscribed to Spotify. I wish I still had the time, because it was the best music player ever, and Spotify is really bad in every way other than cost.

monkpit 5y ago
I had a similar experience, I remember being mesmerized by the scrolling spectrogram as a teenager and wondering how it all worked. I used foobar2000 since it was lightning fast and I had systems with limited resources when I was younger. But, my music library is long gone (or on some deprecated google offering). I moved to Spotify 10+ years ago and haven’t really looked back. I use it for multiple hours a day and don’t really have any complaints.

asicsp 5y ago

When I moved to Ubuntu, I installed Wine just for Foobar2000. Eventually moved to DeadBeef, but I'm thankful to have used Foobar2000. Having a shuffled playlist that stays in that order was enough of a draw for me and the lightweight usage was just a bonus (compared to say itunes).

NikolaeVarius 5y ago

Foobar is one of the greatest pieces of software ever and Linux music software only dreams it can be as good as Foobar.

29athrowaway 5y ago
Doubtful. With Linux you can setup a streaming server and stream your music across different devices. You can automatically download covers and lyrics for each song and automatically organize and index your collection for search.
- jjulius 5y ago
  ... you can do all of those things on Windows and Mac, too.
- FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
  > You can automatically download covers and lyrics for each song and automatically organize and index your collection for search. I did this in like 2008 already, on windows.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  I have yet to find a Linux app as amazing as mp3tag
  - rK5Q58 5y ago
    Idk what you mean by "Linux app" but I use beet[1] and it's superior to any manual tagger software I've used. [1] https://beets.io/ https://beets.io/
  - youngNed 5y ago
    I have to agree, and its a piece of software I think a lot about. It doesn't do anything particularly special, if you look at the list of features you could list off many others that do the same, and many do much more. I like cli software, and should be drawn to beets, but yet... but yet, i still paid 20 for mp3tag and i would do it again

sebow 5y ago

Good player, too bad i've given up on dreaming for a linux version.(Yes i know it 'works' under wine [which is what the snap version is based on])

s_m 5y ago

I loved Foobar2000 back in my Windows days. iTunes just wasn't as fun an experience.

bearjaws 5y ago

Love that this page is stuck in time with Rammstein - Mutter. I remember using FooBar simply because my system had so little RAM, iTunes was off the table.

causality0 5y ago

Foobar is my favorite Android music player. The UI is excellent and it's very fast.

goodguyamericun 5y ago

Why don't they just release foobar 2022? (Or outsource naming to Microsoft?)

r1ch 5y ago

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!

galdosdi 5y ago
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
- stavros 5y ago
  Whereas ICQ already came with one.
- hug 5y ago
  I wrote a reeaally primitive SMTP server in mIRC's scripting language. The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the "captcha" (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad -- think "jh412ec@[12.34.56.78]" -- that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC. The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs. It then read the body of the email and "clicked" every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials... and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined. Being k-lined wasn't an issue though. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute. Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.

hatware 5y ago

Anyone know why there's never been a linux version?

totetsu 5y ago
it always worked great via wine
blibble 5y ago
deadbeef is a pretty good cross platform clone
- snvzz 5y ago
  It tries to, but isn't. I use both foobar2k and deadbeef depending on which OS I'm booted at. deadbeef is most blatantly missing a library; It has the playlists, but no library.
triactual 5y ago
It feels like there’s enough interest in these comments to make it happen with some organization.

otterpro 5y ago

If it wasn't for Foobar2000, I would've stayed with Winamp. It's so small, yet so configurable and extendable, that I still consider it the best music player for windows. Also I wished that they had foobar2000 on the Mac, which would replace my dependence on iTunes.

jimdavenport 5y ago
They do! It's nowhere near on-par with the Windows release but it can play your music: https://www.foobar2000.org/mac https://www.foobar2000.org/mac
JohnBooty 5y ago
There IS a Mac version of Foobar2K now; check the site! Just discovered this myself. However, another commenter mentioned that it's quite incomplete/different.

CA0DA 5y ago

I love foobar. Are there any alternative programs that are similar to Foobar2000 on Linux?

iypx 5y ago
As a long time foobar user, when switching to linux I only found quodlibet to be able to sort by multiple columns at the same time, quite buggy but kinda works, for a few days, then it resets for whatever reason. Gonna install wine and foobar again sometime in the coming days anyways. this one won't even let me edit the date field as YYYYMMDD, apparently it's an invalid format, and I use it for sorting..
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Audacious is somewhat similar as a game emulation (eg. psf/spc) player, though I'm not sure if it's as powerful for building a media library.
- Raphael 5y ago
  It can import a folder as a giant playlist, which effectively serves as the libary.
Sniffnoy 5y ago
I just run Foobar under Wine. It works fine.

nemof 5y ago

foobar2k + soulseek was a heady combination. one abiding memory was how fragmented the components for fbk2 were and how you had to search through the hydrogen audio forums for updates and they often got abandoned/picked up by someone else, and the forum community was incredibly unwelcoming! even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i'd love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.

slothtrop 5y ago

Customization still makes this a must for me. It's cool to have tree-view playlists that can link to youtube, or whatever else. You also don't need to uncompress your zip/rar archives to create playlists from them - which isn't very common, most other players won't allow you to play consecutive tracks from a compressed archive. Saves space and that's how I always liked organizing albums.

JohnTHaller 5y ago

Related: Does anyone have contact info for any of the foobar2000 folks? I'd love to get a portable package up on PortableApps.com.

soulofmischief 5y ago
FWIW, here is Peter's account on Hydrogen. I have not been able to find a public email address. https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?action=profile;u=84 https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?action=profile;u=84
- JohnTHaller 5y ago
  Thanks, dropped him a note.

ModernMech 5y ago

Ugh, I almost got detention in middle school because of this app. I was talking about it and the teacher overheard me, thought I was saying FUBAR. He pulled me into the hall and started chewing me out, and I had to be like "No, it's my music player." I remember the thing I really liked about it was all the custom skins it had.

piaste 5y ago
> thought I was saying FUBAR Wow, I thought FUBAR was an acronym invented specifically to be polite and not use the f-word explicitly.
- mellavora 5y ago
  I heard it was military slang designed, so yes to drop the explicit f-word, but not to be polite, rather to have an acronym since so much else is an acronym SNAFU situation normal all fouled up FUBAR fouled up beyond all repair leading to the temp variable names "foo", "bar", and "baz"

Hamuko 5y ago

I used to use Foobar2000 back in the day. Tried to set it up on my gaming PC last year, but I didn't really have a clue as to how to set it up properly. Ended up just setting up Plex and Plexamp instead.

skocznymroczny 5y ago

Foobar2000 has a special place in my heart. Back on an old 486 120MHz machine, WinAmp was too heavyweight to play MP3 files smoothly, but Foobar2000 had no issues.

theandrewbailey 5y ago

I like and use Winamp more (mostly out of inertia and the UI), but I'll reach for Foobar2000 when I need to tag or convert a lot of files.

toastercat 5y ago

Found foobar2000 in 2005 when I wanted a lightweight music player to play heavy metal while I played Counter-Strike Source. 17 years later and it is still my music player of choice. I've gone through maybe 6 different UIs/skins with it, all of them wildly different. My most recent being a sort of "return to form" [0]. I've since also set up a Raspberry Pi with OMV installed to act as my music server, so I can access my library from around the house. [0] https://i.vgy.me/Bwv7Eq.png https://i.vgy.me/Bwv7Eq.png

wodniok 5y ago
Hi, can you share this theme?
- toastercat 5y ago
  Sure. Since it's less of a theme and more of a custom configuration, here is a link to the installation (it's a portable install, so no need for folders in `AppData`. Just place this anywhere, and run foobar.exe): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j9yfv18j8b2mss4/AABgDgZUfm0KuvEi6WWifstQa?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j9yfv18j8b2mss4/AABgDgZUfm0KuvEi6... Additionally, I use the 'Fira Code' font for the UI, so you must have that installed if you want your foobar to look the same. That font is freely available here: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode

petarb 5y ago

It’s nice to see this come up. This was my go to on Windows for many years until I switched to MacOS

jccalhoun 5y ago

I use foobar every day for playing streaming radio stations.

clearing 5y ago

Finally a chance to remind a captive music-piracy-nostalgic audience that Soulseek is still alive and well!

racuna 5y ago

I like Quodlibet, but I had to switch to Foobar2000 in my working laptop (Win10) because some library wasn't working properly. On my personal laptop (PCLinuxOS), Quodlibet is working fine. Both audio players are pretty bare bones until you start to customize them with their add-ons.

gglitch 5y ago

I didn't use it, but it looks to me like one of the main draws of foobar2000 was library/metadata management. I've only ever used directories in the filesystem as a "library," and have used many players over the years (mainly moc, which I love, but which doesn't bring anything especially valuable to the table--I mainly just like the UI and out-of-box key commands). Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software/vendor lock-in.

afterburner 5y ago
Agreed, I've always made sure that any metadata or info I truly care about in my MP3s is embedded in them and independent of platform. I like Foobar for some utility tasks, but I recently had to twist into a pretzel just to add a playback speed feature that at this point should be both standard and upfront in the UI, so I don't think Foobar is thaaat great.
symlinkk 5y ago
Foobar actually reads and writes to the ID3 tags on the actual music files themselves. So there is no lock in
suby 5y ago
Foobar had good options for using the filesystem as the library structure. Some of the options were user-made plugins rather than something available out of the box, but it all worked very well.
WorldMaker 5y ago
I still use foobar2000. The library/metadata management it is quite proud of is entirely built on your existing folder structure (it does not mutate it; it auto-explores/watches it for changes) and your ID3 tags (which it only mutates on your explicit edits). That was a big deal at the time it launched, especially versus how Windows Media Player and iTunes both fought to control your folder structure, rearranged everything form time to time, and would update your ID3 tags at the whims of Microsoft's or Apple's "genius" tagging databases (which were often full of mistakes, especially for rare/weird files). Foobar2000 was the breath of fresh air opposite of "software/vendor lock-in" and a model that software today still often fails to live up to.

mariusor 5y ago

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.

jopsen 5y ago
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.
- mariusor 5y ago
  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 https://britishseapower.bandcamp.com/album/disco-elysium)
madars 5y ago
100% agree. I also miss IrfanView. I ended up replacing foobar2000 with mpd+ncmpcpp for the lightweight experience but it is nowhere near the same. I have not seen any replacements for Total Commander and it doesn't work well enough under Wine so I keep a Windows VM around to use Total Commander over SMB.
majkinetor 5y ago
Double Commander is near 100% clone of TC and cross-platform.
- mariusor 5y ago

UI_at_80x24 5y ago

I switched to FooBar2000 shortly after it was started. IIRC it was mentioned in a /. thread and I enjoyed it right away. At this stage the available extensions were almost non-existent but the framework for depth & breath was there and looked promising. It was also one of my favorite interactions with contact directly with the programmer. At the time, there was some conflict in the forums with the developer about the distinction between "shuffle", and "random". Whenever you played songs from your playlist with 'Random' selected the same songs would play in the same order. I'd have a playlist containing over 100 songs and (for example) it would always play: 13, 72, 55, 31, 85, etc... until eventually restarted that order (without playing all songs in the playlist). The developer insisted the play order was random and he wouldn't fix it. He claimed that people were looking for a 'shuffle' feature and they refused to create one. The interaction always reminded me of this strip: https://xkcd.com/221/ Not long afterwards, I discovered Amarok from the KDE v3.5 days and stopped caring about Windows audio players.

nickjj 5y ago

Ah yes, foobar2000 and IrfanView. The 2 tools that I'll likely never replace. Been using them both for what seems like forever. Late 90s for IrfanView and foobar2000 since it came out, I remember switching to it from Winamp back in the day. Given how many positive comments there are for this tool, I think it's safe to say efficiency is a primary factor when choosing desktop apps. It's hard to replace something that works great, opens instantly and uses practically no resources. I forgot what box I had back then but I'm pretty sure it was a Pentium III 700@933mhz CPU, it was super smooth back then too.

widg3t 5y ago

My old fb2k - https://i.imgur.com/WVt3oCU.png https://i.imgur.com/WVt3oCU.png. Loved it dearly before Spotify became a thing... Soulseek -> MusicBrainz -> Foobar2000.

remram 5y ago

I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp's. Basically it had three panels, in order: Artists, Albums, Tracks (you could enable "Genre"/"Year"/... as well but I rarely did). So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc. All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums. I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks... [edit: screenshot to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4 https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4]

HeXetic 5y ago
> So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc. iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).
deergomoo 5y ago
I think there’s two things at play. One, small screens were never a good fit for that style of multi-panel UI. You could perhaps get away with it now, but we had years of small phones and iPods that were definitely not big enough. (FWIW, iTunes—or “Music” as it’s now called—has a UI option much like what you describe, though not enabled by default. It’s a trash fire of an app these days, but it bears mentioning.) Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix. It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.

wejick 5y ago

I used to play all my music using Billy [0]. It's very simple player, just a window with list of files to play. Until today I still see my sister is using it, while I have been spotify user for ages. [0] https://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html https://www.sheepfriends.com/index-page=billy.html

baragiola 5y ago

Foobar2000 was by far the best player I've used on Windows

sohkamyung 5y ago

Question: How do you make Foobar2000 keep playing music when you close the lid of your laptop / turn off the screen on your tablet under Windows 10? I've tried the suggested steps in the Foobar2000 FAQ on this (enable an always play feature) but playback still stops for me.

surajs 5y ago

senorqa 5y ago

I frequently use foobar2000 on Linux just because of the Discogs Tagger plugin: https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_discogs https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_discogs The other great feature is a very nice spectrogram which helps me to easily spot tracks which were converted from a lossy format to a lossless one. I wish the source code was open sourced so that a Linux port could be made without the need to run it via Wine.

tonto 5y ago
discogs tagger is amazing. so many cool plugins. another foobar feature I like are the autoplaylists. i really like having (from really any music player) a "recently added" and "recently played" autoplaylists and this can be quite difficult to get. itunes has it built in, foobar enables the autoplaylists, other apps make it...pretty hard

omar_alt 5y ago

Fond memories of What.cd, waffles.fm amongst others. I remember 12 years ago trying to get 30 or so FLAC albums into Foobar on a windows laptop I was taking with me on holiday. In order to display them as one collection the only obvious way to do this was to create individual playlists of each album and I think group them. When I shut my machine down I had the habit of using Ctrl+w to close everything but Foobar took this instruction as close and delete the playlist. When I revisited the app my library was empty. Back then I did not have the patience to rice Foobar up or explore the display configurations so that's where I gave up on Flac playback on a temp win machine. For OSX I was a big fan of the original incarnation of Vox and bought a Swinsian license which is still my primary music player. I hope with the cli app resurgence we get something that improves on Cmus as I have a lot of 24/96 Flac that isn't supported and would love to have something run near seamless in Linux. Props to all those sticking with winamp or playing .mod files

KTallguy 5y ago

I've been using foobar2000 since the 90s. It plays music effortlessly, but I also love the extensive tagging and ripping functionality. Another plus is its interface skinning flexibility. There are recently made "modern" looking themes if that's your thing. I'm currently using Georgia[0]. [0]https://github.com/kbuffington/Georgia https://github.com/kbuffington/Georgia

boomboomsubban 5y ago
It's initial release was 2002, not that it's a meaningful difference.
- KTallguy 5y ago
  Haha, thanks. Just more evidence that I'm getting old. It feels like I've been using it since I first touched a computer. But most likely I found my way from Winamp like most folks.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Foobar2000 and its plugin system always impressed me. Another piece of software from that era that had a similar plugin system was Miranda[1]. Their speed, small size, and customization with drop-in (like, literally drop a plugin into a folder) plugins has been a standard I try to meet with my own projects. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_IM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_IM

AiAi 5y ago

This is by far the best music player I've ever used, and I tried a bunch of them (on Windows, macOS, and Linux). I would love to go back to foobar2000 again, and I hope to someday. And while I hate Spotify with passion, I do see the practicality of streaming services like that.

hettygreen 5y ago

Kinda strange to see all of the "OMG I remember this.. ". Foobar2000 is still what I use to listen to my FLAC collection while on my desktop computers. It's ability to let you do everything, rename, transcode, copy, tag, replaygain, etc is a throwback to when software respected your personal agency.

dpark 5y ago
I miss replaygain every time a playlist/station/whatever starts blasting or going nearly silent on me. I don’t actually miss curating a collection of mp3s.

oogetyboogety 5y ago

I spent many teenage years looking for a GTK Foobar2000 replacement for my Compiz/Gnome desktop. Finally settled on http://gmusicbrowser.org/ http://gmusicbrowser.org/ For large music libraries, UX on Gmusicbrowser was awesome. Wish newer GTK music players would take cues or I could find something similar.

k12sosse 5y ago

"Foobar2000 can do anything.. except a real dark mode" - my friend (I've been hearing about this for years)

anta40 5y ago

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