It's great to see that fb2k is still around and well :)<p>It's remarkable how they've kept the same UI since its inception, 21 years ago. It was clean, simple and intuitive back then, and still is today. Same goes for the website, now that I think of it. A true testament that simplicity trumps trend-chasing.<p>It was my main music player after Winamp released the awful version 3.0, and I never looked back. I don't use Windows much these days, but mpv serves me well as a barebones audio player, and occasionally I do use Quod Libet on Linux, which has similar design sensibilities as fb2k.
There is certainly something intangibly attractive on this era and style of software. On top of my head I'm thinking fb2k, mpc (and its forks), virtualdub, utorrent (the original 1.x series), irfanview, kerio firewall (classic 2.x series), putty, even maybe mirc and notepad++ to some degree. Small programs, classic Windows style controls, emphasis on staying out of your way, somewhat minimalistic and barebones but still remarkably powerful and capable. These to me represent the golden age of Windows.<p>Of all these programs (and there were many), fb2k is the one that I still use on regular basis while almost all the others have faded away.
Wow, that brings back memories!
foobar2000 was my go to player. I used to spend hours curating all my folders with albums and playlists.
Funny how fast I switched to a streaming platform when they became widely available around here.
One of the great music players out there. Clean, simple UI. Easy to use. Supported far more formats than anything mainstream. Replaygain was a killer feature, and it mostly boggles my mind that it still isn't widespread, (…like non-broken, i.e., dB, volume knobs).
It's kind of strange I have never seen any other player where you can just click on a folder and play music from it. Like two clicks, one on a folder (which loads the list of tracks) and second to start playing this list<p>of course it's doable in any player but not with such ease
The author on why Foobar2000 is not open source: <a href="https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,31222.msg270982.html#msg270982" rel="nofollow">https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,31222.msg270982.html#...</a>
This was the one piece of software I missed when I made the switch to Linux 15 years ago. Not enough to miss Windows, of course. It worked in Wine but didn't feel quite right. It was sort of the end of me building a curated music collection. It takes time and I just moved on to other things. In all this time I've never found anything as good as foobar2000 was back then and my music collection has languished.
I'm surprised that AIMP hasn't been mentioned yet. It's also a great old school audio player that was released back in 2006. I transitioned to it when Winamp development was fizzling out. Not sure when that was but I've been using it for a long time. With the 'Pandemic' skin it looks like classic Winamp and has support for visualizations and many other features people tended to like from Winamp.<p><a href="https://www.aimp.ru/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aimp.ru/</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIMP" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIMP</a>
One of the things I loved about Winamp was programming my own visualizations - can't remember if this was a plugin or was built into the main app. But it was most satisfying to generate trippy visuals with extreme granular control. I also liked having control over my skin and panel setup.<p>Also, this is cool for all those über random playlisters: a tool you can use to create a random playlist of X amount of songs from your entire library [edit: and make copies of the random files to a new folder. Useful for making playlists on portable media]. Sorry it was a long time ago and I don't recall what it was called.
Bit of a tangent but it's kind of infuriating to me that I still haven't found anything better than Winamp (or Foobar for that matter) on a modestly powerful Windows machine. Even 20 years ago, I could literally just right-click on an entire folder sitting on my external hard-drive, and it would immediately enqueue all of those files into Winamp.<p>I even had a bunch of Winamp plugins that could automatically handle my NSFs, SID files, tracker files—any format I threw at it, it could handle them seamlessly.<p>It used very little CPU, it never crackled, it never popped, and it never crashed. This wasn't even using any low-latency ASIO drivers or anything fancy.<p>Fast forward decades later and I'm sitting on my Mac M1 desperately trying to find anything that even comes CLOSE to this.<p>The closest thing I found is Cog, but it takes minutes to queue up larger folders. It's ridiculous, and of course I'm one of the lucky individuals who ended up with a Mac with core audio issues where if I'm using more than 35% to 40% of my CPU, the audio pops once every minute/minutes despite clearing out the plist files and trying every other trick, it seems like the basic core audio drivers of Mac are awful stuff. I had a better DAW experience on my Windows machine with ASIO4ALL which shouldn't even be possible.
I downloaded it on my mobile device, because I have the issue where some songs are very quiet and some are very loud, so I was looking for a volume normalizer and this is the one (that's zero cost) that was recommended, but I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between using this one and just the normal Metro Music Player.<p>So if anyone knows what I'm doing wrong or if there are better (zero cost) tools that could fix my issue, please advise (I'm looking for Android tools as I don't have a usable Windows/MacOS/Linux machine)
I used to use Foobar2000 a lot like 20 years ago and a couple of years ago I tried to use it again when I got myself a Windows gaming PC, and I have no idea how I even used it back then. I felt completely lost trying to replicate what I have these days with MPD (+ ncmpcpp and assorted things).<p>Eventually I just gave up and decided that if I was going to listen to music on my Windows machine, I'd just use Plex in a browser. Eliminated the need to scan for files on a network volume every time I used it too.
I like the concept of directory players. I don't want playlists, my files are arranged in directories just fine.
I use players like 1by1, VUPlayer, Resonic. Straightforward, usable players.
I miss this functionality in foobar, implemented as native, not cumbersome plugins that need a lot of tinkering.
I love Foobar but it does not whip the llama's ass. Incidentally, Winamp is apparently going open source:<p><a href="https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-code" rel="nofollow">https://about.winamp.com/press/article/winamp-open-source-co...</a>
Nope. Even way back then, I was using iTunes on mac and windows to rip and organise my music collection. A quick rsync or an smb mount from a Linux machine made it easy to access my media in VLC or Rhythmbox.
The winamp/foobar aesthetics were really cool, but overall offered nothing to the practically or ease of actually buying/ripping/playing your music.<p>But you know, everyone is different and some folks had memorised a sequence of characters that were something like "FCKGW-...", install limewire, just to play that live acoustic version of Everlong.
<i>foo</i> and <i>bar</i>, and <i>foobar</i>, have meanings and utility that is undermined by people giving them new definitions and polluting our public namespace. Instead, call the project "farting in an elevator" because that's what you're doing.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable</a><p>* FOO 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything.*<p><a href="https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html</a><p>A similar injustice, theft of the commonweal, was Microsoft was granted a trademark for "windows", as if that was the generic term for... well, "windows"