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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. It's been in development a long time and is quite mature.

Added to that is the relative lack of quality freeware and open source apps and utilities (compared to Windows or Linux platforms).

Seriously? What open source app or utility doesn't run on OS X?

He said freeware and open source, but off the top of my head (including freeware):

Foobar2000
Exact Audio Copy
VirtualDub
DVDShrink
Quicktime Alternative
Media Player Classic
7-zip
Quickpar
Nvu
Irfanview
Picasa 2
Paint.net
FileZilla

Foobar2000 is not GPL'd, and is probably not considered Open Source either. Have you even read the license page?

Foobar2000: http://www.foobar2000.org/ It works well with my ~2000 MP3/OGG/M4A and Mod tracks. It's fast, has a small footprint, is expandable, has library features, it's extremely customizable, works nearly out of the box with most standard multimedia keyboards, has a decent following and is actively developed. It's also GPL. I could babble on about the plugins I use but I'll let the HydrogenAudio wiki do my talking for me :) http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foob ar2000:Components You'll be most interested in the ColumnsUI stuff but there's quite a few other gems in there. HTH

I suggest switching from WINAMP to foobar2000, at least for background music playing. It's much smaller than WinAmp. On my system, foobar2000 takes less than 3MB while playing streaming audio.

It has actually created a new niche. DWIW media players like foobar2000 http://www.foobar2000.org/. Even amarok in it's default layout is nicely navigable. Extraneous options hidden behind either menus or sidebars.

The company I work at has been struggling with VOIP for years now. They tried a Bell solution but it was far too expensive. They bought a huge 3COM solution but could never get it working correctly. Now they're jumping through hoops trying to get Cisco to work but it's taking about 1000% as long as they planned. When I mentioned Asterix to the head of IS, she said it wasn't even an option because "no company can be held accountable for failure".

Saying that commercial software is better than open source is BS. Which would you prefer - Foobar2000 audio player with a zillion features and a super clean interface, or Windows Media Player which displays ads every time you run it and tries to phone home behind the scenes?

Home PC users will generally try free software first, and if it doesn't meet their needs they'll shrug it off and try somethign else. Companies seem to be afraid of open source, though, because they need a hotline to call and a target at which to point their finger if something goes wrong.

...version 6 (6.4 specifically, I think) was when WiMP essentially reached maturity.

Really, what more possible features could you need in a media player other than the usual play, pause, rewind, etc. buttons...

Microsoft should take a hint from VLC or mplayer, and realize that we don't want the useless junk they're piling on. The reason why VLC and mplayer are so great is they do one thing and do it well: play media. Period.

I guess there are strategic reasons for having an all-in-one video/audio player, but I haven't seen a good implementation/interface yet. Maybe version 11 will get it right, but I have doubts. I think Microsoft would have been better off separating Media Player into two apps: Windows Video Player and Windows Music Player. For now, I'll keep using MPC for video and foobar2000 (with Columns UI) for music.

foobar2000 has a tabbed interface with separate playlists in each tab which is nice. I like the sparse interface. Some people hate it, although if you are willing to invest the time there are a lot of ways to customize it to make it look much nicer.

The Columns UI is enabled by selecting the "Foobar2000" menu, then selecting "Preferences," then "Display," then changing "User interface module" from "Default User Interface" to "Columns UI." I think it should be easier to find the Columns UI, but I don't want to complain too much about a great app with so many great customization options.

Here's an example of what Columns UI can look with a few more customizations:

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Imag e:Columnsui.png

I use foobar2000 to manage my collection (about 10k mp3s). It's got a real low memory footprint, easy search, plugins to do just about whatever you want (I believe there's a musicbrainz plugin, but I know there's a freedb plugin, which is similar). Anyway, checkout http://www.foobar2000.org/. Windows only, unfortunately.

Plus foobar2000 is the first player I have found that has an interface that looks like all of my other programs. All of the other media players look like some amateur art student trying to reinvent a UI (and failing miserably). foobar2000 has a tabbed interface with separate playlists in each tab which is nice. I like the sparse interface. Some people hate it, although if you are willing to invest the time there are a lot of ways to customize it to make it look much nicer. foobar2000 is nice and fast too, at least until you try to seek through a MP3.

I keep my files on my Linux server. I have a raid array with a LVM volume called music with MP3 subdir (as opposed to other subdirs like C64-SID and AmigaMods). I then have the following broad directories:

• Audiobooks
• Classical
• Comedy
• Folk, Ethnic, & World
• Jazz
• LargeSets
• Miscellaneous
• Other

LargeSets is for DJ Mixes and other MP3s that are over an hour long. If I have more than two items from a DJ or artist I create folder with their name and put the files in there.

All of the other directories have a subdir and file structure of artist/albumyear-albumname/nn_trackname where nn is the tack number. I find this method to be easy for me to drag and drop music into a playlist to play. I never have gotten used to the iTunes method of importing everything that you have.

One thing that I am going to focus on over the next several months is to sort albums and artists out by more broad genres as I have already done. Eventually I will go back through all of my songs and set the genre for each song. Right now I'm giving each album the same genre rather than tagging each song with the genre that that specific song falls into.

Foobar200, with its dynamially generated playlists, masstagging and basically superlatively superb playlist management does the trick for me.

Funny how winAMP and foobar2000 manage to run faster than iTunes.

Funny also how VLC and even WinAMP manage to not be complete shite at playing videos (and can even do fullscreen omg).

One might conclude that, in fact, Apple just can't handle coding in Windows, or something equally preposterous - because we all know that, unlike M$, Apple's never sued bloggers or screwed over customers or released broken hardware or... oh... wait...

I dared question the illusion that Apple <3's us all, so this is probably going to be modded flamebait - but whatever.

MY MOM KNOWS I'M INSIGHTFUL AND INFORMATIVE LIKE ALL THE OTHER BOYS.

... isn't it? Although I use a Mac Mini most of the time, my work PC with Windows 2000 makes some beautiful music with the latest version of iTunes. What's so bad about it? Seems to function precisely as it does in Mac OSX, my iPod syncs beautifully, etc ... what makes it so awful?

Everything already listed, plus the fact that it's approximately twice as slow as MusicMatch Jukebox - anyone else remember -that- piece of shit?

Some excellent, free alternatives include WinAMP and the sleek, sexy, geek-chic foobar2000.

Compared to these, iTunes blows. And QuickTime... well, you didn't mention it, but QuickTime is one of those rare few applications that leaves me completely speechless, save for the word "dogshit" - which isn't even the proper spacing.

I remember installing QuickTime and some of the preferences are a wee bit clunky, but no more so than **chuckle** Windows Media Player **shudder**.

Oh, yes, you -did- mention QuickTime - and you even got all gay about it. I think your subconscious knows what a wretched piece of dogshit it is, and is trying to alert you by TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR THOUGHTS. I'm happy with a crashy old WinAMP, I'm happy with VideoLAN's obtuse interface, I'm even mildly non-peeved concerning Media Player's sluggy sluggishness - but keep QuickTime the fuck away from me. The same goes for RealAnything, too.

Also, I thought Microsoft-anything was always "the worst" with you Apple People(TM). So basically we have one of you charming folk here saying "oh yeah, our media player doesn't suck as bad as... ...WINDOWS Media Player" - in other words, of all the free video players out there, the only one that sucks more than Apple's is... the one that (by definition as interpreted by an Apple Person(TM)) sucks the most? SIGN ME UP.

There's a version of foobar for Linux? I've been waiting for it for years!

Subject: iTunes!

Best app on Windows, bar none.

I switched to using Mac primarily about 6 months ago. I've been able to find suitable replace for most of my windows apps, except my favorite music player, foobar2000. It can play everything (including oggs, very important to me), it's highly customizable, it uses very little resources, and its freeware. Nothing on Mac comes close to giving the user the options available in foobar, especially the sorry collection of players that play oggs (I know itunes can with a plugin, but it can't read tags, and it's very slow). Get it!

Google Desktop; Firefox and/or Opera; OpenOffice and/or AbiWord; and the requisite antispyware/antivirus apps, of course. Oh, and Google Desktop.
I also make heavy use of the following:

ClocX
Windows XP PowerToys (highly useful, especially TweakUI
Notify CD (bare-bones but elegant CD player)
ReadPlease (text-to-speech)
Foxit Reader (a much faster PDF reader than Adobe)
Trillian (multiple IM)
foobar2000 (audio player)

Foobar2000 - An audio player that is a painful reminder how heavy iTunes feels. Has 10x the functionality, and brutally enforces good practices in keeping a media library. 0.9 just came out a few weeks ago.

Media Player Classic - The only media player you'll need. With ffdshow, it handles just about anything I can throw at it, audio works, subtitles work, and its one exe.

uTorrent - Everything you'd want from Azureus, in a 150k self-contained exe. Makes it almost manditory to leave it open all the time because its just that slick and efficient.

BurnAtOnce - A cdrdao based burner with an amazingly simple interface. Who needs Nero with this around?

Exact Audio Copy - THE cd ripper. cdparanoia works fine in most cases, but doesn't leave you 100% sure your rip is 100% perfect like this one. And this fits in almost any audio workflow with its advanced tagging, and command line support.

More apps like these on other platforms please!

AAC,WMA,Vorbis from everything i read use more CPU time to decode then a mp3 track

Speaking of parroting, this has shown up several times in the discussion, with only assumptions and no evidence to back it up.

Take a look here: http://www.foobar2000.org/foospeed/

That's a collection of decoding speed results from various machines using foobar2000. It doesn't include WMA, but AAC and MP3 are on there, and the results are rather consistent in showing that AAC decodes faster than MP3. Not overwhelmingly, but definitely noticeable. Regardless, it disproves the whole "newer codec, therefore must be more complex, therefore must take longer to decode" assumption.

That has little to do with iTunes. The iPod just works that way... try putting music on an iPod with any other manager software, it will turn out just the same way. Some 3rd party managers can also pull music off an iPod and rename the tracks based on tags.

iTunes only "mangles" track names if you have the "keep my music organised" checkbox checked, and even then it just sorts them into directories by artist and then by album.

That said, I don't think iTunes is a great music management application. With large collections it gets slow, really slow. And there's no way you can organise things by anything other than genre, album name and artist tags. I prefer foobar2000.

Complexity? In 2006, Winamp is by far the lightest, fastest, and least complex of all the major Windows media players.

A small plug for the greatest MP3 player in existance, Foobar2000

It's so awesomely customisable, it hurts.

I used winamp too - until i found foobar2000

It supports virtually all posible audio codecs, and sound quality is much better

Back in the days of audioscrobbler there were frequent days and even weeks when the servers would be slow and sometimes even not record data sent, but since the swap of domain and name to last.fm it seems that they have worked out all the kinks. foobar2000 and last.fm work splendid on my windows box. I just wish there was some way to have two different plugins report to the same account. (Even if that led to abusing tags.)

Hmm, I use fb2k for most of my audio conversion (and everything else for that matter), and it has no trouble maintaining metadata across whatever formats you throw at it, and it's certainly not the only tool capable of this. What are you using, command line decoders and encoding from the resulting WAV or something?

If you like iTunes, you'll love Foobar2k. I use it to rip all of my CD's to Musepack -standard, get tags, apply ReplayGain, and sort it how I like it. It also has the advantage of not being nearly as resource/memory intensive as itunes or WMP 10.

In my experience iTunes does nothing Foobar can't do.

And it has the best and most minimalistic interface ever :)

foobar2000 for audio.
for video.
Haven't found anything these can't play on Windows yet...
but then, I simply don't watch realmedia.

VLC (VideoLan Client) is a video player. Using it to play music would be silly. That said, let Winamp die already, and join the rest of us here in the 21st century. And yes, one can play an entire folder of music with one right-click on the folder itself.

It's name is Foobar2000 and it is made by one of the old winamp devs. Closed source but it has a nice SDK.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

If you want to run queries on your music collection, get foobar2000 with the extended playlist generator plugin (included in the special installer).

foobar2000 (screenshot) is clean and functional and does what I want it to do instead of what someone else wants it to do. And I've stopped caring about how it looks.

Gee, I think I'll dump iTunes and install Windows Media Player instead, because I just like its looks better.

Pretty much, yeah. You should have guessed by now that Microsoft isn't going to complete on software quality.

Who the hell wants one of those? I use VLC and Foobar2000 to get away from that crap!

There's nothing more pathetic than apps trying to emulate the look of physical appliances, like all DVD-players do for instance. It's like some idiotic idea that just won't go away, no matter how truly stupid and fugly it is.

now what's wrong with winamp???

I was specificly referring to WinAmp3, which everyone knows was a slow, useless resource-hog which offered little new features justifying it. Nobody used it, and in the end we got WinAmp5 (2+3) with the best of both worlds (versions), or so was the plan. We got WA3 features, and it was slightly lighter than WA3, even though it wasn't nearly as light as WA2.

Anyway, since you ask. What is wrong with WinAmp? IMO two things:

1. Get a decent music-collection and watch the memory footprint exceed 50MBs. For something as simple as a mp3-player. Not to mention the VM-allocations can bypass 250MB for some odd reason. This is supposed to be a simple music-player for crying out loud. This is insane. The software is bloated and full of leaks.

2. No unicode support. People have been asking about it since version 2, and they still haven't gotten around to implement it. They have been rather active about dismissing the issues and killing threads about the subject in the Winamp forums though.

That's it really. It's become big and bloated, without adding anything but a new skinning engine and a medialibrary. Apart from that, no new features I can think of.

Plus I need my unicode. Even though it's slightly less "pro" than WinAmp, I find that Foobar2000 takes care of all my music needs. And it uses less resources doing so.

It's also worth mentioning that SNESMusic.org has a better SNES collection than ZD, and that Foobar 2000 Special comes bundled with plugins for many console music formats.

http://www.foobar2000.org/

I never liked Winamp because it does not support Unicode and because it does not support multi-user setups. They claim that because only a very small fraction of their users need anything beyond chr(255), they won't implement it. In fact, one mod at Winamp referred me to Foobar2000 for my Unicode-needs. I haven't looked back since.

Foobar2000 seems fairly decent.
http://www.foobar2000.org/

As an offside, I'm am getting so fucking annoyed by the anti-script thing.

Maybe this is news for Winamp users - I doubt it, but I don't use it myself. But there has been software to download songs from the iPod to your harddrive for ages. The inability to do so is pretty much limited to iTunes, every other application dealing with the iPod (and there are dozens) enables you to do that. One popular example for Windows is EphPod. Lots and lots more can be found for multiple platforms at iPodlounge.

Personally, I use foo_pod, a plugin for the foobar2000 audio player. It's quite powerful, including such features as automatic conversion of formats the iPod doesn't know (e.g. ogg or shorten) and automatic generation of audiobooks. For what it's worth - Wired seems to care - foobar and foo_pod are yet half as small than Winamp and that plugin is. Hah.

1. replaygain
2. proper gapless playback support
3. A scripted language based system to for determining how the player outputs/reads:
   1. tags
   2. filenames
   3. on-screen displays / title bars / etc
   4. the actual main player window
4. support for embedding cue files in id tags (rip album as a single mp3/ogg/whatever, but it appears as a set of tracks in the player)
5. playing albums from within rar/zip files (another way of doing the above, some benefits/drawbacks by comparision)

Considering the Best Audio Player in the World
has Tabs.
Also the new gui component, foo_columns, is even more
awesomer!

Given that Microsoft is firmly entrenched in the media and content industries, as are Apple, Dolby, Fraunhofer and others, is it really any surprise these days that a lot of patents are being trodden on these days? Hell, even foobar2000 must be stepping on a few peoples' toes.

Best I've found thus far (under windows) to manage a medium-large sized collection and allow quick "normailization" for additions is Foobar2000

It might take a bit to figure out how to customize it, but you should give it a try - I bet it'll grow on you :)

VLevel is exactly what you want. It works by continuously but gradually changing the gain throughout the file. It has a lookahead buffer of a few seconds, so unlike a compressor, it never has to change the gain too quickly. This preserves "contrast," so for example if a quiet part was being made loud, the gain will decrease a little while before the big bombastic crescendo, so you'll still get the effect.

For Windows, the best way to use it is with the plugin for Foobar2000, an awesome windows audio player. On Linux, you can use it as a LADSPA filter, which can be plugged into XMMS.

Have you tried using Replay Gain? It finds the psychoacoustic level of the music and calculates an appropriate gain correction. Replay gain is supported by foobar2000. MP3Gain is a tool that computes the replay gain for a track and changes the overall gain of the file.

OK, so Winamp isn't installed by default, but is is becoming the player of choice for the IT cogniscenti in place of WMP.

Hm. First off, I wouldn't say that Winamp is becoming anything - it already is, and has been for a while. People, and not only "IT cogniscenti" (aka geeks), have been using Winamp in the days when WMP wasn't a generally known acronym. To me, Winamp was the player of the period when MP3 was still new (remember oth.net and AudioGalaxy?). I kind of doubt the number of users is still increasing, in fact I imagine that if anything, the number is decreasing.
I might be wrong, though - so, what is the choice among the geeks these days? Do you all still use Winamp? Personally, I've been using Foobar for a long time now, mostly because of it's small footprint, straightforward interface and out-of-the-box global hotkeys. Because I'm so happy with it, I really haven't even looked out for any other new players, so I'm curious as to whether I've missed anything. (And I don't mean iTunes for Windows.)

I have yet to see a good media player that use native widgets

Well, I have seen one

(As an Engineer who has thoroughly studied ADC/DAC) I would say that the article presents a very good background on the issues of sampling and reconstruction of audio.

However, the rest of the article is approached from the heavily biased opinion point of an "audiophile", which the majority of the population is not. These audio experts have fantastic equipment and a keen sense of hearing, allowing them to distinguish between the subtle difference between high fidelity recording and playback. Such people like software like foobar2000 and care a lot about dynamic range, and for the most part think that lossy encoding is a shame. This is a bit about being picky, and a bit about showing off, but either way it's a minority viewpoint.

But such people are by far the minority of the public. Most of us don't get caught up in the subtle details of audio recording and playback, partially because we don't care, and partially because we don't have the fine equipment (electronics and human ear) to notice such things. So the article for instance completely dismisses lossy encoding, even though this is by far the most exciting frontier of modern audio compression. You can get 64 kbps (ogg vorbis) or 32 kbps (aac) streams that sound amazing to most people, as good as FM radio.

As an Engineer that is what I find exciting, because we can transport "essentially the same" amount of media in far, far less bandwidth than it required a decade ago. And the efficiency is improving all the time, ditto for video.