[HN Gopher] Foobar2000
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Foobar2000
Author : citruscomputing
Score : 142 points
Date : 2024-07-31 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.foobar2000.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.foobar2000.org)
| athoscouto wrote:
| 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.
| nickjj wrote:
| > foobar2000 was my go to player
|
| It is still my go to player, it works great in Windows 10.
| ents wrote:
| It's my go-to in macOS 14.5 as well. I tolerate using Spotify
| as a player for it's library. A plain list is all I actually
| want 99% of the time.
| athoscouto wrote:
| I haven't consumed audio and video from files for a while
| now. Streaming has become so convenient (partly because of
| internet prices and availability) that I don't see myself
| coming back.
| dailykoder wrote:
| There are times when songs from streaming platforms go away
| or I get somehow reminded of one very old song from some
| unknown band that's still somewhere on my hard disk, that I
| think about going back. I love to have all my songs in one
| single playlist and then just have them on random. I
| remember having that from my saved files and then some of
| those very rare songs come up every now and then. It feels
| somewhat magical. There are a handful of songs that barely
| any people know, but they trigger some very nice memories.
|
| I think soon (tm) I'll go back. Yes, streaming is
| convenient, but the algorithm is just unable to recommend
| me such rare treasures
| Geezus_42 wrote:
| Hey, I'm a "one giant playlist on shuffle" person too! :D
| conductor wrote:
| And it has iOS/Android versions too, which is great if you
| still prefer file-based players:
| https://www.foobar2000.org/mobile
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| DeaDBeeF is a clone for Linux.
| mrinfinitiesx wrote:
| I've been using VLC for Linux and mobile mp3s haven't tried
| FLAC though
| olyjohn wrote:
| xmms was my go to back in the day for Linux. Hard to beat the
| small, unobtrusive WinAmp interface and skin support. Now I
| use Audacious as it still supports WinAmp skins and
| interface. It's really hard to beat.
| kichik wrote:
| That's a funny name considering it was the Winamp creator's
| nickname and Foobar2000 itself is a Winamp clone.
| rcfox wrote:
| It's a phrase that fits into a hex value. 0xdeadbeef,
| 0xcafebabe, etc.
| shmichael wrote:
| How do you fit r into hex?
| rcfox wrote:
| I don't know. How?
| kichik wrote:
| Yeah he loves that stuff.
|
| https://github.com/kichik/nsis/blob/b4f28a7071dcd0bf3bcdb76
| 6...
| Quiark wrote:
| in what way is foobar2000 a winamp clone
|
| the only similarity I could see is that it plays music
| notpushkin wrote:
| Not sure how fb2k is a Winamp clone.
|
| There's a Winamp clone for Linux though, Audacious:
| https://audacious-media-player.org/
| kichik wrote:
| Sorry, clone might not be the right word here. Foobar2000
| was created out of spite because the creator didn't like
| what Winamp was doing. I vaguely recall something about
| bitrate limits and ogg support? It was so long ago and on
| IRC so no history saved. So it's a replacement?
|
| Edit: some more context here:
|
| https://forums.winamp.com/forum/developer-center/winamp-
| deve...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comments/lqu9u/a_brief_hi
| s...
| jasonjayr wrote:
| > foobar2000 was first released in 2002 and developed by
| Peter Pawlowski, who had previously worked at Nullsoft and
| developed plugins for Winamp. He created foobar2000 with
| the audiophile community in mind. The software's mascot and
| logo icon consists of a white "alien cat".
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 . It has
| WinAmp's DNA somewhere in there, and IIRC it was kicked off
| soon after AOL had bought WinAmp/Nullsoft.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Should also mention that Foobar2000 works flawlessly with WINE.
| dailykoder wrote:
| 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
| mariusor wrote:
| 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.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Anyone know of a supported Foobar2000 Subsonic plugin? The ones
| I've seen seem to be abandoned.
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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).
| hlandau wrote:
| foobar2000 is so good, and so unmatched, especially with its
| plugins ecosystem, I use it for my music playback needs under
| wine on Linux.
| jdc0589 wrote:
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| Why does the author backport fixes to the 1.5 and 1.6 versions?
| What's significant about recent changes that makes those worth
| keeping alive?
| stuartd wrote:
| They mention one reason in the release notes:
|
| > unintended SSE CPU requirement present in previous releases
| has been removed.
| justin66 wrote:
| Removing that requirement makes sense to me (in the current
| release or the previous releases), but I'm curious why the
| previous releases are deemed worth maintaining alongside the
| current release.
|
| What did they do feature-wise in newer versions that makes
| the old versions desirable to some people, to the point that
| a user would prefer to upgrade them rather than upgrade to
| the newest version? It's not about system compatibility: the
| 2.x line supports Windows all the way back to Windows 7.
|
| I'm content to dig into the docs but I was wondering about
| people's personal experiences with it. One hint in the
| release notes is that some, but not all, old plugins work in
| the new version...
| twerkmonsta wrote:
| Yeah almost certainly plugin ecosystem
| Grazester wrote:
| I spent more time configuring the darn thing than listening to
| music!
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Still my daily driver when I'm at my PC.
| SeriousM wrote:
| 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.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I'm not the person you are replying to but ... I started
| buying CDs in 1985 to replace my vinyl collection. Around
| 2001 is when I ripped all my CDs (800 or so) to mp3, but I
| kept buying new CDs and ripping them up until CD players
| disappeared as a standard PC feature. I now buy mp3s from
| amazon or bandcamp or wherever.
|
| Even though I have spotify, I prefer to listen to my own
| mp3s. The only time I use spotify is when someone says, "You
| should check out <band or album>". I'll listen to the album a
| few times on spotify, and if I like it, I will buy the album
| and then listen to my own mp3s.
| LM358 wrote:
| Sharings platforms still exist, they just get less mainstream
| exposure, for obvious reasons. They are also more exclusive
| and generally require more effort than back in the days.
| Sakos wrote:
| It's still extremely simple to get music without having to
| put up with snobbish exclusive communities. Most basic
| solution is getting JDownloader and just copying a YouTube
| link with a song or playlist. If you want album releases, I
| could list half a dozen publicly accessible sites off the
| top of my head that don't require you to sign up and don't
| require you to beg somebody for an invite and don't require
| you to fulfill absurd seeding requirements.
| LM358 wrote:
| I don't know where you get that snobbish vibe from (maybe
| my comment, in which case it wasn't intentional), but of
| course it's easy to just use yt-dlp or whatever. The
| places I frequent come with curation, organization,
| quality control and a community of people who deeply care
| about music which is something I value a lot.
|
| Seeding, uploading and staying in it for the long haul is
| a lot more work than just buying a Spotify subscription
| and certainly not for everyone, but as someone who is
| constantly disappointed by the selection available on
| streaming services and also _need_ local files for DJing,
| I couldn 't imagine living without it.
| Sakos wrote:
| I got the snobbish vibe from being in these communities
| and wasting my time on them. It's just another form of
| gatekeeping.
| LM358 wrote:
| You do you. After the takedowns of its predecessors
| (Napster, Oink, What.cd) some quite literal gatekeeping
| is required IMO.
| Stagnant wrote:
| As someone who uses foobar daily, I get my music mainly from
| the streaming platform Deezer. With the hi-fi subscription
| you get access to high quality audio and there are some
| unofficial tools that make it possible to download the flac
| files. It is super convenient for they have extensive
| metadata, album art and more recently lyrics as well.
| Occasionally I may download torrents but that is rare
| nowadays.
|
| I also own physical copies for vast majority of the music
| that I download but I basically only buy them to support the
| artist and to read the booklet.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| codr7 wrote:
| re: Quod Libet; thank you, these kinds of recommendations are
| invaluable for finding good tools. Especially these days with
| all the noise.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| 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.
| themerone wrote:
| WinAmp 3 was bloated, slow, and unstable. It was bad enough
| that they threw out the code and released WinAmp 5 which was
| based on the code from WinAmp 2.
| donatj wrote:
| Yep, Wasabi, the XML driven UI toolkit was just too slow
| for PC's of the time.
| a0123 wrote:
| People got used to a fairly simple and efficient UI. Version
| 3 was a bit of an abrupt change. A bit like today when your
| favourite social network completely revamps its UI for no
| apparent reason and makes it look fancier without adding any
| interesting functionality (and usually removes a couple).
|
| It's hard to come back from that.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| > 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
| a0123 wrote:
| A remnant of simpler times. Foobar and VLC, any other software
| that has always worked and remained pretty much the same?
| tryauuum wrote:
| 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
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| 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.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| 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.
|
| Pretty ironic.
|
| [1] https://www.rarewares.org/rrw/apollo.php
| haunter wrote:
| >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
| pentagrama wrote:
| Back in the day this was the hardcore nerds' Winamp!
| layer8 wrote:
| Back in the day? It still is.
| mathnode wrote:
| 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.
| nipperkinfeet wrote:
| I still use Winamp on my desktop and Foobar2000 on my ARM laptop
| because they got a ARM64 build.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| I love Foobar but it does not whip the llama's ass. Incidentally,
| Winamp is apparently going open source:
|
| https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-co...
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I wonder if this will be the new Winamp-in-nothing-but-name or
| the old-new Winamp 5x builds, or even older builds?
| fluoridation wrote:
| To be honest, while I used and loved Winamp for a long time
| and it would be nice to have the sources even for a 2.x
| version, the reason it was popular back in the day was
| because it was the only one (or close enough). Nowadays
| there's a million ways to play audio files. Audacious even
| has a mode that imitates the Winamp aesthetics, and I think
| it can even load Winamp skins. There's not much value in the
| Winamp sources beyond nostalgia, and if it's about that you
| can still run ancient builds on modern Windows, although
| they're not able to play anything.
|
| I think the moment to release the sources was when Nullsoft
| went down. Back then Winamp still had a smidgen of mindshare
| left. Now everyone has moved on to either streaming or other
| players.
| Hamuko wrote:
| 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.
| enthdegree wrote:
| The author on why Foobar2000 is not open source:
| https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,31222.msg270982.html#...
| fluoridation wrote:
| >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.
| beart wrote:
| The maintainers of foobar have always been very opinionated,
| for better or worse.
|
| I recall it pushed away a chunk of the community at least
| once in the past.
|
| It's just one of those types of projects.
| evanhughes wrote:
| I use foobar2000 to play back my super high quality dsd files. So
| far the best option to listen via my headphone amp.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| I didn't realize Foobar2000 had a Mac release. And here I've been
| using Apple Music like a fool!
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| vunderba wrote:
| 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.
| meta-meta wrote:
| 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.
| haunter wrote:
| >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
| donatj wrote:
| Have you used VLC? It's powerful and compatible, sure, but
| the UI is janky as all get out.
| haunter wrote:
| Yes I'm using it every single day
| sawaali wrote:
| 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...
| cageface wrote:
| On a mac you could give my new app a try:
|
| https://plastaq.com/minimoon
| antisthenes wrote:
| A great example of what software can and should be.
|
| A lightweight audio player/converter without any bloat.
| jcovik wrote:
| I daily use foobar2000 as my main music player. It is very good
| and simple music player.
| zokier wrote:
| 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.
| fallinditch wrote:
| 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 uber 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.
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(page generated 2024-07-31 23:01 UTC)