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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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!
>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 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.
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.
I never found a browsing interface as good as Winamp's. Basically it had three panels, in order: Artists, Albums, Tracks (you could enable "Genre"/"Year"/... as well but I rarely did).
So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums.
I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks...
> So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).
I think there’s two things at play. One, small screens were never a good fit for that style of multi-panel UI. You could perhaps get away with it now, but we had years of small phones and iPods that were definitely not big enough. (FWIW, iTunes—or “Music” as it’s now called—has a UI option much like what you describe, though not enabled by default. It’s a trash fire of an app these days, but it bears mentioning.)
Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix.
It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.
Being able to scroll out swipe left and right would be quite enough. Foobar2000 has swipe gestures, but that brings you to the "now playing" view (for that one I'd prefer an always-visible area at the bottom, like VLC does, since it's only a single track).
I guess this had never bothered me enough before, but my rant made me research this a bit. After trying a dozen Android apps or so, Musicolet seems like the best option. It does use tabs you can swipe between, combined views, and overall seems to have a ton of useful options accessible by long-press and icons. An app enabling power-users, instead of the usual options over-refined for a single use case.
my preference is to actually combine the 'artists' and 'albums' columns into a single column that is a list of text 'artist - album'. foobar allows this with their great title formatting language https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Title... i also now use linux and have a similar thing with quodlibet but it's a bit tricky and i still wish i had foobar2000 sometimes
Ah yes, foobar2000 and IrfanView. The 2 tools that I'll likely never replace.
Been using them both for what seems like forever. Late 90s for IrfanView and foobar2000 since it came out, I remember switching to it from Winamp back in the day.
Given how many positive comments there are for this tool, I think it's safe to say efficiency is a primary factor when choosing desktop apps. It's hard to replace something that works great, opens instantly and uses practically no resources. I forgot what box I had back then but I'm pretty sure it was a Pentium III 700@933mhz CPU, it was super smooth back then too.
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
I didn't use it, but it looks to me like one of the main draws of foobar2000 was library/metadata management. I've only ever used directories in the filesystem as a "library," and have used many players over the years (mainly moc, which I love, but which doesn't bring anything especially valuable to the table--I mainly just like the UI and out-of-box key commands).
Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software/vendor lock-in.
Agreed, I've always made sure that any metadata or info I truly care about in my MP3s is embedded in them and independent of platform.
I like Foobar for some utility tasks, but I recently had to twist into a pretzel just to add a playback speed feature that at this point should be both standard and upfront in the UI, so I don't think Foobar is thaaat great.
I still use foobar2000. The library/metadata management it is quite proud of is entirely built on your existing folder structure (it does not mutate it; it auto-explores/watches it for changes) and your ID3 tags (which it only mutates on your explicit edits). That was a big deal at the time it launched, especially versus how Windows Media Player and iTunes both fought to control your folder structure, rearranged everything form time to time, and would update your ID3 tags at the whims of Microsoft's or Apple's "genius" tagging databases (which were often full of mistakes, especially for rare/weird files).
Foobar2000 was the breath of fresh air opposite of "software/vendor lock-in" and a model that software today still often fails to live up to.
Foobar had good options for using the filesystem as the library structure. Some of the options were user-made plugins rather than something available out of the box, but it all worked very well.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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 was a Winamp guy on Windows, now I'm using Swinsian on Mac and both GoneMad and PlayerPro on Android.
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.)
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.
https://swinsian.com/ is another choice. Not a free or oss one though.
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.
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.
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.
So at any point, you could select an artist and see both their albums and tracks. Or you could select no artist and see all albums and all tracks. You could select an album there and see all tracks in that album. You could pick a track from the full list, etc.
All the modern players only show you one thing at a time and you have work through all those views. I don't know what I am going to do, I am browsing. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I only have one or two songs, in which case I don't want to see a list of albums; maybe I will click an artist for which I have a single album. Maybe I will click on an artist for which I have multiple full albums.
I can see that Foobar2000 Android falls into that category as well. I have to pick whether I want to browse by "Artist / Album" or "Album" or "Style" upfront. If I pick a style, I will be presented with a list of artists before I can see songs. If I pick "Artist / Album" and browse through artists, clicking on any artist will hide the list of all songs behind an "all tracks" button, even if there's two songs on two albums. Browsing requires such an unnecessary amount of clicks...
[edit: screenshot to show what I mean: https://imgur.com/a/ipnUiY4]
iTunes does this on the desktop. It shows up as filter panes at the top of the master tracks list, allowing you to narrow the list by selecting one or more genres, artist or album. And selecting items from any of those filter lists narrows the other lists accordingly (e.g. select an artist and it reduces the albums list to the albums they own or appear on and the genres list to only those genres in the filtered tracks).
Two, things have changed with the move to streaming. The goal of the music player is no longer to help you browse a curated library, it’s to put new things in front of you. The primary interface is now the suggested playlist and the AI mix.
It’s a shame that the ratio of price/month of music streaming to album price is pretty much 1:1. If it was more like 3:1 I think I could justify going back to just buying albums. Strangely, I don’t think I enjoy music as much now I can listen to anything at any time.
Itunes and MusicBee seem like they would fit your requirements.
Been using them both for what seems like forever. Late 90s for IrfanView and foobar2000 since it came out, I remember switching to it from Winamp back in the day.
Given how many positive comments there are for this tool, I think it's safe to say efficiency is a primary factor when choosing desktop apps. It's hard to replace something that works great, opens instantly and uses practically no resources. I forgot what box I had back then but I'm pretty sure it was a Pentium III 700@933mhz CPU, it was super smooth back then too.
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
Thus, to me, as an outsider, this whole conversation feels a bit like a cautionary tale about software/vendor lock-in.
I like Foobar for some utility tasks, but I recently had to twist into a pretzel just to add a playback speed feature that at this point should be both standard and upfront in the UI, so I don't think Foobar is thaaat great.
Foobar2000 was the breath of fresh air opposite of "software/vendor lock-in" and a model that software today still often fails to live up to.
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.