Why don't you guys like foobar2000?

It's only for use as a audio player, and it looks like crap to begin with, but you can heavily modify it, and using asio, and ssrc, you can make music sound extremelly good...

Someone has released a wmp 11 skin too

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=43077&st=3625&p=441401&#entry441401

 

Some of the modified foobar looks are pretty dang good:

 

Foobar is the only reason I still use Windows as my main OS. There is no equivalent for Linux or Mac.

 

No equivalent, but AmaroK is a highly acclaimed Linux media player (KDE based) that's along the lines of iTunes without the DRM crap.

That being said, I just use Noatun inside of KDE, and find it'll play everything I want pretty well, close to what foobar2000 does.

I do use foobar2000 on my work PC though, as I have enough Windows using cow-orkers that I need to be using the same thing they are so that I can fix their problems

 

I do use FB2K

I have used AmaroK as well, its neat I like the integration with audioscrobble but FB2K is still the best. I think though, the average user is turned off because for one thing they don't realize what its capable of. I mean if you look at the base, its really well basic. Second, the scripting isn't very easy for beginners

 

*shrug* I just need something that can play mp3's. Why bother with something that requires so much work to customize and tweak?

 

Exactly. If they want people to use it they need to set up to work like that out of the box. Not everyone is a computer "nerd" with the time and knowledge to to all that custom stuff.

 

Not all people have the time and know-how to customize it. You need to be a graphics designer and developer to be able to customize it so as you wish; which really sucks since you just want to play music.

A lot more would download and use them if the default layout is attractive enough with all the "essential mods" already installed. Personally I'd like to try it out, but I don't have time to read the whole forums, and play with codes. If it came with a wmp11 skin heck sure i'd try it out - but no you get some crappy 1980s looking UI... greaaAAAAAAAt.

If I wanted a audio player with the smallest resource footprints I'd go for winamp 2.x - at least it comes with one-click themes.

 

Well you definitely don't need to be a graphics designer. You just have to learn the scripting language called TagZ which by the way is used in many plugins etc. in Winamp anyways. I have to admit though it is probably hard to learn at first with my first 'decent' config taking a good 4-5 hrs, but now they can roll out in less than 20 minutes.

I don't think people realize you don't have to make these configs from scratch, you just need some basic knowledge of TagZ and then you'd be able to just import other people's configs and then just do some tweaks to make it fit for you.

 

I use mp3blaster (Linux), which is an ncurses (i.e. text console) based player. I select a few albums to listen to and then I don't look at the player for a couple of hours. Why have a really pretty display, is the music so dire that you have to have some distraction from it?

 

Does AmaroK do gapless mp3? Nope. Game-set-match. MPD and Aqualung are the only two gapless (using LAME encoded mp3s) music players (MPD is a daemon). I use MPD with a client interface and it works well in Linux, but there's no replacement for the advanced tagging and file management that foobar2000 offers in Linux. I've had success running foobar 8.x.x through Wine, but it just isn't the same as in Windows.

Last time I checked Jalf, you install foobar2000, drag and drop mp3s (or any other format for that matter) and click play. I'm not sure it really gets much easier than that. It's the interface which requires customization. For some people that aspect of foobar is the fun of it. For others who want something that looks better than it actually functions, there are 1000000000 other players out there.

 

interesting... I use foobar2k because it is a simple lightweight sort of player that I can just use without mucking around with much.

 

ChangFest: Thanks for mentioning mpd.

It's early days, but mpd with ncmpc looks like a promising replacement for mp3blaster. I like being able to connect more than one client to the server, so that I can start it on the desktop and then change the volume or a skip a track when I run up the laptop some time later.

I haven't tested whether mpd supports ogg gapless playback (I am aware that the ogg file format does).

PS my first portable mp3 player was a Hango (Compaq) PJB-100, and I miss that the support for gapless and album centric design isn't featured in most of the current portable devices.

 

I think he forgot to mention that it ALSO must look good immediately.

This is VERY enticing:

......... if we were still living in the windows 95 era.

 

Point and Case.

 

I've used foobar2k for a quite awhile and never knew it could be skinned.

I just kept using it because it's light and because of its minimalistic appearance. Where can I find tutorials on skinning the app? Or skins for that matter?

 

MPD supports gapless with mp3, Ogg Vorbis, Musepack, FLAC, and WAV files. It supports MOD and AAC, but I'm not sure if it supports gapless for those formats as well (I haven't tested it).

My first and only portable player is a Rio Karma.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=43077
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=49783

 

I hope you can see the red flags here? There is probably less than 1% of the population who is interesting in "learning a scripting language" just to play MP3's and show cover art!

 

Yeahhh..... I'm sure that I could learn it if I wanted to since I've no problem with that typa thing, but after spending half a day to make a nice skin for my celly, I've no desire spending half a day customizing something that I can just minimize and not look at, almost ever... And when I do have time I want to waste, I'd rather make another skin for my phone anyway, since that's something I do have to look at, all the time - actually whenever I want to know the time, hehh.

Malia

 

meh, its definitely not for everyone. I do prefer it after learning it though, I just like how I have full control/management over my collection.

Stick with Winamp or whatever you guys use

 

Ummm... yep.

You were saying?