It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :)
It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing.
It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.
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.
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.
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.
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
There is certainly something intangibly attractive on this era and style of software. On top of my head I'm thinking fb2k, mpc (and its forks), virtualdub, utorrent (the original 1.x series), irfanview, kerio firewall (classic 2.x series), putty, even maybe mirc and notepad++ to some degree. Small programs, classic Windows style controls, emphasis on staying out of your way, somewhat minimalistic and barebones but still remarkably powerful and capable. These to me represent the golden age of Windows.
Of all these programs (and there were many), fb2k is the one that I still use on regular basis while almost all the others have faded away.
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 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.
Wow, that brings back memories!
foobar2000 was my go to player. I used to spend hours curating all my folders with albums and playlists.
Funny how fast I switched to a streaming platform when they became widely available around here.
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.
One of the great music players out there. Clean, simple UI. Easy to use. Supported far more formats than anything mainstream. Replaygain was a killer feature, and it mostly boggles my mind that it still isn't widespread, (…like non-broken, i.e., dB, volume knobs).
It's kind of strange I have never seen any other player where you can just click on a folder and play music from it. Like two clicks, one on a folder (which loads the list of tracks) and second to start playing this list
of course it's doable in any player but not with such ease
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.
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.
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.
>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.
This was the one piece of software I missed when I made the switch to Linux 15 years ago. Not enough to miss Windows, of course. It worked in Wine but didn't feel quite right. It was sort of the end of me building a curated music collection. It takes time and I just moved on to other things. In all this time I've never found anything as good as foobar2000 was back then and my music collection has languished.
I'm surprised that AIMP hasn't been mentioned yet. It's also a great old school audio player that was released back in 2006. I transitioned to it when Winamp development was fizzling out. Not sure when that was but I've been using it for a long time. With the 'Pandemic' skin it looks like classic Winamp and has support for visualizations and many other features people tended to like from Winamp.
One of the things I loved about Winamp was programming my own visualizations - can't remember if this was a plugin or was built into the main app. But it was most satisfying to generate trippy visuals with extreme granular control. I also liked having control over my skin and panel setup.
Also, this is cool for all those über random playlisters: a tool you can use to create a random playlist of X amount of songs from your entire library [edit: and make copies of the random files to a new folder. Useful for making playlists on portable media]. Sorry it was a long time ago and I don't recall what it was called.
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.
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.
Bit of a tangent but it's kind of infuriating to me that I still haven't found anything better than Winamp (or Foobar for that matter) on a modestly powerful Windows machine. 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.
I even had a bunch of Winamp plugins that could automatically handle my NSFs, SID files, tracker files—any format I threw at it, it could handle them seamlessly.
It used very little CPU, it never crackled, it never popped, and it never crashed. This wasn't even using any low-latency ASIO drivers or anything fancy.
Fast forward decades later and I'm sitting on my Mac M1 desperately trying to find anything that even comes CLOSE to this.
The closest thing I found is Cog, but it takes minutes to queue up larger folders. It's ridiculous, and of course I'm one of the lucky individuals who ended up with a Mac with core audio issues where if I'm using more than 35% to 40% of my CPU, the audio pops once every minute/minutes despite clearing out the plist files and trying every other trick, it seems like the basic core audio drivers of Mac are awful stuff. I had a better DAW experience on my Windows machine with ASIO4ALL which shouldn't even be possible.
>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
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.
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
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.
I downloaded it on my mobile device, because I have the issue where some songs are very quiet and some are very loud, so I was looking for a volume normalizer and this is the one (that's zero cost) that was recommended, but I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between using this one and just the normal Metro Music Player.
So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or if there are better (zero cost) tools that could fix my issue, please advise (I'm looking for Android tools as I don't have a usable Windows/MacOS/Linux machine)
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.
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.
I used to use Foobar2000 a lot like 20 years ago and a couple of years ago I tried to use it again when I got myself a Windows gaming PC, and I have no idea how I even used it back then. I felt completely lost trying to replicate what I have these days with MPD (+ ncmpcpp and assorted things).
Eventually I just gave up and decided that if I was going to listen to music on my Windows machine, I'd just use Plex in a browser. Eliminated the need to scan for files on a network volume every time I used it too.
I like the concept of directory players. I don't want playlists, my files are arranged in directories just fine.
I use players like 1by1, VUPlayer, Resonic. Straightforward, usable players.
I miss this functionality in foobar, implemented as native, not cumbersome plugins that need a lot of tinkering.
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.
Nope. Even way back then, I was using iTunes on mac and windows to rip and organise my music collection. A quick rsync or an smb mount from a Linux machine made it easy to access my media in VLC or Rhythmbox.
The winamp/foobar aesthetics were really cool, but overall offered nothing to the practically or ease of actually buying/ripping/playing your music.
But you know, everyone is different and some folks had memorised a sequence of characters that were something like "FCKGW-...", install limewire, just to play that live acoustic version of Everlong.
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.
foo and bar, and foobar, have meanings and utility that is undermined by people giving them new definitions and polluting our public namespace. Instead, call the project "farting in an elevator" because that's what you're doing.
A similar injustice, theft of the commonweal, was Microsoft was granted a trademark for "windows", as if that was the generic term for... well, "windows"
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?
imiric|1 year ago
It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing.
It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.
qwerty456127|1 year ago
a0123|1 year ago
signaru|1 year ago
rchaud|1 year 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.
raxxorraxor|1 year ago
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.
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
codr7|1 year ago
DidYaWipe|1 year ago
out_of_protocol|1 year ago
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
zokier|1 year ago
Of all these programs (and there were many), fb2k is the one that I still use on regular basis while almost all the others have faded away.
philistine|1 year ago
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.
iotku|1 year ago
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.
athoscouto|1 year ago
nickjj|1 year ago
It is still my go to player, it works great in Windows 10.
skydhash|1 year ago
deathanatos|1 year ago
dang|1 year ago
Foobar2000 v2.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35718802 - April 2023 (2 comments)
Foobar2000 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30054239 - Jan 2022 (215 comments)
Foobar2000 - the ultimate audio player - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305796 - April 2010 (2 comments)
pvorb|1 year ago
tryauuum|1 year ago
of course it's doable in any player but not with such ease
ZoomZoomZoom|1 year ago
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:
Pretty ironic.[1] https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/apollo.php
AdmiralAsshat|1 year ago
haunter|1 year ago
VLC. Right click on folder > Play with VLC media player
ClueslessTech99|1 year ago
In the browser mode you can just right click and add the folder to your playlist. Just like in foobar2000.
The_Colonel|1 year ago
skydhash|1 year ago
haspok|1 year ago
enthdegree|1 year ago
fluoridation|1 year ago
"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.
npteljes|1 year ago
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
globular-toast|1 year ago
Teslazar|1 year ago
https://www.aimp.ru/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIMP
pks016|1 year ago
fallinditch|1 year ago
Also, this is cool for all those über random playlisters: a tool you can use to create a random playlist of X amount of songs from your entire library [edit: and make copies of the random files to a new folder. Useful for making playlists on portable media]. Sorry it was a long time ago and I don't recall what it was called.
thesuitonym|1 year ago
ElCapitanMarkla|1 year ago
hlandau|1 year ago
RunSet|1 year ago
Feels like when Disney makes a movie version of a public domain folktale and then lobbies to perpetually extend the copyright on it.
jdc0589|1 year ago
anthk|1 year ago
That for GUI.
If you like CLI, mpd+any UI it's a beast. Mocp if you are a minimalist.
vunderba|1 year ago
I even had a bunch of Winamp plugins that could automatically handle my NSFs, SID files, tracker files—any format I threw at it, it could handle them seamlessly.
It used very little CPU, it never crackled, it never popped, and it never crashed. This wasn't even using any low-latency ASIO drivers or anything fancy.
Fast forward decades later and I'm sitting on my Mac M1 desperately trying to find anything that even comes CLOSE to this.
The closest thing I found is Cog, but it takes minutes to queue up larger folders. It's ridiculous, and of course I'm one of the lucky individuals who ended up with a Mac with core audio issues where if I'm using more than 35% to 40% of my CPU, the audio pops once every minute/minutes despite clearing out the plist files and trying every other trick, it seems like the basic core audio drivers of Mac are awful stuff. I had a better DAW experience on my Windows machine with ASIO4ALL which shouldn't even be possible.
sawaali|1 year ago
For iOS I would suggest my own app Muziqi https://apps.apple.com/us/app/muziqi-for-music-lovers/id6468...
haunter|1 year ago
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
keybits|1 year ago
It's a wonderful music player that handles large libraries and is quite customisable (especially smart playlists).
meta-meta|1 year ago
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.
cageface|1 year ago
https://plastaq.com/minimoon
haspok|1 year ago
Grazester|1 year ago
justin66|1 year ago
stuartd|1 year ago
> unintended SSE CPU requirement present in previous releases has been removed.
pentagrama|1 year ago
layer8|1 year ago
nipperkinfeet|1 year ago
antisthenes|1 year ago
A lightweight audio player/converter without any bloat.
calvinmorrison|1 year ago
dailykoder|1 year ago
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
jszymborski|1 year ago
kichik|1 year ago
mariusor|1 year ago
SuperNinKenDo|1 year ago
squidbeak|1 year ago
mrinfinitiesx|1 year ago
LoveMortuus|1 year ago
So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or if there are better (zero cost) tools that could fix my issue, please advise (I'm looking for Android tools as I don't have a usable Windows/MacOS/Linux machine)
zelphirkalt|1 year ago
ksynwa|1 year ago
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.
Hamuko|1 year ago
Eventually I just gave up and decided that if I was going to listen to music on my Windows machine, I'd just use Plex in a browser. Eliminated the need to scan for files on a network volume every time I used it too.
ags1905|1 year ago
happytoexplain|1 year ago
SeriousM|1 year ago
jszymborski|1 year ago
TiredOfLife|1 year ago
jcovik|1 year ago
indigodaddy|1 year ago
zelse|1 year ago
HelloNurse|1 year ago
George_Bouras|1 year ago
citruscomputing|1 year ago
JonChesterfield|1 year ago
mikojan|1 year ago
oleg_antonyan|1 year ago
dqft|1 year ago
evanhughes|1 year ago
blackeyeblitzar|1 year ago
https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-co...
thesuitonym|1 year ago
M95D|1 year ago
jokoon|1 year ago
Same for paint.net
p0w3n3d|1 year ago
anta40|1 year ago
I found it's been ported to iOS, though: https://apps.apple.com/id/app/winamp/id1664497725
siva7|1 year ago
drw85|1 year ago
mathnode|1 year ago
But you know, everyone is different and some folks had memorised a sequence of characters that were something like "FCKGW-...", install limewire, just to play that live acoustic version of Everlong.
anthk|1 year ago
sma3in|1 year ago
heckerhut|1 year ago
[deleted]
fsckboy|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable
* FOO 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.*
https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
A similar injustice, theft of the commonweal, was Microsoft was granted a trademark for "windows", as if that was the generic term for... well, "windows"
npteljes|1 year ago
helloplanets|1 year ago