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... foobar is a decent option if your needs are just music.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

No thanks. Anything called "2000" is crap, we all know that.

... foobar is a decent option if your needs are just music.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

This!

My player of choice is foobar2000. No other player comes remotely close to the amount of customisation and efficiency. That said, it's really meant for experts. For tech noobs, I recommend XMPlay, which has a very Winamp-like interface out of the box, but supports many more formats or 1by1 for a very straightforward, no frills player.

As with many things, Foobar2000 can be extended and configured to have such a view:
http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...

A nice view that is in between album cover browsing and a straight text based playlist is achievable with Simplaylist:
http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...
(see the screenshots here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/ind... )

Customizing foobar2000 can be pretty 'technical' (holding shift when accessing the menus, really?), but once you get it the way you want it, it works almost perfectly.

As with many things, Foobar2000 can be extended and configured to have such a view:
http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...

A nice view that is in between album cover browsing and a straight text based playlist is achievable with Simplaylist:
http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...
(see the screenshots here: http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/ind... )

Customizing foobar2000 can be pretty 'technical' (holding shift when accessing the menus, really?), but once you get it the way you want it, it works almost perfectly.

What else would I be using?

Foobar2000

Lots of people do equalization, but mostly just by ear. Tools to use SCIENCE to do it are now cheaply available.

1) play music out of your computer with an equalizer. I use Foobar2000. There is a free 31-band stereo equalizer plug in available for it. http://www.foobar2000.org/comp...

2) play some Pink Noise through it. Pink Noise is equal energy per octave, so on a log frequency graph of SPL it should be flat. Of course, it won't be b/c speakers and rooms are imperfect, but now you have a goal. Download a pink noise sample, or make one with something like Audacity. Probably use a non-lossy file format.

3) get a smartphone app with a Real Time Equalizer. iphones have consistent mic performance, so the software can usually correct for it well, but I have had some bits of software behave oddly. I paid a few bucks for this one ( http://www.studiosixdigital.co... ) I understand there are android apps also. You can buy a measurement mic for your phone cheaply ( http://www.parts-express.com/d... ) if you want.

4) The RTA will measure your SPL vs Frequency, and your pink noise sample is sound that should have flat response. So use your equalizer software to twiddle the sliders until things are flat. Microphone location makes a difference!

So if you have a smartphone and a computer this can be done for somewhere between free and $50. Some people are good at equalizing by ear, but bringing some tech to the table will help most people get better results.

foobar2000 is now whipping the llama's ass. I haven't looked back since I started using it.

foobar2000 is an excellent Winamp alternative. It's written by an ex-Winamp developer and I find it to be superior in every way. It looks like a normal Windows app, the UI is configurable, has a media library feature, and has bunch of plugins available to add new features and customize it.

I still have two or three recent (i.e. last four or five years) devices that have problems seeking VBR files or displaying the proper duration.

Even foobar2000 has issues with seeking in MP3s. From the FAQ:

Why is seeking so slow while playing MP3 files?

The MP3 format doesn't natively support sample-accurate seeking, and sample accurate seeking is absolutely required by some features of foobar2000 (such as .CUE playback). MP3 seeking can't be optimized neither for CBR files (frame sizes aren't really constant because of padding used), nor for VBR files (both Xing and VBRI headers in those files contain only approximated info and are useless for sample-exact seeking). Therefore MP3 seeking works by bruteforce-walking the MPEG stream chain and is appropriately slow (this gets faster when you pass through the same point of file for the second time because seektables have been built in the RAM).

foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. It is known for its highly modular design, breadth of features, and extensive user flexibility in configuration. For example, the user-interface is completely customizable.[5] Its extensive SDK allows third-party developers enough power to completely replace the interface. foobar2000 supports a large number of audio file formats, has many features for organising metadata, files, and folders, and has a converter interface for use with command line encoders. To maximize audio fidelity in cases where resampling or downscaling in bit depth is required, it provides noise shaping and dithering. There are a number of official and third-party components which add many additional features. The core is closed source, whereas the SDK is licensed under the BSD license.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 foobar2000 site: http://www.foobar2000.org/ download: http://www.foobar2000.org/download

foobar2000 is a freeware audio player for Windows developed by Peter Pawlowski, a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft. It is known for its highly modular design, breadth of features, and extensive user flexibility in configuration. For example, the user-interface is completely customizable.[5] Its extensive SDK allows third-party developers enough power to completely replace the interface. foobar2000 supports a large number of audio file formats, has many features for organising metadata, files, and folders, and has a converter interface for use with command line encoders. To maximize audio fidelity in cases where resampling or downscaling in bit depth is required, it provides noise shaping and dithering. There are a number of official and third-party components which add many additional features. The core is closed source, whereas the SDK is licensed under the BSD license.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar2000 foobar2000 site: http://www.foobar2000.org/ download: http://www.foobar2000.org/download

I switched to foobar2000 a long time ago as my light weight music player.

I liked the concept of Songbird, even though it was too 'heavy' a program, what with all the Mozilla stuff in the background. I really was looking for a replacement to Winamp, but Songbird didn't work. The problem was that it was painfully slow to parse the media library from my SMB share (Winamp was about 10 times faster), and that was just a show-stopper for me (I'm a music enthusiast, and play a little bit myself, so I have a rather huge library). So I went back to Winamp, and would check Songbird twice a year or so to check their progress.

Then about a year ago I found out about Foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/ and I never fired Winamp up ever again (as soon as I figured how to setup foobar). It's got all the geeky plugins ('components') I need, such as Kernel Streaming, AudioScrobbler and live Lyrics. The only downside is that it runs only under Windows.

Have you tried foobar2000? It's simple and minimal like Winamp used to be, but still extensible with plugins if you need functionality not built-in.

Foobar has a plugin for performing ABX tests.

You give it two files encoded differently and it will perform the test using those files. It will also tell you the % chance that you're just guessing.

http://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx

Foobar 2000 is what I use. A lil bit of moseying about to set it up, but it's worth it. Recommend this plugin if you're on Vista+. It helpfully kills all other sounds while your music is playing - oh, and it apparently gives bit-exact output as well, although I'm fairly sure nobody can really hear the difference.

Foobar 2000 is what I use. A lil bit of moseying about to set it up, but it's worth it. Recommend this plugin if you're on Vista+. It helpfully kills all other sounds while your music is playing - oh, and it apparently gives bit-exact output as well, although I'm fairly sure nobody can really hear the difference.

Use Rockbox instead http://www.rockbox.org/ I record (and download) a lot of live music and prefer to keep it lossless, so I convert everything to flac and tag it all in foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/ rather than going the MP3 route. Rockbox will remove your need for iTunes and the unwanted QT install and does a very nice job on most older iPods (I have a 5.5 video 80 gb as well as an older iRiver that it works sweetly on). Unfortunately, they stopped after the mini and 1g Nano so if you have anything newer you're out of luck, but this is easy to use and works a treat for me.

It depends on what kind of functionality you want. With my iPod classic I use foobar on the iPod itself as a portable application to manage my music collection. My iPod touch is completely jailbroken and can install 3rd party apps via iTunes. But as another poster correctly pointed out, unless you're willing to devote a lot of time and potentially brick your device, you're pretty much stuck in the walled-garden.

Exactly. Only a seriously uninformed person would use Songbird. It's pure, bloated crap. Even more bloated than Winamp.

Use foobar2000 instead. You can do infinitely more with it and it has a tiny footprint. If you don't need something that powerful but is easy to use, then grab Xion.

If you're using Linux, then use Open Cubic Player or something. If you're using MacOS, then you have bigger problems than worrying about what music player to use.

From my experience with Paypal this will be an outright desaster for many people. You can't get a hold of any human being through their shit telephone system. There is nothing except pre-fab email replies. They lock accounts for no apparent reason and refuse to explain themselves. They steal money from their account holders by blocking accounts and not creating opportunities to dispute that. They've stolen money from foobar http://www.foobar2000.org/, the Xorg Foundation http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.freedesktop.xorg/42548 and as we all clearly see Wikileaks http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100124/1846137886.shtml

Paypal is a lame excuse of an idea that went right of the window. They try to act like a bank but don't take the responsibility that comes with it. They screw several countries out of taxes because they're situated in Liechtenstein (at least for Europe) which doesn't pay anything. They provide the service of adding another layer of menu forms to a credit card purchase. They don't provide actual added value to most resellers and are currently used as an extortion tool for Ebay customers. On top of that they are a major target for phishing and skimming attacks, cross site scripting and abuse.

Who in their right mind would do business with them? Oh I forgot you have to. In case you've wondered I've had my share of problems w/ Paypal. They refused to let me balance my PP account from my bank because they are too fucking stupid to get a non-automated verification system for new bank accounts. So while my account was in transfer because of a merger they send the "verfication" (a ridiculous transfer of random cent values) to the wrong sort code and subsequently refused to correct their mistake or let me (who had done nothing but provide them with updated proper bank data) verify the account any other way. In short: Paypal sucks, I've closed my account there and won't be coming back. Ever.

If that is the kind of servce they provide to their paying customers imagine how brilliantly developers will find working w/ them.

Wow, foobar2000 did that backend/frontend thing ages ago, not to mention it looks a lot better and is customizable like hell. http://www.foobar2000.org/

I'm not quite sure what your point is. You don't need iTunes to put music on your iPod, either.

And listen to music. It amazes me that I, a linux user with 6 years of experience, cannot find a decent music player for linux that is as simple and straightforward as foobar2000 for windows. There are dozens of MPD frontends, iTunes clones and too many winamp clones, but they are all either complicated or crashy or bloated

Yeah I know I should write one myself...

I used to be a diehard Winamp user, back from the pre v1 days to the early days of v5. It just got so slow and bloated that I eventually gave it up. Apparently Winamp users care more about how their player looks than how it sounds and responds.

Songbird sucks boulders through crazy straws. I tried it once before and have absolutely nothing positive to say about it.

foobar2000 is my main player. I've been using it to manage and play my music library/large playlists for the past few years and absolutely love it. It's fast, small memory/CPU footprint, supports almost every known audio format, has just about any audio/DSP feature/filter that can be named, ReplayGain support, nice masstagger/renamer and a highly customizable interface via its own internal scripting language, ColumnsUI or PanelsUI. In my opinion there is no other player that even comes close.

Xion is what I use for quick individual sound files or small playlists. It's quite a nice, fast loading little player.

XMPlay is decent, but is a little too slow loading once you get the file format and DSP plugins installed. It boasts "balls-on" accurate MOD/XM/etc playback, but really many other players can handle these formats just as accurately.

CoolPlayer is a neat little player, but doesn't really offer much, aside from being open source. It has limited format support and not many features.

uAmp has the distinction of being an x64 player, but offers little else. It's slow loading, supports even fewer formats than CoolPlayer and has doesn't even have rudimentary features that many other players have (ie. equalizer, noise shaping, gapless playback, etc).

1by1 is actually a pretty cool little player. It supports few file formats standalone, but does support Winamp input plugins for more. The main feature is its interface which directly uses directories instead of playlists.

coverJuke is basically a coverFlow clone. It has a slick OpenGL interface, supports a moderate number of file formats (can support more by using an external player) and is actively developed. Still considering that foobar2000 has a coverFlow-like plugin for it (if that's your thing), this player doesn't have much more than novelty value.

musikCube is a nice lightweight player with a respectable number of features. I think of it as foobar-lite, except it's really not any faster and has significantly less features and format support.

iTunes is slow, bloated, supports a laughably small number of formats and is lacking in features. I tried it once and it proceeded to start renaming my meticulously named, tagged and ordered music library on its own. Purged it from my system and had to use foobar2000 to repair the damage that it did. In short, it's complete crap.

Aqualung looks promising, but I haven't actually gotten around to trying it out.

I'm not sure about iPod support for any of these since I use a Creative Zen which acts as an external drive when plugged in, making it really easy to copy to/from.

I'm sorry, but Foobar is not open source.

You may like foobar 2000:

http://www.foobar2000.org/

0.9.5 and later have a revamped default interface and may warrant a reevaluation if you have previously evaluated and rejected foobar.

Video encoding's been multithreaded in at least some encoders for a while now, some decoders too. Compression can be done multithreaded (e.g. pbzip2, WinRAR), as can generation of par files (I use concurrent par2cmdline for backups). My audio player's supported running NUM_CPU conversion/ReplayGain threads for years.

And yes, even when apps don't use it themselves, SMP's nice; I was doing it 9 years ago when I got my first BP6 and it was great, despite relatively little other than the OS actually making use of multiple cores; that system lasted me years more than a single socket would have. Increasingly though the CPU heavy things that actually make some people plop down £150+ on one are using multiple cores, and even if some do tend to max out around 2 cores, at least quad core lets you run 2 of them at full pelt; that was an advantage a decade ago enjoyed by people willing to spend a bit more, and it's an advantage now.

Of course what actually tends to be an issue more than available CPU is available IO. Being able to run 4 compression/encoding threads at once isn't so hot when each thread's waiting hundreds or even thousands of ms for a HD to get around to servicing them. I expect as core counts go up we'll probably see more consumer level hardware plonking down the extra £40 for RAID-1, or more.

http://www.foobar2000.org/ for the win.
While I do use Amarok on my Linux boxes, I'd REALLY prefer running foobar2000, and even investigated how well it ran with Wine.

Well, how about http://foobar2000.org/? Amarok is my player of choice under Linux, but I still prefer foobar2k over it, too bad it doesn't run that well under Wine...

Any time foobar2000 is recommended, popular components should be mentioned as well (also a link to that hydrogenaudio-hosted wiki). My essential components (all on that linked page):

• Columns UI
• LyricsDB
• Monkey's Audio decoder
• Autoplaylist Manager

Also, foobar2k includes transcoding settings for LAME MP3 and Nero AAC, but the binaries aren't included (for licensing reasons I assume). Foobar2k asks for the locations of "lame.exe" or "neroaacenc.exe" the first time you try to encode to these formats. They can be downloaded for free:

• LAME MP3
• Nero AAC

Finally, essential reading for newbie foobar2k users: Bachi-Bouzouk's Guide to Foobar2000 v0.9.

Any time foobar2000 is recommended, popular components should be mentioned as well (also a link to that hydrogenaudio-hosted wiki). My essential components (all on that linked page):

• Columns UI
• LyricsDB
• Monkey's Audio decoder
• Autoplaylist Manager

Also, foobar2k includes transcoding settings for LAME MP3 and Nero AAC, but the binaries aren't included (for licensing reasons I assume). Foobar2k asks for the locations of "lame.exe" or "neroaacenc.exe" the first time you try to encode to these formats. They can be downloaded for free:

• LAME MP3
• Nero AAC

Finally, essential reading for newbie foobar2k users: Bachi-Bouzouk's Guide to Foobar2000 v0.9.

foobar2000 is my favorite media player for windows. does one thing very well without any of the pointless eye candy. the installer is 1.6MB and it has some really nice plugins (.ape decoding and last.fm updater).

I like Opera, modo, foobar2000, VLC Media Player, 7zip, Pidgin, Process Explorer, uTorrent, TCPView, Foxit Reader, and WinDirStat.

Foobar2k! Best audio player for Windows ever. http://foobar2000.org/ Quite minimalistic, but highly configurable. Very low memory footprint and plays basically everything.

Then foobar2000 (http://www.foobar2000.org/) is probably the player for you.
As a fellow media-players-should-simply-play-media-dammit curmudgeon, it ticks all the boxes. Its UI is extremely simplistic (by default - it can be customized to include things like album art etc), it has high quality playback, and a very small footprint.
It has very powerful tagging functionality (with even the possibility to script tagging operations you frequently use).
There are also many, many plugins available (to provide things like freedb-based tagging, last.fm scrobbling, ...).

Not being a Windows fan myself, which on practice means I use Ubuntu 95% of the time, I cannot help regretting the fact that foobar2000 player doesn't run on Linux. So the next time you find yourself wandering these frozen lands and start thinking of a calefactory monkey dance, just launch it up.

Back to the topic, Foobar2000 for Windows handles crazy big music libraries with no slowdowns, and is extremely customisable.

fb2k is known for being very effecient, even in the face of crazily huge libraries. I dare say you'll hate the default interface/config, but it's not difficult to bend it to your will (though it's not exactly iTunes; more like vim/mutt for music).

Windows only unfortunately, though it is supposed to work well in Wine. Significant chunks of it are BSD licensed.

Fair enough; I'm satisfied with foobar2000/BMPx and rsync. That said, it sounds like iTunes might work with Rockbox if you're willing to work on it. See this forum post.

The problem with OSS is that there are just too many choices.

You're entirely right. Thank god that with closed source, there's only one media player to choose from. And only one web browser. I'm so happy that there's only one closed source mail client too!

I would make my point further, but my comment would be rejected as spam...

Consider the sales/support implications of customers selecting products for Christmas 2008: "Well, sir, this Foobar-1000 plays discs up produced in 2006-2007, a Foobar-1130 plays discs produced from 2006-2008, and a Fonybaz-1900 plays discs produced from 2006 to August 2008."

You didn't specify an OS, but for Windows Foobar 2000 plays MODs and SIDs and a lot more.

Foobar? Winamp? iTunes is one of the worst music players I've used.

Hehe, what I love is that the ppl clamoring for higher quality tracks are ppl who couldn't pass a double blind test between probably 96-128 kbps and 192. The truth of the matter is that double blind tests are rarely conducted by humans above 128kbps because it is so difficult(I've heard of a high bitrate test using some program to look for noise). In fact there is a 48 kbps test(Thats right, Forty Eight Kilo Bee Pee Ess ;) test in progress at the respected http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php I was looking for another thread about how "ABX killed my ego" but gave up. Basically, no one can tell the diff easily above 128 using modern encoders, its all the placebo effect. Download foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/ and try taking a double blind(ABX test) with FLAC vs 128 kbps lame. Have fun flipping a coin to decide which one is higher/lower quality.

Foobar 2000

It's FOSS, so the GUI is generally crap (it's as unitiuitive as other media players while still being ugly and unskinnable by default) but it's very lightweight and unobtrusive.

Here's what it looks like with one person's customizations and skins: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Imag e:Columnsui.png

Since Column UI is so popular, I think its site needs to be much easier to access from Foobar2000's front page. Also, to add a "volume slider" (not enabled by default - WTF?), right-click the toolbar area in Columns UI and add the volume slider.

In my experience Winamp5 sucks incredible amounts of memory when you have a decent music library. I'm talking over 200 megabytes just to have a music player running. Hint: Check VM usage and Peak memory usage aside from the seemingly compete "memory usage" in task manager.

Not to mention Winamp still doesn't do unicode. Basicly, the developers said they couldn't add unicode support without breaking the plugins back in the 2.0 days. Then they changed the model, broke the plugins and still refused to add unicode support.

In short: It's bloated, and crap. Only thing Winamp has going for it these days is the huge amount of plugins and skins.

While I will agree it's not for everyone, I really like Foobar200. On my system it uses around 13MBs of RAM, as opposed to Winamps 200MBs+.

I've found foobar2000 to be very nice. It's a typical hacker-player that can be mod'ed to do anything you want it to, but the base is just a simple, lightweight music player with a library, superb format-support (except iTunes MPEG4 lossless) and otherwise no fuzz.