[mojo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by slwiser I just check my J River Media player processor load and it is running between 0 and 2%. How they do this I do not know. Memory resources are running a little over 12 megs.

That's interesting - are you looking at physical memory usage or total physical/paged memory usage?

My Firefox is currently using 100MB of memory in total (I don't even have a page file, 2GB RAM is enough).

 

[mojo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComfyCan However, I am happy to see that a computer technician finds Foobar documentation confusing. It makes me, a mere mortal, feel much less like an idiot.

I know... I have set up SAMBA manually, installed Gentoo Linux, built a cmoy... I spent hours with foobar and even had 0.8 set up in some reasonable way once, but gave up because of many niggling problems in the end.

wxMusik or musikCube would be probably be ideal if they supported kernel streaming / ASIO, but neither do.

I wish I had time to write something. I used to write a lot of code, back when I didn't have to work every day... Maybe I could contribute kernel streaming to wxMusik?

EDIT: I'm going to start a thread asking for some kind of tutorial or standard set-up for foobar 0.9, basically to give it a similar interface to iTunes/WinAMP Media Library, for the benefit of all head-fiers.

 

[ComfyCan]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mojo I know... I have set up SAMBA manually, installed Gentoo Linux, built a cmoy... I spent hours with foobar and even had 0.8 set up in some reasonable way once, but gave up because of many niggling problems in the end. wxMusik or musikCube would be probably be ideal if they supported kernel streaming / ASIO, but neither do. I wish I had time to write something. I used to write a lot of code, back when I didn't have to work every day... Maybe I could contribute kernel streaming to wxMusik? EDIT: I'm going to start a thread asking for some kind of tutorial or standard set-up for foobar 0.9, basically to give it a similar interface to iTunes/WinAMP Media Library, for the benefit of all head-fiers.

mojo,
That sounds like a great idea, and would be a terrific service. Assuming it takes off, somebody with some influence needs to talk the mod into making it a sticky. There is so much useful information here that is not readily accessible. The search function on broad subjects like "foobar" yield too many returns, and headfi is such an active forum that posts don't stay on page one for long without a sticky.

 

[krmathis]

Apple iTunes for me.
I would like support for more audio formats, but other than that its just perfect!

* Lossy (MP3 and AAC) and lossless (ALAC, WAVE and AIFF) audio support.
* AirTunes support.
* Fast and responsive GUI.
* Looks good, like most other Apple applications.

 

[manhattanproj]

what's wrong with windows media player. i like it because it's easy to use. no one mentioned/talked about wmp. is the sq or wmp that bad?

 

[bperboy]

iTunes for me also, not just because I have an iPod; it's because it's the best organizational system IMHO!

 

[CSMR]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mojo * Note: I am a computer technician, and studied computer programming at degree level. I regard myself as an expert. But, a lot like Linux, the documentation for foobar is so thinly spread, often out of date and seemingly incomplete (where is the one-stop manual with a good overview?). I tried both V0.8 and V0.9, and couldn't get either into a state I was happy with. I downloaded some layout codes and tried them, but... well, I want to play music, not write code. If I wanted to do that, I'd just write a music player.

Foobar isn't all that bad unless you want to customize its appearance radically. What are you wanting to do with it?

 

[mojo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CSMR Foobar isn't all that bad unless you want to customize its appearance radically. What are you wanting to do with it?

Make some kind of usable media library out of it. I have about 12,000 MP3s (I know, I need to prune a bit probably) and want to access any given one quickly. They are all tagged properly, and WinAMP has a good media library for them. It's just that I like Japanese music, and WinAMP is not Unicode compatible.

 

[CSMR]

Is Library->Album list inadequate?

 

[mojo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by CSMR Is Library->Album list inadequate?

It's not bad, but not quite there yet. You get into problems when you have a lot of media to manage, like scroll bars becomming too small, not handing "the" at the start of artist/album names, being able to easily bring up compilation albums etc.

There are some excellent foobar features that help though - mass tagging, replaygain (okay, no foobar specific), gapless playback etc. But I suppose my main issue is that it doesn't seem "agile" enough - it's a lot of work to quickly find stuff and then create on-the-fly playlists from it.

 

[Dedpoet]

I'm glad I found this thread. I too am frustrated with foobar. Like the OP, I have a technical career in the computer field. I'm administer Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 server as well as a half dozen flavors of Unix/Linux. I work with scores of different kinds of software day in and day out, yet foobar frustrates the hell out of me.

Yesterday, I spent hours organizing my library (about 120 CD's in both FLAC and MP3 format) plus maybe 200 individual MP3's from various sources. I tried the tree view and eventually got frustrated just trying to make seperate branches for the FLAC and MP3 files and also for each album. I went back to the playlist bar and that was mostly doing what I wanted. I had all of my FLAC files in a beautiful playlist, organized using a album-track hybrid layout that I found in one of the foobar threads. I then started a new playlist to set up the MP3's, and when I clicked back over to my FLAC playlist, it was empty...I cannot fathom why this is so difficult to use.

I was going to look at MediaMonkey, as the built-in support for my Zen Vision: M is appealing, but now I see here that it is slow. J. River looks like it may be far more than what I need, but if it can be streamlined easily I may consider it. I'm going to try both and see what shakes out.

 

[mojo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dedpoet I was going to look at MediaMonkey, as the built-in support for my Zen Vision: M is appealing, but now I see here that it is slow. J. River looks like it may be far more than what I need, but if it can be streamlined easily I may consider it. I'm going to try both and see what shakes out.

To be honest, I think MediaMonkey could be a very good player if it just had two extra features: an on-the-fly playlist and the ability to remember where I left the album list after I restart.

Otherwise, it has it all: FLAC support, kernel streaming/ASIO, a reasonable media library, Unicode, iPod support etc. Shame about the stupid name though.

Maybe one day I'll write something, but it's finding the time...

PS. One other gripe about foobar - it doesn't recognise "the" at the start of band/album names. MediaMonkey does.

 

[audioengr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dedpoet I'm glad I found this thread. I too am frustrated with foobar. Like the OP, I have a technical career in the computer field. I'm administer Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 server as well as a half dozen flavors of Unix/Linux. I work with scores of different kinds of software day in and day out, yet foobar frustrates the hell out of me. Yesterday, I spent hours organizing my library (about 120 CD's in both FLAC and MP3 format) plus maybe 200 individual MP3's from various sources. I tried the tree view and eventually got frustrated just trying to make seperate branches for the FLAC and MP3 files and also for each album. I went back to the playlist bar and that was mostly doing what I wanted. I had all of my FLAC files in a beautiful playlist, organized using a album-track hybrid layout that I found in one of the foobar threads. I then started a new playlist to set up the MP3's, and when I clicked back over to my FLAC playlist, it was empty...I cannot fathom why this is so difficult to use. I was going to look at MediaMonkey, as the built-in support for my Zen Vision: M is appealing, but now I see here that it is slow. J. River looks like it may be far more than what I need, but if it can be streamlined easily I may consider it. I'm going to try both and see what shakes out.

The one downside with Foobar2K is that it is relatively easy to erase a whole playlist, and not obvious how to port them from one player version to the next. It should have a "lock" on each playlist that you can enable.

 

[audioengr]

Foobar2K is not the easiest to set-up, but it is without a doubt the highest quality playback.

I use version 0.8.3 with ASIO version 47a SSE2 and SRC upsampling to 24/96. I have lots of customers trying lots of combinations and giving me feedback. This one seems to be the best mix of dynamics and vocal smoothness based on their feedback and I have verified this against the new Foobar 0.9 and many of the older ASIO versions. These all make a difference in the sound quality.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer

 

[jiiteepee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dedpoet I'm glad I found this thread. I too am frustrated with foobar. Like the OP, I have a technical career in the computer field. I'm administer Windows NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 server as well as a half dozen flavors of Unix/Linux. I work with scores of different kinds of software day in and day out, yet foobar frustrates the hell out of me. Yesterday, I spent hours organizing my library (about 120 CD's in both FLAC and MP3 format) plus maybe 200 individual MP3's from various sources. I tried the tree view and eventually got frustrated just trying to make seperate branches for the FLAC and MP3 files and also for each album. I went back to the playlist bar and that was mostly doing what I wanted. I had all of my FLAC files in a beautiful playlist, organized using a album-track hybrid layout that I found in one of the foobar threads. I then started a new playlist to set up the MP3's, and when I clicked back over to my FLAC playlist, it was empty...I cannot fathom why this is so difficult to use. I was going to look at MediaMonkey, as the built-in support for my Zen Vision: M is appealing, but now I see here that it is slow. J. River looks like it may be far more than what I need, but if it can be streamlined easily I may consider it. I'm going to try both and see what shakes out.

You can make a sorted (ascending by the path\name.ext structure; i.e. Artist\Album\filename.ext) M3U -playlist quickly (couple of seconds) by executing couple commands on directory above your audio library:

DIR *.ext1 /S /B /OG >alltmp.txt
sort alltmp.txt >all.txt
del alltmp.txt
ren all.txt all-flac.m3u

Change the *.ext1 with the extention you like to include on playlist. You can add as many extentions as you need. (*.mp3 *.ape *.wma *.wav *.flac *.ogg *.m4a *.aif *.mka *.mpa *.mpc *.ofr *.tta *.sd2 *.aac *.mp4 *.mp2 *.vqf, etc.). Also name the resulting .m3u plaulist file as you wish.

Above command set prepares a M3U playlist holding only files w/ extention you have defined just after the DIR command.

NOTE: If your music-files/path names contains special characters, you need to use MakeList.vbs found on thread --> http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=155654 (post #12). You need to edit the line containing extList = ".mp3 .ape .wma .wav .flac .ogg .m4a .aif .mka .mpa .mpc .ofr .tta .sd2 .aac .mp4 .mp2 .vqf"

extList = ".flc .flac" ' only FLAC files are listed

Just change the extentions for other types.


jiitee