Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery (mostly through piracy forums) for me in my teens, used to spend hours upon hours customising it and posting the results on Hydrogen Audio while weird and wonderful music was downloading from yousendit, rapidshare, soulseek, and megaupload. Bands I now go see live and support through bandcamp now that I'm not poor!
So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.
Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS.
Music Forums (and 4chan) were amazing for discovery because you had people with extremely hard opinions arguing vociferously against others over which album was best or why such-and-such was awful.
Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!"
Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.
TBF, a lot of that hasn’t really died out in niche music communities even though it might appear to be. Still widely prevalent in the metal scene at least with people moving to Reddit and Facebook as they age and stop being able to maintain forum software
Probably yes. As I move forward in life, my free time is dwindling faster than I like. Work responsibilities and other fun stuff seeps in.
I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.
Free time is one factor but other factors include declining health (people that have lived the touring lifestyle understand how harsh it can be physically) and dying. Add in children and the complications of having a 10 year old listen to Cannibal Corpse with you as a hypothetical situation.
One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)
There's also rateyourmusic.com which has a forum that I always thought of as the online hub for those who enjoy having petty arguments about all things music
There were even decent releases made on /mu/. Specifically, never having been on 4chan myself, I've heard of that scene by the way of Loli Ripe—whose music is basically j-core a-la DJ Sharpnel, but with more breakcore. I only wish that they would better normalize the volume between tracks.
IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).
/mu/ used to be a lot more interesting, but yeah. Nowadays it's mostly an Anthony Fantano discussion board, but I remember talking up some really interesting artists on there a few years ago. People would trade Death Grips demos for Monkees stems, and a number of relatively large artists used to frequent the board too. My fondest memories were chatting up Iglooghost who'd visit every so often, posting links to demos that sounded like keygen music from another planet. Dude didn't even need a tripcode: everyone knew his stuff when it came around.
It saddens me that I grew up during this time but never availed myself of any of these resources. What a lift that would've been to my lifelong quest to discover my own sound.
Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.
Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.
Redacted hasn't quite rebuilt What.CD's full library, but it's getting remarkably close. Streaming services have taken some of the vigor out of the torrent scene, but I think it's safe to say What's all-music-archive dream is alive.
It might be a little late now, but in the early days, they seemed more than happy to have former What.CD users (provided they were in good standing) on board. There was an interview, but it wasn't a big deal.
Yes I sure did. That album may have been a vanity house "staff pick" too, I don't recall. Pink and What felt like magical places... Terra Firma, what a massive tune. https://youtu.be/HwbVnFR-XP4
I mean this without hyperbole. Loseing what.cd was one of the saddest moments of my life. Losing it was on a tier below the burning of the library of alexandria, but only a single tier.
too bad nothing like oink exists anymore, I remember being an early uploader of some interpol albums.
Also people just had great music tastes, you could go to any genre and sort and find heavy hitters you didnt know, who were amazing.
what.cd was one the most incredible archive of music ever created, happily spent £10/mo on a seedbox to support it and had a bunch of scripts to auto-seed things to get some sort of ridiculous ratio.
The powers that be truly did destroy something great, if there's a tracker that's anything like it I'd happily rent a seedbox again.
Even now most music streaming services will only give you a single crummy option of the album version to listen to, usually some stupid remaster, AM sometimes gives lets you listen to the original but it's far from perfect.
This was same for me + early last.fm and sites like c8 [1].
Now I just obtain music from Bandcamp.
And on my phone it is either bandcamp.app or decoupled.app
The good old days of listening test on Hydrogen Audio and Divx / Xvid video testing on Doom9.
But as we have so much storage space and bandwidth the interest of newer, better audio codec wind down. 20 years later we still dont have anything that gives CD / 128kbps MP3 quality at half the bitrate. Instead we all went with 256Kbps AAC, and may be soon lossless. I wish MPC ( Musepack ) has taken off though, I still think it sounds better than AAC.
The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties.
Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
> Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.
Opus at 64k~=Mp3 128k. There's still interest in better audio codecs in the commercial world, it's just more focused on streaming audio and voice chat these days.
No? Opus 1.3 96k is slightly worse than mp3 192k CBR. Previous listening tests just always compared 96k opus+AAC to mp3 128k because mp3 is just that bad (and mp3 would still lose).
I think that is a personal listening test. Especially from Kamedo2 whom is quite bias towards Opus LOL.
The last group listening test was in 2014. Which was touched on in this thread [1]. And in general I believe and agree with IgorC. Opus has gotten better, but the last test results still remains largely the same.
On the subject of looking this up my HA account is over 20 years old. Oh My.
I remember ripping a few things in Musepack a very long time ago.
Now I use ALAC for lossless (it supports 24-bit 192khz now!) and AAC for lossy, because they are standardised, use the MP4 container, and seem to be the most widely supported.
I forgot about Hydrogen Audio! Remember when Musepack (is that what it was called?) was the greatest audio format ever? Oh man, those were the days. Then I got old and bought a Spotify subscription. Haha
I'm trying to get back to those times, I use Apple Music for most stuff, but I've got a SSD and cheap VPS that I use navidrome on. Nobody can pull the plug on me. AM and Spotify et all is great but the feeling you get when you can't access them for some reason and realise you have become near totally dependent on corporation and laws for something that is core to your soul is a huge realisation.
THANK YOU for this recommendation. I've been trying numerous iTunes/"Music" alternatives but none have stuck, or their price point doesn't make sense for the offering. This looks perfect!
For people who have multiple computers or are “on the move” a lot I can recommend https://asti.ga
Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.
>Foobar2000 was such a golden age of music discovery... So much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.
But what you describe takes work and Spotify radio and similar features from their competitors don't.
As someone who also built up a big library during the golden ages of music piracy, the primary benefit of the Spotify-like services is not their libraries. It is that they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy.
Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?
> they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery
And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new album and or band by discovering it on your own whims, you are more motivated to share it and discuss it with people as opposed to just appreciating it as an individual.
Sure, there's a time and a place where you do just want to kick on a vibe and do something else (especially at work) and for that AM Stations or Spotify Radio is adequate, however, it is a gilded cage.
I remember setting up AudioGalaxy on my home machine and using their UI so that I could download stuff "from work" and have it available when I got home. It was great for my use!
Agreed. Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing.
It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.
I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.
> Such a step back in power user features these days; being able to say "create a playlist of all songs in genre X with 4+ stars" or "Play 5 star songs I haven't listened to in at least 12 months" was amazing.
Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for.
(N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)
I spent hours and hours customizing Foobar2000 and maintaining my library. At some point my database file was lost, and shortly after that I subscribed to Spotify. I wish I still had the time, because it was the best music player ever, and Spotify is really bad in every way other than cost.
I had a similar experience, I remember being mesmerized by the scrolling spectrogram as a teenager and wondering how it all worked. I used foobar2000 since it was lightning fast and I had systems with limited resources when I was younger.
But, my music library is long gone (or on some deprecated google offering). I moved to Spotify 10+ years ago and haven’t really looked back. I use it for multiple hours a day and don’t really have any complaints.
When I moved to Ubuntu, I installed Wine just for Foobar2000. Eventually moved to DeadBeef, but I'm thankful to have used Foobar2000. Having a shuffled playlist that stays in that order was enough of a draw for me and the lightweight usage was just a bonus (compared to say itunes).
I have to agree, and its a piece of software I think a lot about. It doesn't do anything particularly special, if you look at the list of features you could list off many others that do the same, and many do much more.
I like cli software, and should be drawn to beets, but yet...
but yet, i still paid 20 for mp3tag and i would do it again
I ended up switching to MusicBee (https://www.getmusicbee.com/), before switching to macOS. It's not as snappy but I liked the default UI and had all the batteries I needed.
Also back then they had this concept of an "Inbox" for new albums, which was a special playlist of newly scanned music that you then could "move" to your library. It was good for vetting new albums before the era of streaming/YouTube.
That’s a really clever solution to an annoying problem. Before music streaming, I would sometimes order 10+ CDs on Amazon and import them all (without knowing if I liked them, just on a hunch).
Then I just ended up with lots of musical clutter in my library.
Can people who feel similar share what metadata do they miss the most? Maybe I'm a caveman, but I feel mostly satisfied with artist/title/album, plus maybe the year at most. I came to use filesystem directories for genre/mood tagging and then also artist/album obviously. It's crude, but usable and easily portable. I'm not claiming this is all one can wish for, but I'm curious.
For this kind of library I found Audacious (minimalistic, supports Winamp skins) and QMPlay 2 to be good. The latter supports and remembers your folder tree, has a very cool widget system and can be also used for videos (music or otherwise).
I collect live recordings, so there's a bunch of less common stuff I use a good bit: Date performed, handle of who recorded it, tour, a personal rating system for the recording quality, additional artists (special guests + the like), and general comments I might want attached to the file. ("clips at 0:40" or "heckler in the quiet part"). I may have 20 copies of the same song, and I may even have multiple recordings of the same song on the same night from different people.
At least for some artists, there's a huge number of show recordings out there. The guy who maintains the (unofficial, although known and tolerated by the artist) live archive for Nine Inch Nails is up to >1,000 recordings, for example.
Now that I think about it it may have been that there was info in foobar's media library database that wasn't supported, not necessarily id3 tags. Play count and last played date are some I'm partial to that I couldn't get working.
I also use album artist a lot, though that's probably supported.
Foobar2000 was my favorite as well back in my Windows days. But on Linux I think cmus does a great job. What exactly does Foobar2000 have that cmus doesn't?
The result of decoding music files is deterministic and well defined, so essentially: they will all sound the same, unless one of them is screwing something up.
Some may handle sample rate conversion better than others.
foobar can do bitperfect output. MPD too, given configured properly. A lot of players is missing this option (specifically bypassing system mixer), and it making sound noticably worse. On MacOS situation is dire (there are some players, but their UX is terrible, imo)
I use it for like 15 years now. No other player is that versatile.
Client/Server, very stable, small resource footprint.
Recently I used mpd to play audiobooks and live radio streams on my headless server. MPD uses icecast to make the stream available in my local network so I can use chromecast and/or google assistants to listen to the streams. Its more or less running transparent in the background and iam very glad I found this solution.
> MPD uses icecast to make the stream available in my local network
What is the latency like? I tried something like this but there was so much lag between a remote control input and player state changes that it was unbearable.
I too used MPD in various scenarios for maybe a decade, but sometimes last year it stopped working with pulseaudio, and no amount of tinkering seemed to fix it (other apps worked with PA like a breeze, but not MPD). So I replaced it with Qmmp, and am slowly forgetting about it.
Foobar2000 was the hardest app to replace when I switched from Windows to Linux. I finally settled with Clementine which is great too, but that was basically the end for my music collection, organization and rating hobby. I had even built my own replacement to Last.fm/Audioscrobbler backed with a local database as I wasn't happy with their feature sets, and I meticulously kept all tracks uniquely identifiable with full tagging to derive some data of my listening habits.
That all basically ended -- instead of being an active process and participating in vibrant communities my music listening changed to just that, listening. The eventual switch to Spotify was much less dramatic for me. Sure it was replaced with something else to tinker on, but some of my fondest computing memories are thanks to foobar2000.
Same thing with a move to Mac over a decade ago. I still feel icky that most of the stuff I've listened to this past decade is archived on such a closed platform, and once in a while it itches enough that I use a downloader of sorts to try and at least archive them somewhere. But the curated library of tags, endless dynamic playlist generation, and aimless wandering through torrents and articles are all but gone. And along with it a certain aspect of the love for music.
I had a similar experience. I tried every linux music player I could find, nothing came close to foobar. I also settled on Clementine which I still use, but I stopped collecting and organizing music locally as a result of the switch. I even spent some time coding a new music player before deciding to just settle on clementine.
I haven't touched Windows in over 10 years (Linux only) and foobar2000 is the only piece of software I miss. It wasn't the UI or anything. Amarok is probably better. It was just how solid the software felt. foobar2000 was the only thing I could trust to send the right bits to my soundcard when I wanted them to be sent. All other audio software felt like the actual audio part was an afterthought and a hack that just barely worked.
gmusicbrowser (combined with Ex Falso for more extensive tagging) has replaced foobar2000 for me, and I _think_ that these days I like it even better than I ever liked foobar2000 - but maybe that's just the long years making my memories of its greatness somewhat hazy...
Nope. For Foobar to have the functionality of my player, I'd have to write a plugin for it, and I have no intention of doing that for closed source software.
I remember writing a Foobar2000 plugin to emulate the Winamp API so my mIRC song spam scripts still functioned. It was buggy as hell as I was still new to C++ programming and it eventually got added to a hard-coded blacklist in the app for causing stability issues.
I ended up open sourcing it and it still lives on 19 year later, about three forks deep and a lot more stable and functional. The power of open source!
OMG, "writing a Foobar2000 plugin to emulate the Winamp API so my mIRC song spam scripts still functioned" is such a nostalgia packed sentence for those of us of a certain age.
Some of the most fun I ever had was trying to make the utterly ridiculous mIRC script programming language do things it was not meant to do. Pretty sure I recall someone I know writing a primitive web server with it IIRC
I wrote a reeaally primitive SMTP server in mIRC's scripting language.
The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the "captcha" (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad -- think "jh412ec@[12.34.56.78]" -- that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC.
The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs.
It then read the body of the email and "clicked" every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials... and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined.
Being k-lined wasn't an issue though. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute.
Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.
> Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.
AWESOME memory you describe there.
OMG, fond memories of the day me and my IRC friends in high school somehow figured out that there was a bug in our network's ircd that allowed us to cause the server to segfault simply by setting a strange combination of a large number of modes on a channel.
The ops were pissed but they got less pissed after I submitted a patch, after I went looking in the C source code and figured out it was probably a buffer overrun.... Something like maxing out an undersized buffer by using every zero argument mode possible, duplicating modes and as many one argument modes with long nicknames... like MODE #channel +mmmvv LongNickGuy1asdfasf LongNickGuy2skldjfaklsjd
...and that was my first non toy experience with C!
It was definitely my intro to socket programming. I wrote entirely mIRC script based IRC services - NickServ, ChanServ, the lot. I c:lined it (is that the right flat? I don't recall), then wrote my own little set of slash commands to perform various fun raw commands - e.g getting ChanServ to message someone and ask how their day is going.
IRC was a way cooler world than the current internet.
Oh, man. That’s hilarious. I remember another guy getting blacklisted because he was writing plug-ins that mucked with the menu and whining because Pawlowski started changing the menu ids in every minor release out of spite.
I had my own learning experience when I accidentally deleted all my plugins’ sources and couldn’t recover it. That was an important lesson on the reason for backups and version control. I burned a ton of time on those plugins.
If it wasn't for Foobar2000, I would've stayed with Winamp. It's so small, yet so configurable and extendable, that I still consider it the best music player for windows. Also I wished that they had foobar2000 on the Mac, which would replace my dependence on iTunes.
There IS a Mac version of Foobar2K now; check the site! Just discovered this myself. However, another commenter mentioned that it's quite incomplete/different.
As a long time foobar user, when switching to linux I only found quodlibet to be able to sort by multiple columns at the same time, quite buggy but kinda works, for a few days, then it resets for whatever reason.
Gonna install wine and foobar again sometime in the coming days anyways. this one won't even let me edit the date field as YYYYMMDD, apparently it's an invalid format, and I use it for sorting..
foobar2k + soulseek was a heady combination. one abiding memory was how fragmented the components for fbk2 were and how you had to search through the hydrogen audio forums for updates and they often got abandoned/picked up by someone else, and the forum community was incredibly unwelcoming!
even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i'd love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.
Customization still makes this a must for me. It's cool to have tree-view playlists that can link to youtube, or whatever else. You also don't need to uncompress your zip/rar archives to create playlists from them - which isn't very common, most other players won't allow you to play consecutive tracks from a compressed archive. Saves space and that's how I always liked organizing albums.
Ugh, I almost got detention in middle school because of this app. I was talking about it and the teacher overheard me, thought I was saying FUBAR. He pulled me into the hall and started chewing me out, and I had to be like "No, it's my music player."
I remember the thing I really liked about it was all the custom skins it had.
I heard it was military slang designed, so yes to drop the explicit f-word, but not to be polite, rather to have an acronym since so much else is an acronym
SNAFU situation normal all fouled up
FUBAR fouled up beyond all repair
leading to the temp variable names "foo", "bar", and "baz"
I used to use Foobar2000 back in the day. Tried to set it up on my gaming PC last year, but I didn't really have a clue as to how to set it up properly. Ended up just setting up Plex and Plexamp instead.
Foobar2000 has a special place in my heart. Back on an old 486 120MHz machine, WinAmp was too heavyweight to play MP3 files smoothly, but Foobar2000 had no issues.
Found foobar2000 in 2005 when I wanted a lightweight music player to play heavy metal while I played Counter-Strike Source.
17 years later and it is still my music player of choice. I've gone through maybe 6 different UIs/skins with it, all of them wildly different. My most recent being a sort of "return to form" [0].
I've since also set up a Raspberry Pi with OMV installed to act as my music server, so I can access my library from around the house.
Sure. Since it's less of a theme and more of a custom configuration, here is a link to the installation (it's a portable install, so no need for folders in `AppData`. Just place this anywhere, and run foobar.exe): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/j9yfv18j8b2mss4/AABgDgZUfm0KuvEi6...
Additionally, I use the 'Fira Code' font for the UI, so you must have that installed if you want your foobar to look the same. That font is freely available here: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode
218 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadSo much more exciting and engaging than fucking Spotify radio.
Shame the macOS one is basically nothing like the Windows one. I'd recommend Cog for something similar for macOS.
https://cog.losno.co/
Music recommendations feels like somebody constantly prodding you with "oh don't like this? try this!"
Perhaps it was the combative nature that made them so much fun.
I'm not complaining most of the time, but sometimes I want to be able to spend a day working mindlessly on my computer to try new things and fool around.
One other factor not commonly mentioned is that many people ossify and have difficulty expending the mental energy to seek out new music. I personally don't do that anymore but I certainly did for a while when I was much more stressed out with work. Additionally, some genres themselves seem to get into a rut and tap out (let's not forget the "punk's not dead" attempts at denying reality, for instancee)
Reddit has, for good or bad, always attracted a "help all newbies" mentality too.
edit - it's not as fun as I remember it used to be
IIRC there was also something vaporwave-related (predictably).
(Dammit, this all was really long ago.)
/mu/ collaboratively produces albums all the time. I was present for and might have contributed to this one: https://millennialdreamcorp.bandcamp.com/album/drake-josh-jo...
Nah, back then I just used LimeWire to download fake Weird Al Yankovic songs.
Though, I did discover the Avalanches because a guildmate I met while playing an MMO sent me the MP3 in MSN Messenger.
edit: ok I did confuse them, see reply
It might be a little late now, but in the early days, they seemed more than happy to have former What.CD users (provided they were in good standing) on board. There was an interview, but it wasn't a big deal.
https://torrentfreak.com/music-group-confirms-what-cd-raid-c...
Some of What's Vanity house stars are now real stars with tours around the world, like "The Flashbulb"
It put things into perspective for many.
red, ops, slsk
The powers that be truly did destroy something great, if there's a tracker that's anything like it I'd happily rent a seedbox again.
Even now most music streaming services will only give you a single crummy option of the album version to listen to, usually some stupid remaster, AM sometimes gives lets you listen to the original but it's far from perfect.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080514213709/http://c8.com/
But as we have so much storage space and bandwidth the interest of newer, better audio codec wind down. 20 years later we still dont have anything that gives CD / 128kbps MP3 quality at half the bitrate. Instead we all went with 256Kbps AAC, and may be soon lossless. I wish MPC ( Musepack ) has taken off though, I still think it sounds better than AAC.
The same may happen to video too. The rate of Mobile 5G bandwidth improvement is much faster than video codec adoption. We used to care about sub- 1Mbps bitrate, now it is largely gone in developed counties.
Still, I am surprised Foobar2K getting updates in 2022.
Why shouldn't it? It's still perfectly fine with a lot of extensibility. It's one of the rare desktop apps that I'll not easily give up for a web-based alternative. Having an offline music collection is just different. I don't know how to explain it. I know it's stupid but it feels like, when I actually purchase albums, they sound better than streaming. It's the value my subconscious assigns for the things I pay for directly perhaps. Still silly but, perhaps.
No? Opus 1.3 96k is slightly worse than mp3 192k CBR. Previous listening tests just always compared 96k opus+AAC to mp3 128k because mp3 is just that bad (and mp3 would still lose).
The last group listening test was in 2014. Which was touched on in this thread [1]. And in general I believe and agree with IgorC. Opus has gotten better, but the last test results still remains largely the same.
On the subject of looking this up my HA account is over 20 years old. Oh My.
[1] https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?topic=118446.0
I remember ripping a few things in Musepack a very long time ago.
Now I use ALAC for lossless (it supports 24-bit 192khz now!) and AAC for lossy, because they are standardised, use the MP4 container, and seem to be the most widely supported.
https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.
They can pry my music from my cold dead hands.
Basically type throw your music on a cloud or a combination of ones, Astiga scans these clouds and presents all the music it finds as one library which you can browse and play from the browser.
But what you describe takes work and Spotify radio and similar features from their competitors don't.
As someone who also built up a big library during the golden ages of music piracy, the primary benefit of the Spotify-like services is not their libraries. It is that they remove the need to do the work in both music selection and discovery. They provide a middle ground between just random music selection and entirely intentional selection. Sometimes I just want a specific musical vibe without having to design a playlist or choose a specific singular artist. In addition these services are smart enough to understand that vibe and mix new music in that fits that vibe which I therefore might also enjoy.
Is there anything that can adequately replicate this type of radio style listening while using one's own library that doesn't require them to spend hours and hours both proactively seeking out new music and meticulously updating their library's metadata using something like Musicbrainz (or whatever the modern equivalent now is)?
And this right here is the problem. It makes you lazy, it makes music discovery a passive process. It kills your soul. By requiring active effort to engage with a scene and music itself, you regain a certain beauty and excitement to music because it becomes an interactive process and something you are part of. Once you have "earned" a new album and or band by discovering it on your own whims, you are more motivated to share it and discuss it with people as opposed to just appreciating it as an individual.
Sure, there's a time and a place where you do just want to kick on a vibe and do something else (especially at work) and for that AM Stations or Spotify Radio is adequate, however, it is a gilded cage.
You have to understand that this reads like gatekeeping nonsense to a lot of people.
It seems that the "stream any song instantly" usecase is winning out, but I really pine for some metadata / playlist overlay that I could use to regain this sort of control of my music streaming.
I replaced my usage of spotify with these two and its been great. I also enjoy having fine grained control over my listening, and streaming services were sorely lacking.
Possibly ironically, both of those examples work on current versions of the Music app on macOS, and will work with both local and cloud files in your library. There are many valid reasons to dump on The Application Formerly Known As iTunes, but it remains more capable at library management than I think it's usually given credit for.
(N.B.: the same cannot be said for its iOS counterpart, which can sync smart playlists but not create them, and seems to have dropped support for star ratings completely.)
I was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.
But, my music library is long gone (or on some deprecated google offering). I moved to Spotify 10+ years ago and haven’t really looked back. I use it for multiple hours a day and don’t really have any complaints.
With Linux you can setup a streaming server and stream your music across different devices.
You can automatically download covers and lyrics for each song and automatically organize and index your collection for search.
I did this in like 2008 already, on windows.
I like cli software, and should be drawn to beets, but yet...
but yet, i still paid 20 for mp3tag and i would do it again
[1] https://beets.io/
Also back then they had this concept of an "Inbox" for new albums, which was a special playlist of newly scanned music that you then could "move" to your library. It was good for vetting new albums before the era of streaming/YouTube.
Then I just ended up with lots of musical clutter in my library.
For this kind of library I found Audacious (minimalistic, supports Winamp skins) and QMPlay 2 to be good. The latter supports and remembers your folder tree, has a very cool widget system and can be also used for videos (music or otherwise).
At least for some artists, there's a huge number of show recordings out there. The guy who maintains the (unofficial, although known and tolerated by the artist) live archive for Nine Inch Nails is up to >1,000 recordings, for example.
I also use album artist a lot, though that's probably supported.
Linux, Mac -> cmus
https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea
https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbles
Some may handle sample rate conversion better than others.
Foobar's FAQ says as much: https://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ
Not sure about linux, but on windows, macos, android difference is huge if you have some good DAC & headphones
I use it for like 15 years now. No other player is that versatile.
Client/Server, very stable, small resource footprint.
Recently I used mpd to play audiobooks and live radio streams on my headless server. MPD uses icecast to make the stream available in my local network so I can use chromecast and/or google assistants to listen to the streams. Its more or less running transparent in the background and iam very glad I found this solution.
What is the latency like? I tried something like this but there was so much lag between a remote control input and player state changes that it was unbearable.
That all basically ended -- instead of being an active process and participating in vibrant communities my music listening changed to just that, listening. The eventual switch to Spotify was much less dramatic for me. Sure it was replaced with something else to tinker on, but some of my fondest computing memories are thanks to foobar2000.
https://strawberrymusicplayer.org/
https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org
Who is dreaming now?
I remember using FooBar simply because my system had so little RAM, iTunes was off the table.
I ended up open sourcing it and it still lives on 19 year later, about three forks deep and a lot more stable and functional. The power of open source!
Some of the most fun I ever had was trying to make the utterly ridiculous mIRC script programming language do things it was not meant to do. Pretty sure I recall someone I know writing a primitive web server with it IIRC
The reasoning, of course, was that there was an IRC server that I frequented that required a web sign-up, so I wrote mIRC script that screen-scraped the sign-up page, solved the "captcha" (an unobfuscated type-in-this-number field solved by using an open source OCR library) and then used a random local-part and a host-part of a dotted quad -- think "jh412ec@[12.34.56.78]" -- that was a hosted my box at home that was running mIRC.
The SMTP server just literally reponded with 354 to the DATA command and a 250 to everything else, which was more than enough for my needs.
It then read the body of the email and "clicked" every link it found in order to verify the email, and logged me into the IRC server with the auto-generated credentials... and some time later I'd inevitably be k-lined, because of course the kind of kid who did this was the kind of kid who got k-lined.
Being k-lined wasn't an issue though. Reset the dial-up for a new IP, run the command, and you were back in within a minute.
Being a dick on IRC was how I learned to program. What a blast.
AWESOME memory you describe there.
OMG, fond memories of the day me and my IRC friends in high school somehow figured out that there was a bug in our network's ircd that allowed us to cause the server to segfault simply by setting a strange combination of a large number of modes on a channel.
The ops were pissed but they got less pissed after I submitted a patch, after I went looking in the C source code and figured out it was probably a buffer overrun.... Something like maxing out an undersized buffer by using every zero argument mode possible, duplicating modes and as many one argument modes with long nicknames... like MODE #channel +mmmvv LongNickGuy1asdfasf LongNickGuy2skldjfaklsjd
...and that was my first non toy experience with C!
IRC was a way cooler world than the current internet.
I had my own learning experience when I accidentally deleted all my plugins’ sources and couldn’t recover it. That was an important lesson on the reason for backups and version control. I burned a ton of time on those plugins.
I use both foobar2k and deadbeef depending on which OS I'm booted at.
deadbeef is most blatantly missing a library; It has the playlists, but no library.
Gonna install wine and foobar again sometime in the coming days anyways. this one won't even let me edit the date field as YYYYMMDD, apparently it's an invalid format, and I use it for sorting..
even though spotify has almost completely destroyed my need for fb2k, i do still use it for listening to radio streams. i'd love if there were fully fleshed out components that let you use spotify with fb2k.
https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?action=profile;u=84
I remember the thing I really liked about it was all the custom skins it had.
Wow, I thought FUBAR was an acronym invented specifically to be polite and not use the f-word explicitly.
SNAFU situation normal all fouled up
FUBAR fouled up beyond all repair
leading to the temp variable names "foo", "bar", and "baz"
17 years later and it is still my music player of choice. I've gone through maybe 6 different UIs/skins with it, all of them wildly different. My most recent being a sort of "return to form" [0].
I've since also set up a Raspberry Pi with OMV installed to act as my music server, so I can access my library from around the house.
[0] https://i.vgy.me/Bwv7Eq.png
Additionally, I use the 'Fira Code' font for the UI, so you must have that installed if you want your foobar to look the same. That font is freely available here: https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode