Foobar2000 was the hardest app to replace when I switched from Windows to Linux. I finally settled with Clementine which is great too, but that was basically the end for my music collection, organization and rating hobby. I had even built my own replacement to Last.fm/Audioscrobbler backed with a local database as I wasn't happy with their feature sets, and I meticulously kept all tracks uniquely identifiable with full tagging to derive some data of my listening habits.
That all basically ended -- instead of being an active process and participating in vibrant communities my music listening changed to just that, listening. The eventual switch to Spotify was much less dramatic for me. Sure it was replaced with something else to tinker on, but some of my fondest computing memories are thanks to foobar2000.
Same thing with a move to Mac over a decade ago. I still feel icky that most of the stuff I've listened to this past decade is archived on such a closed platform, and once in a while it itches enough that I use a downloader of sorts to try and at least archive them somewhere. But the curated library of tags, endless dynamic playlist generation, and aimless wandering through torrents and articles are all but gone. And along with it a certain aspect of the love for music.
I had a similar experience. I tried every linux music player I could find, nothing came close to foobar. I also settled on Clementine which I still use, but I stopped collecting and organizing music locally as a result of the switch. I even spent some time coding a new music player before deciding to just settle on clementine.
Can people who feel similar share what metadata do they miss the most? Maybe I'm a caveman, but I feel mostly satisfied with artist/title/album, plus maybe the year at most. I came to use filesystem directories for genre/mood tagging and then also artist/album obviously. It's crude, but usable and easily portable. I'm not claiming this is all one can wish for, but I'm curious.
For this kind of library I found Audacious (minimalistic, supports Winamp skins) and QMPlay 2 to be good. The latter supports and remembers your folder tree, has a very cool widget system and can be also used for videos (music or otherwise).
I collect live recordings, so there's a bunch of less common stuff I use a good bit: Date performed, handle of who recorded it, tour, a personal rating system for the recording quality, additional artists (special guests + the like), and general comments I might want attached to the file. ("clips at 0:40" or "heckler in the quiet part"). I may have 20 copies of the same song, and I may even have multiple recordings of the same song on the same night from different people.
At least for some artists, there's a huge number of show recordings out there. The guy who maintains the (unofficial, although known and tolerated by the artist) live archive for Nine Inch Nails is up to >1,000 recordings, for example.
Now that I think about it it may have been that there was info in foobar's media library database that wasn't supported, not necessarily id3 tags. Play count and last played date are some I'm partial to that I couldn't get working.
I also use album artist a lot, though that's probably supported.
I ended up switching to MusicBee (https://www.getmusicbee.com/), before switching to macOS. It's not as snappy but I liked the default UI and had all the batteries I needed.
Also back then they had this concept of an "Inbox" for new albums, which was a special playlist of newly scanned music that you then could "move" to your library. It was good for vetting new albums before the era of streaming/YouTube.
That’s a really clever solution to an annoying problem. Before music streaming, I would sometimes order 10+ CDs on Amazon and import them all (without knowing if I liked them, just on a hunch).
Then I just ended up with lots of musical clutter in my library.
Foobar2000 was my favorite as well back in my Windows days. But on Linux I think cmus does a great job. What exactly does Foobar2000 have that cmus doesn't?
I use it for like 15 years now. No other player is that versatile.
Client/Server, very stable, small resource footprint.
Recently I used mpd to play audiobooks and live radio streams on my headless server. MPD uses icecast to make the stream available in my local network so I can use chromecast and/or google assistants to listen to the streams. Its more or less running transparent in the background and iam very glad I found this solution.
I too used MPD in various scenarios for maybe a decade, but sometimes last year it stopped working with pulseaudio, and no amount of tinkering seemed to fix it (other apps worked with PA like a breeze, but not MPD). So I replaced it with Qmmp, and am slowly forgetting about it.
> MPD uses icecast to make the stream available in my local network
What is the latency like? I tried something like this but there was so much lag between a remote control input and player state changes that it was unbearable.
The result of decoding music files is deterministic and well defined, so essentially: they will all sound the same, unless one of them is screwing something up.
Some may handle sample rate conversion better than others.
foobar can do bitperfect output. MPD too, given configured properly. A lot of players is missing this option (specifically bypassing system mixer), and it making sound noticably worse. On MacOS situation is dire (there are some players, but their UX is terrible, imo)
I haven't touched Windows in over 10 years (Linux only) and foobar2000 is the only piece of software I miss. It wasn't the UI or anything. Amarok is probably better. It was just how solid the software felt. foobar2000 was the only thing I could trust to send the right bits to my soundcard when I wanted them to be sent. All other audio software felt like the actual audio part was an afterthought and a hack that just barely worked.
gmusicbrowser (combined with Ex Falso for more extensive tagging) has replaced foobar2000 for me, and I _think_ that these days I like it even better than I ever liked foobar2000 - but maybe that's just the long years making my memories of its greatness somewhat hazy...
Nope. For Foobar to have the functionality of my player, I'd have to write a plugin for it, and I have no intention of doing that for closed source software.
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
