Foobar2000

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

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

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

I use Audacious on Ubuntu as I can almost get the same UI configuration as foobar2000, tabs of playlists which can be made on the fly or from saved files. A music player app is something I always use on the background, so all the fancy visualizations or album art are not so useful for me. It's also sad that the default music player on Ubuntu (Mate) doesn't have a volume control out of the box.

It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago.

Easy to do when you don't have bosses breathing down your neck about adding in podcasts and audiobooks, then nudging users into engaging with that stuff first so that they don't have to pay as much to the music rights holders.

It also just has superior functionality.

Want to mirror your front channels to your back channels? Easily done in foobar2k, while many other media players already fail here, even those whose main task is to do audio output.

the same UI

Haha, it's not the same even for any specific version. With plugins and ability to move panels around, it's hard to say all these UIs are the same player. Search for "foobar2000 theme" in google images

re: Quod Libet; thank you, these kinds of recommendations are invaluable for finding good tools. Especially these days with all the noise.

That's a funny name considering it was the Winamp creator's nickname and Foobar2000 itself is a Winamp clone.

I've been using VLC for Linux and mobile mp3s haven't tried FLAC though

I do like deadbeef. It's a nice player, but what I absolutely hate about it is that ctrl-w closes the current playlist (well, that's the hotkey I close my tabs with, too, so that's fine), but you cannot restore that (or am I missing some feature?). And I am a lazy guy that doesn't save his playlist regularly.

Is there some feature to make it ask me if I want to close a playlist or just disable that hotkey? I sometimes get frustrated when the wrong window has focus. I was even thinking about implementing such thing myself, but somehow never got around to do it

Edit: Also iirc the shuffle function in deadbeef is weird, because it always shuffled tracks in the same order (if the playlist did not change and you started on the same track). It somehow has a 'shuffle' and 'random'. Maybe that's intended

A clone in appearance and layout configurability, but it's far from having feature parity from foobar.

With all due respect, but it's very, very far from being a clone from the point of view of the functionality that foobar provides.

Should also mention that Foobar2000 works flawlessly with WINE.

I dunno what the experience is like on other distros, but on Arch I've tried 3 or 4 times to run it and something is always going awry, either with the software itself or with some plugin I consider indispensable.

Before foobar2k there was an outstanding player named Apollo[1] with almost a perfect UI: basically, just a playlist grid. It supported associating with directories, of course, so playback was also two clicks away.

Just checked, it still works great, although, the limited codec support and no scrobbling is a dealbreaker for me. Same reason I had to ditch it years ago.

Would love to peek at the source code of that program. One of the last messages its developer Heikki Ylinen left on his website reads:

  If you want to know what the future of digital music looks like, I recommend giving Spotify a go. And before anyone says anything, I know it has been done before, but this time it looks like it's been done right. And this is just the beginning.

[1] https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/apollo.php

I was looking for a player that had this functionality when I switched to Linux. Finally settled on Clementine which has both a library & "file browser" mode.

In the browser mode you can just right click and add the folder to your playlist. Just like in foobar2000.

I have never seen any other player where you can just click on a folder and play music from it.

VLC. Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player

I used to use 1by1 for this. It's a very minimalistic music player (200 KiB) doing exactly this.

On MacOS, I used IINA for that. You drag a folder and it plays it, switching by default to Music Mode if it’s audio files..

Deadbeef does exactly this. It is more minimalistic / gets more out of your way, so I love it!

My workflow of playing music for about 20 years was right-clicking on a folder in Windows Explorer and selecting "Play in Winamp" from the context menu.

foobar2000 was my go to player

It is still my go to player, it works great in Windows 10.

Streaming is convenient but their interface is not the greatest for curation and focus listening. Especially with their “lots of whitespace” design. There’s a reason we have list and tables in managers like itunes, calibre and file explorers. I tried adding my favorite albums to Apple Music and it quickly became untenable. Spotify is also awful for that. I have ~500 albums in my main library and various series and collection and it’s a breeze to manage, browse and listen with MPD, MOC, beets, Kid3 and the file explorer.

Where do you get your music from? Back in the old days we used cd rips and sharing platforms to get the mp3s from but nowadays streaming got so convenient.

Even 20 years ago, I could literally just right-click on an entire folder sitting on my external hard-drive, and it would immediately enqueue all of those files into Winamp.

VLC? Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player

Works with any media file. Takes like 2 seconds to open my Youtube local backup folder with +10k videos

For macOS Ionica is really really good: https://ionica.app/

For iOS I would suggest my own app Muziqi https://apps.apple.com/us/app/muziqi-for-music-lovers/id6468...

Totally agree. On Windows, Dopamine https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine is close to giving me what I want but it crashes frequently and simple things like dragging a directory of music onto it just don't really work. Has to be imported to the DB first.

Musicbee https://www.getmusicbee.com/ was kinda promising for a while but bloated and clunky.

VLC and Foobar get the job done but the UI is meh.

Streaming and iTunes really wrecked everything.

I can recommend Swinsian on macOS: https://swinsian.com/

It's a wonderful music player that handles large libraries and is quite customisable (especially smart playlists).

Try Deadbeef.

On a mac you could give my new app a try:

https://plastaq.com/minimoon

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

"Implementing that feature would break component compatibility" is not a valid reason not to release the source. If someone wants to modify the software to implement a feature they want even if it would break compatibility, that's their business.

As for porting to different OSes, sourcecode release won't magically spawn people capable of doing that properly. Somehow no one has written fully functional foobar2000 clone yet.

The point of having it open source is that the possibility is there. Right now it's impossible. Someone has to go through the trouble of documenting all the features and then reimplementing them.

Sourcecode loss argument is not really valid, I keep backups on multiple redundant devices. I'd be surprised if someone who spent as much time on programming as I have wouldn't know well enough how to handle this.

Two words: bus factor.

I see attempts to refute reasons to open source the code, but no reasons not to do it. If the reason is simply "I don't want to", that's perfectly fine, and it's all that needs to be said.

All of the listed reasons are humbug, as someone in that threads points it out. The only real reason is that the author wants it so, and that's why it happens. No particular reason or supporting argument is stronger than this will alone.

By the way, I haven't seen the author in that thread, just other commenters. Here, however, he addresses the open sourcing idea: https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,119676.0.html

They mention one reason in the release notes:

unintended SSE CPU requirement present in previous releases has been removed.

Meh. Audacious + pulseaudio/alsa-plugins >>>>> foobar 2000.

That for GUI.

If you like CLI, mpd+any UI it's a beast. Mocp if you are a minimalist.

plugins were great. Measured the speakers at my desk (I built them). generated an inverse impulse response filter, and fed it through a plugin to do full frequency equalization. It was a fun project to play with full range speakers that had no passive filter network whatsoever, all done via software.

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

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

Isn't it similar to how your nickname is fsckboy, cleverly iterating over the well-established fsck utility? Or is that something else, because fsckboy is not a published product in the IT space?

You are aware that foobar2000 is 21 years old, right?

I wonder if this will be the new Winamp-in-nothing-but-name or the old-new Winamp 5x builds, or even older builds?

I feel like (with no research) these interfaces were designed by programmers first and foremost and have a tight coupling to the actual underlying code.

A "well designed" interface with "good" UI/UX from a proper designer may have best practices, but additional layers of abstraction from the functionality which makes everything feel less direct.

Seeing this from the outside, I can't shake the idea that Microsoft's complete fumbling of offerings for UI development is to blame. There are so many new paradigms in user interface on Windows that led nowhere, are completely inadequate for modern development, and yet are still supported by Microsoft. The company has lost the plot, and we're left with Microsoft even devolving into web apps for the desktop, with the success story of VS Code leading the charge.

If Microsoft could find one good path forward for UI development on Windows, we'd want those small boutique apps to get with the times.

I do -- I use WinAmp myself, mostly, but xmplay was updated as recently as 2020 so it's still a thing.

XMPlay crashed so often on SID files from HVSC that I switched to Foobar2000.

Probably runs perfectly under wine https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...

A long time ago, I had a music player for windows, which had separate volume control for each track, in 10% steps. With that I could make tracks match volume the best, while of course being a bit of manual effort involved. But one could do it iteratively, when one noticed it was too low or high volume on a track, compared to the others. The player was probably not so good in other regards, but I remember using it for quite some time. It was called Ashampoo media player or similar.

Can't say for sure. But I have two ideas.

1. Ensure that your music player has loudness normalization enabled. It's normally called ReplayGain and is disabled by default.

2. Replaygain information is written to the audio file's tags. So check the audio file's tags to see if the tags are there. They start with "replaygain_" for most formats and "r128_" for opus files.

You can install termux on your phone and then it basically becomes a linux computer btw.

Oh really when did that come out? I remember missing Foobar when I switch to OSX about 15 years ago before switching to Spotify not long after.

Why's that insensitive?

Back in the day? It still is.

How?

I found it's been ported to iOS, though: https://apps.apple.com/id/app/winamp/id1664497725

try https://github.com/olegantonyan/mpz/ not even close in terms of features, but it could be enough

This. With alsa-plugins and any console music player (cmus or mocp, cmus it's more collection oriented, mocp enforces you to just use directories and files) and a -rt kernel it was more than enough (if not better) to play huge collection files under Linux.

Unfortunately no.

Wow, so 12 years without a post about fb2k on HN. That's a lot of time.

AIMP is great! I have using it with my Android phone.