[das_bill]

I just started using foobar because I have heard it sounds better. I usually use winamp because it has the fastest libraries if you have tons of music. But foobar seems to sound clearer. Anyone else experience this or is foobar all talk?

 

[halcyon]

When properly configured, foobar has a slight advantage over Winamp, due to:

- replaygain with clipping prevention
- mrc src (sinc best)
- adjustable pre-amp with clipping warning / prevention
- good dithering modes after re-quantisation
- selectable output (kernel streaming, asio 2.0)

Granted some if not most of the above can also be impleneted on WinAmp via plug-ins as well.

If you use the same plug-ins and settings (if available) on both, I do not think there is any difference in sound quality between the two.

 

[doctorcilantro]

FWIW, J. River Media Center is the fastest for large libraries and it's a great program; I haven't looked back. More people here should check it out and provide input for the next release, MC12.

DC

 

[pank2002]

Quote:

Originally Posted by das_bill I just started using foobar because I have heard it sounds better. I usually use winamp because it has the fastest libraries if you have tons of music. But foobar seems to sound clearer. Anyone else experience this or is foobar all talk?

Well, you might be expecting to hear better sound and thus do. I mean it's not like your using high end equipment here (Audigy 2). As Halcyon said, you can (most likely) tweak WA to be as good as f2k on your system. If you don't mind paying for software take a look on Media Center 11, though.

Quote:

Originally Posted by doctorcilantro FWIW, J. River Media Center is the fastest for large libraries and it's a great program; I haven't looked back. More people here should check it out and provide input for the next release, MC12. DC

So true. For larger library or media PC's MC12 is definitely is great. Well, for smaller librarys like mine (2000-3000 tracks) it's a great program too

 

[lordgibbness]

I'd actually say a better solution to J River Media Jukebox/Centre is Media Monkey. A very good music organiser and player for a lot of people.

 

[morphie]

I use winamp with all plugins (asio etc) and the quality is exactly the same as foobar. If you output a bit perfect signal without using DPS or EQ then itll sound exactly the same.

 

[Twombly]

Yeah, there's no difference. It makes me want to stab my eyes out with a soldering iron when people say it does, especially considering when the programmer himself states it doesn't.

 

[]|[ GorE]

Foobar in its default unconfigured state sounds exactly like any mp3 decoder software.

 

[Jasper994]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ]|[ GorE Foobar in its default unconfigured state sounds exactly like any mp3 decoder software.

Don't take this the wrong way, I really don't mean to insult you, but it might really help if you upgrade beyond a soundblaster live! and mp3's before you start rolling your eyes at people. Most of us don't use Direct Sound output and MP3's are rare around here. Most of us use ASIO output with lossless codecs like .flac or .ape. Hence, foobar and winamp are pretty much our only choices. Not that that is really a bad thing, Foobar is a pretty powerful program with a lot of options that make it the most versitle player I've used to date.

 

[halcyon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by ]|[ GorE Foobar in its default unconfigured state sounds exactly like any mp3 decoder software.

This is not exactly true.

There are mp3 players that produce different kind of outputs. For example, MAD library based come with built-in dithering (on Foobar that is selectable, as it should be).

Also, earlier nullsoft mp3 decoders were just not very accurate, but lost the LSB in decoding.

There could be other mp3 decoders that preform worse that I know of, but at least the ones above have been reported and researched.

 

[shimage]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jasper994 Don't take this the wrong way, I really don't mean to insult you, but it might really help if you upgrade beyond a soundblaster live! and mp3's before you start rolling your eyes at people. Most of us don't use Direct Sound output and MP3's are rare around here. Most of use use ASIO output with lossless codecs like .flac or .ape. Hence, foobar and winamp are pretty much our only choices. Not that that is really a bad thing, Foobar is a pretty powerful program with a lot of options that make it the most versitle player I've used to date.

I think his point was simply that so long as you compare apples to apples, there isn't a difference.

 

[Soundbuff]

I use J. River Media Center v. 11... it's an excellent program for organizing, editing tags and playing files and has many other extra features too.

While I am not familiar with Foobar, I doubt very much Foobar can compare with J. River Media Center v. 11 when it comes to organizing and editing files. J. River has very advanced features for editing that lets you edit and reorganize tags and file information using global search and replace (similar to a word processor), you can copy file info to tags and vice versa, and fields are easy to change and re-organize using a simple drag and drop interface. There are many other features I haven't learned to use yet too.

I doubt very much Foobar has advanced features for editing and re-organizing on the same level as J. River Media Center. It may be a good file player, but in the end you get what you pay for.

 

[necropimp]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soundbuff you can copy file info to tags and vice versa

masstagger can do that stuff easily

 

[TURBO]

Recently I’ve been testing the playing sound quality capabilities of Media Center 11 against foobar 0.9b4 (to my ears). We all know that without eq, all players sound the same; this is due to the standard bit depth, channels and sample rate of the recordings. When you enable the Eq is when Foobar shines; If you enable overflow handling (anti-clipping routine) and the EQ in MC11 all together, the player adjusts the volume levels for not to clip as a whole. This means, that the volume levels will be way too low. On the contrary, Foobar works differently. In Foobar, you can enable the anti clipping features and the Eq without one messing with the other. The volume levels are adjusted by the Eq after the signal has been filtered for clipping. This makes a big difference in sound enjoyment due to the fact that you can hear more sounds from the music you are playing.

 

[thomaspf]

Sorry to burst the bubble but using the limiter before the eq is problematic.

The equalization itself might drive the signal into clipping so you need the limiter right before you convert to the integer representation required for the sound card.

What you observed about the low volume is the expected behavior! The anti-clip logic attenuates the signal and remembers the setting. This will guarantee that you don't clip on the loudest part of your song. Unless you want a soft limiter which is actually a form of compressor there is no other way to do this right if you want to preserve the full dynamic range.

The pipeline itself is 32bit float so you can stack arbitrary processing without to much quality loss.

Cheers

Thomas