Yeah, I think where you stand on the whole "foobar vs X" thing really depends on whether you're more DIY-ish or out-of-the-box-ish. I tend to be more of the former with tech, even though I am a very lazy person in real life.
e: Actually, I'm still lazy. All I really did with my latest foobar install was grab Columns UI, do a bit of re-arranging, add playback stats for ratings and the scrobbler plug-in.
foobar2000: Don't even consider any other audio player.
Oh please. I've tried it and I like MediaMonkey better. I'm sure foobar has features that you like but it is not hands down the best like you're claiming.
What exactly does MediaMonkey do that foobar2000 can't?
Out of box sync to portable MP3 players, ability to rate songs, smart playlists, an album art panel that shows embedded art for the currently playing song (and ignores file-based art), ability to apply a skin with the drop of a single file, ability to delete MP3s from the player, easy access to currently playing song in shuffle mode. Last time I tried to get foobar to do all that it was like going through hell and I never got it the way I wanted it.
I'm trying it again and am not to impressed. The UI has taken a step forward, but it's still rather confused. MediaMonkey has a left folder-structure that shows all playlists, and the ability to search by artist/album/mood/rating/whatever, then a main "results" area that shows the items in each selected node in the tree view, or results for a search. In foobar, everything is its own panel, nothing really works together or re-uses space intelligently. The one thing I like better about foobar is the "Add to Playback Queue" option.
I wonder if there's a music player that doesn't have all that useless shit, it just plays music.
foobar2000 can be customized to do that too! Alternatively Billy is very minimalistic.
I HATE HATE HATE HATE foobar. I don't wanna spend a whole day chasing dead links to install 34 different and completely obscure plugins in order to make it look minimally decent (and then it never looks like the screenshot). Because it looks like a lame app made for win 3.1 out of the box. And even if I manage to make it look decent, it's all for naught, because I don't keep the music player maximized and alone on the desktop while I gaze longinly at it. I listen to music while working. I need Word up and in front, while winamp is nicely nestled in the title bar. And I sometimes maximize it to chose some album or another, and it does the job very well. I just completely ignore every single feature other than Library control and play controls.
tl;dr: Winamp works very well and looks fine and isn't really bloated and does everything turnkey.
I'm still using winamp for playing music on the pc - am i missing out on something awesome?
Absolutely not! I love winamp, since I started organising my media library properly its a great way for me to find and listen to specific albums and not worry so much about my file structure. Modern skin on classic winamp colours, all minimised down and shortcut keys to get me where i want to go.
Oh and using Global Hotkeys ingame is brilliant, plus G15 support and tons of plugins for file support.
Live Mesh is a new beta thing for a service that synchronises files across a cloud server between PCs. You can also access files remotely from the website. It is very good and works with both Windows and Mac.
If you live in Europe, Spotify is an awesome on-demand music player/service.
Stormwatcher, you're confusing, you hate foobar2000 because you don't want to spend lots of time customizing how it looks then you're saying how it looks doesn't matter?
Stormwatcher, you're confusing, you hate foobar2000 because you don't want to spend lots of time customizing how it looks then you're saying how it looks doesn't matter?
point is that winamp looks good anyway I use it without any fussing about at all.
And vanilla foobar is so fucking dreadful that it affects the usability. winamp shows me all i need to see while choosing an album or song I wanna listen, and it hides neatly while I'm doing something else. Vanilla foobar does neither, and modded foobar isn't better than winamp in any way I could see.
Stormwatcher, you're confusing, you hate foobar2000 because you don't want to spend lots of time customizing how it looks then you're saying how it looks doesn't matter?
point is that winamp looks good anyway I use it without any fussing about at all.
And vanilla foobar is so fucking dreadful that it affects the usability. winamp shows me all i need to see while choosing an album or song I wanna listen, and it hides neatly while I'm doing something else. Vanilla foobar does neither, and modded foobar isn't better than winamp in any way I could see.
What's wrong with vanilla foobar? I've always used it with the default setup, and I've never had trouble with it. I just add my music folder, find the song title, and double click it
I HATE HATE HATE HATE foobar. I don't wanna spend a whole day chasing dead links to install 34 different and completely obscure plugins in order to make it look minimally decent (and then it never looks like the screenshot). Because it looks like a lame app made for win 3.1 out of the box. And even if I manage to make it look decent, it's all for naught, because I don't keep the music player maximized and alone on the desktop while I gaze longinly at it. I listen to music while working. I need Word up and in front, while winamp is nicely nestled in the title bar. And I sometimes maximize it to chose some album or another, and it does the job very well. I just completely ignore every single feature other than Library control and play controls.
tl;dr: Winamp works very well and looks fine and isn't really bloated and does everything turnkey.
First of all, Winamp is bloated as fuck and has gotten progressively more terrible with every version since 5.35. This is an undeniable fact. Six months ago I was a huge Winamp fan but I've since realized that AOL have basically murdered it. It's just a complete disaster. It breaks all the time. It takes an age to start. If you click on the wrong thing you've just bought yourself a third-class bus ticket to Integrated Web Browser Town. There's no rhyme or reason to the dozens of tabs, widgets, drop-down menus and filter lists which dot the interface. It's a shame, too, because 5.35 was so promising.
Second, my foobar config took me like 1 hour to set up, uses a single plugin (the most popular one - columnsui), and easily blows every other music player I've tried out of the water. It doesn't look as slick as Winamp but it's reliable, it starts up instantly, it has all the features I want, and best of all, it doesn't spend a truckload of resources on integrated Web browsers and hardware-accelerated visualizations that I never use.
Third, just because something forces you to actually use your brain at first, instead of just conveniently handing everything to you on a silver platter, doesn't mean it's not good. Maybe if, instead of trying to copy other people's configs, you had instead spent a little time figuring out how the thing works and maybe even creating your own config using only the features and plugins you need, you might have had a better time with it. With a little patience and work Foobar can be goosed into a much better and more personalized app than Winamp or iTunes or Media Player, one that's structured around how you organize and listen to your music, and is fast and responsive to boot. And it's free, which is more than anyone can say for Winamp.
More than that, it's the little things that make Foobar great. Like how it runs two copies of lame or flac for multi-threaded encoding. Or the fact that it instantaneously detects changes to your filesystem, and doesn't have to rescan all the files to update the music library. There are plenty of windowshade-style configs out there, but personally I just use the playback controls on the taskbar thumbnail, which comes with the default config and requires no plugin. Meanwhile, winamp doesn't even support thumbnails. Nice job, winamp development team.
Furthermore, would those of you throwing around big words like "usability" care to explain the usability of hiding ReplayGain, file conversion, and auto-tagging under a submenu called "Send To"?
foobar2000: Don't even consider any other audio player.
Oh please. I've tried it and I like MediaMonkey better. I'm sure foobar has features that you like but it is not hands down the best like you're claiming.
What exactly does MediaMonkey do that foobar2000 can't?
Out of box sync to portable MP3 players, ability to rate songs, smart playlists, an album art panel that shows embedded art for the currently playing song (and ignores file-based art), ability to apply a skin with the drop of a single file, ability to delete MP3s from the player, easy access to currently playing song in shuffle mode. Last time I tried to get foobar to do all that it was like going through hell and I never got it the way I wanted it.
I'm trying it again and am not to impressed. The UI has taken a step forward, but it's still rather confused. MediaMonkey has a left folder-structure that shows all playlists, and the ability to search by artist/album/mood/rating/whatever, then a main "results" area that shows the items in each selected node in the tree view, or results for a search. In foobar, everything is its own panel, nothing really works together or re-uses space intelligently. The one thing I like better about foobar is the "Add to Playback Queue" option.
I wonder if there's a music player that doesn't have all that useless shit, it just plays music.
VLC makes for a surprisingly competent minimalist music player.
I HATE HATE HATE HATE foobar. I don't wanna spend a whole day chasing dead links to install 34 different and completely obscure plugins in order to make it look minimally decent (and then it never looks like the screenshot). Because it looks like a lame app made for win 3.1 out of the box. And even if I manage to make it look decent, it's all for naught, because I don't keep the music player maximized and alone on the desktop while I gaze longinly at it. I listen to music while working. I need Word up and in front, while winamp is nicely nestled in the title bar. And I sometimes maximize it to chose some album or another, and it does the job very well. I just completely ignore every single feature other than Library control and play controls.
tl;dr: Winamp works very well and looks fine and isn't really bloated and does everything turnkey.
First of all, Winamp is bloated as fuck and has gotten progressively more terrible with every version since 5.35. This is an undeniable fact. Six months ago I was a huge Winamp fan but I've since realized that AOL have basically murdered it. It's just a complete disaster. It breaks all the time. It takes an age to start. If you click on the wrong thing you've just bought yourself a third-class bus ticket to Integrated Web Browser Town. There's no rhyme or reason to the dozens of tabs, widgets, drop-down menus and filter lists which dot the interface. It's a shame, too, because 5.35 was so promising.
Second, my foobar config took me like 1 hour to set up, uses a single plugin (the most popular one - columnsui), and easily blows every other music player I've tried out of the water. It doesn't look as slick as Winamp but it's reliable, it starts up instantly, it has all the features I want, and best of all, it doesn't spend a truckload of resources on integrated Web browsers and hardware-accelerated visualizations that I never use.
Third, just because something forces you to actually use your brain at first, instead of just conveniently handing everything to you on a silver platter, doesn't mean it's not good. Maybe if, instead of trying to copy other people's configs, you had instead spent a little time figuring out how the thing works and maybe even creating your own config using only the features and plugins you need, you might have had a better time with it. With a little patience and work Foobar can be goosed into a much better and more personalized app than Winamp or iTunes or Media Player, one that's structured around how you organize and listen to your music, and is fast and responsive to boot. And it's free, which is more than anyone can say for Winamp.
<snip>
More than that, it's the little things that make Foobar great. Like how it runs two copies of lame or flac for multi-threaded encoding. Or the fact that it instantaneously detects changes to your filesystem, and doesn't have to rescan all the files to update the music library. There are plenty of windowshade-style configs out there, but personally I just use the playback controls on the taskbar thumbnail, which comes with the default config and requires no plugin. Meanwhile, winamp doesn't even support thumbnails. Nice job, winamp development team.
<snip>
Furthermore, would those of you throwing around big words like "usability" care to explain the usability of hiding ReplayGain, file conversion, and auto-tagging under a submenu called "Send To"?
Well, winamp starts immediately on my computer. It eats 50mb of RAM, which is fucking nothing, I have 4GB of it. So the whole "boohooo bloeated" thing is just nerdy whining. I mean, a bloated program is supposed to be slow and affect the system's performance, right? Winamp does neither on my machine. Oh, and concerning all the media and internet shit, well, I never even see it.
Here's what I get with Winamp (spoilered for hscroll):
Considering I have normal hand/eye coordination, I never have trouble clicking on the right things.
I have more than 40GB of music, so I can't just scroll down to find stuff. Winamp lets me just type the first few letters of the band's name and voilà*, it's selected on the center pane. It's fast and easy. The shitty web/media stuff is all hidden as default, anyway. Oh, and it's easy to sync my ipod shuffle too. No need for iTunes, thank god.
And then, the rest of the time, when I'm working or playing games, it's like this:
So there, I can't really see the bloat or shittyness.
Great, we get it, you like winamp and you hate foobar four times in all caps. How about not shitting up this thread with your pointless derail that nobody cares about.
Let the op try both and see which one he prefers, for all we know he'll just stick with itunes.
Great, we get it, you like winamp and you hate foobar four times in all caps. How about not shitting up this thread with your pointless derail that nobody cares about.
So you ran out of arguments and wanna change the subject? Ok, lemme help.
I downloaded foobar again so that I could give it yet another chance, and how do you activate the columnsui thingy?
and what's an easy way to turn shuffle on and off? And how can I do the "type the band's first letters and it scrolls to the band"? If you help me with those things, I might switch.
EDIT: Oh, ok, got columns working and things got a little better. I have shuffle on a dropdown menu.
Is there a way to make the band sorter ignore the "the" in front of some bands' names?
Posts
e: Actually, I'm still lazy. All I really did with my latest foobar install was grab Columns UI, do a bit of re-arranging, add playback stats for ratings and the scrobbler plug-in.
Steam | Live
tl;dr: Winamp works very well and looks fine and isn't really bloated and does everything turnkey.
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showforum=28
Nope, not at all.
Absolutely not! I love winamp, since I started organising my media library properly its a great way for me to find and listen to specific albums and not worry so much about my file structure. Modern skin on classic winamp colours, all minimised down and shortcut keys to get me where i want to go.
Oh and using Global Hotkeys ingame is brilliant, plus G15 support and tons of plugins for file support.
If you live in Europe, Spotify is an awesome on-demand music player/service.
point is that winamp looks good anyway I use it without any fussing about at all.
And vanilla foobar is so fucking dreadful that it affects the usability. winamp shows me all i need to see while choosing an album or song I wanna listen, and it hides neatly while I'm doing something else. Vanilla foobar does neither, and modded foobar isn't better than winamp in any way I could see.
What's wrong with vanilla foobar? I've always used it with the default setup, and I've never had trouble with it. I just add my music folder, find the song title, and double click it
Second, my foobar config took me like 1 hour to set up, uses a single plugin (the most popular one - columnsui), and easily blows every other music player I've tried out of the water. It doesn't look as slick as Winamp but it's reliable, it starts up instantly, it has all the features I want, and best of all, it doesn't spend a truckload of resources on integrated Web browsers and hardware-accelerated visualizations that I never use.
Third, just because something forces you to actually use your brain at first, instead of just conveniently handing everything to you on a silver platter, doesn't mean it's not good. Maybe if, instead of trying to copy other people's configs, you had instead spent a little time figuring out how the thing works and maybe even creating your own config using only the features and plugins you need, you might have had a better time with it. With a little patience and work Foobar can be goosed into a much better and more personalized app than Winamp or iTunes or Media Player, one that's structured around how you organize and listen to your music, and is fast and responsive to boot. And it's free, which is more than anyone can say for Winamp.
More than that, it's the little things that make Foobar great. Like how it runs two copies of lame or flac for multi-threaded encoding. Or the fact that it instantaneously detects changes to your filesystem, and doesn't have to rescan all the files to update the music library. There are plenty of windowshade-style configs out there, but personally I just use the playback controls on the taskbar thumbnail, which comes with the default config and requires no plugin. Meanwhile, winamp doesn't even support thumbnails. Nice job, winamp development team.
Furthermore, would those of you throwing around big words like "usability" care to explain the usability of hiding ReplayGain, file conversion, and auto-tagging under a submenu called "Send To"?
VLC makes for a surprisingly competent minimalist music player.
fixed that for you.
Seriously, Winamp2 was good, for 1999. It's gone downhill since.
Well, winamp starts immediately on my computer. It eats 50mb of RAM, which is fucking nothing, I have 4GB of it. So the whole "boohooo bloeated" thing is just nerdy whining. I mean, a bloated program is supposed to be slow and affect the system's performance, right? Winamp does neither on my machine. Oh, and concerning all the media and internet shit, well, I never even see it.
Here's what I get with Winamp (spoilered for hscroll):
Considering I have normal hand/eye coordination, I never have trouble clicking on the right things.
I have more than 40GB of music, so I can't just scroll down to find stuff. Winamp lets me just type the first few letters of the band's name and voilà*, it's selected on the center pane. It's fast and easy. The shitty web/media stuff is all hidden as default, anyway. Oh, and it's easy to sync my ipod shuffle too. No need for iTunes, thank god.
And then, the rest of the time, when I'm working or playing games, it's like this:
So there, I can't really see the bloat or shittyness.
*that's how you spell it, internet friends!
Let the op try both and see which one he prefers, for all we know he'll just stick with itunes.
So you ran out of arguments and wanna change the subject? Ok, lemme help.
I downloaded foobar again so that I could give it yet another chance, and how do you activate the columnsui thingy?
and what's an easy way to turn shuffle on and off? And how can I do the "type the band's first letters and it scrolls to the band"? If you help me with those things, I might switch.
EDIT: Oh, ok, got columns working and things got a little better. I have shuffle on a dropdown menu.
Is there a way to make the band sorter ignore the "the" in front of some bands' names?