[MetalGeek]

Here's a pretty specialized problem that I'm not sure many people have attempted. It's worth a shot to ask, however.

So I'm a Linux user. Currently I'm running Ubuntu 8.04 - Hardy Heron. My normal media player for music is Audacious, which is sort of a spinoff of Winamp. All that's fine and dandy, and Audacious is really great. But, being the creature of curiosity that I am, I started getting really curious about foobar2000. I've heard wonderful things about it, but it's only available in Windows. Since I don't have Windows on my computer anymore (hallelujah!), I can only use foobar2000 through Wine, a program that allows Windows software to run on Linux. I successfully installed it and it's running fine, but now I want to figure out how to get foobar to play through my iBasso D2 USB DAC.

I could just switch over all sound card duties in my OS to the D2, but this means that any sound the computer makes will go through the DAC. Normally, I set up Audacious so that only the music from Audacious goes through the DAC, and other sounds still go through the sound card and speakers. This is a very convenient setup because I don't have to keep switching back and forth, and I don't get any surprises from system sounds or noisy banner ads while I'm simultaneously listening and browsing.

For example; I'm jamming along with one of my favorites, Baroness's "Red Album", when suddenly...
Stupid Banner Ad: "You've been selected to win a FREE iPod Nano!!"
Me: (as my ears are bleeding) "HOLY CRAP you're loud and annoying; leave me alone! I don't want an iPod anyway, even if it is free!!"

*AHEM* I got a little sidetracked. Back to the topic...

I went into my Wine setup, and it doesn't see the USB DAC as a sound device; it only sees my computer's default sound card. The question is, does anybody know how to get Wine to recognize my DAC? Maybe a driver or something that I can use with Wine to make all of the sounds from Wine (or foobar) go through the DAC? Maybe even simpler, is there something I can do in Ubuntu's settings that only allows sounds from foobar to go through the DAC? Is there another sound application that I can use instead of the default sound management program that allows for this?

I figure it's a bit of a long shot, considering that there are so few Linux users out there, even fewer who are into Head-Fi audio, and even fewer who use a USB DAC, and even fewer who have gone through the trouble of getting foobar to run through Wine. For all I know, I'm the only one around here who's attempted this.

Any ideas, folks?

 

[vapman]

Make sure you've got ALSA set up, you'll know it's working if you can get any sound out of the computer.

WINE + foobar is a pretty clunky setup. You'd be better off to use something like Banshee/XMMS/Sonata to play your music with. If you're dead-set on foobar, you're probably going to need to do a lot of messing around with winecfg if other programs play sound.

 

[daveip]

Good luck with the USB DAC being found in wine. I'm not sure how it can be done but I guess it must be able to some how.

Can I suggest you use Amarok? I use it on my Linux partition with ALSA and OSSMixer. Its not that bad and if you can configure the MYSQL database for it, its lightning fast.

 

[MetalGeek]

Right now, Wine is running using Alsa. My Alsa is working just fine as far as I can tell; I'm getting music to play cleanly through my computer speakers from foobar. I'm only using Wine for foobar, so there isn't an issue with other sounds from Wine programs. I know it's not the cleanest or best way of doing things, but I really wanted to give foobar a shot and see what everybody's raving about. For some people, foobar is the reason they're not switching 100% to Linux. That tells me something. So far I'm liking it, but I haven't really tested it much.

As far as Banshee, Amarok, and XMMS go, I've tried them all (I still use Amarok a little), but I don't really like any of them. I'm not much into the library-based players (i.e. Amarok, Rhythmbox, Banshee, Exaile, etc.), since I'm not sure I really get the benefit of having a library database. I have all of my music organized in folders very nicely by artist and album, so I know my way around that quite well. I'm not really into playlists, because I like listening to full albums rather than a couple songs from several artists or albums. Audacious is just a much-updated version of XMMS. I don't know anything about Sonata.

I appreciate the recommendations for other players, but this isn't really about finding a better player than I already have, it's specifically about my curiosity regarding foobar. Most of these other programs I've already tried.

Thanks, everybody!

 

[vapman]

have you tried Sonata or MPD?

 

[MetalGeek]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mckickflip /img/forum/go_quote.gif have you tried Sonata or MPD?

I looked at Sonata, and it seems to be built off of Rhythmbox. I'll give it a try out of curiosity, but it's not what I'm looking for.

What's MPD?

 

[DervishD]

Hi Metalgeek

I'm using Ubuntu Hardy, too, and I too have an USB DAC. I've been using Audacious to play music until I noticed that it didn't played the last two seconds of every song (more or less). Moreover, it "hanged" from time to time. I had no time to pin the problem so I tried other players.

For my entire collection I use MPD with Sonata or GMPC (or even mpc, depending on what I need to do). MPD: Music Player Daemon and see yourself. It's just fantastic and has the best sound quality (some programs tweak GStreamer a bit, like Exaile, and I don't like that) I've seen for such a small piece of software. There are plenty of clients, but I'm writing my own just for the sake of learning.

For casual listening (I use MPD for my permanent music collection) I use Rhythmbox. It's fast, flexible and sounds good.

My wife uses foobar2000 in her Windows laptop and I don't really like it. I've used it a lot of times and I've configured the program for her, but I really prefer MPD over foobar2000. I even prefer Rhythmbox over foobar2000: probably less featured but much simpler. I want my music player play music, not connect to the Wikipedia, make scrambled eggs or hypnotize me with a CPU hogger visualisation

MPD is easy to set up, works OK with Pulseaudio, etc.

Raúl

 

[MetalGeek]

I've tried to get Sonata + MPD going, but after 30 minutes of fiddling around with it, it still won't recognize my music library. It's really not worth the fuss to me, since I don't like the interface at all. I don't like library based players, especially because any time you add something to the library it needs to recompile it. I prefer to just access my well-organized folders...no more work necessary!

It might be useful for my Asus EeePC. I have a network between my main computer and my Eee so that I can access all my music, videos, etc. from anywhere in my house over the wireless internet. The problem with that is that I haven't gotten anything other than Totem to stream my music over the network. Not even VLC wants to do it!

Anyway, I'm not looking for a replacement for my Audacious...it fits my needs quite nicely. I just really want to try out foobar and see what all the hype is about, but to play it through my DAC, I need Wine to recognize it.

 

[insyte]

I used to have a bithead which was detected by foobar running in wine under ubuntu hardy. I just changed the default sound card to usb audio in system --> preferences --> sound. Then in foobar, changed output settings to usb audio. You can also use the usb dac in mplayer by just changing the audio settings.

 

[MetalGeek]

Quote:

Originally Posted by insyte /img/forum/go_quote.gif I used to have a bithead which was detected by foobar running in wine under ubuntu hardy. I just changed the default sound card to usb audio in system --> preferences --> sound. Then in foobar, changed output settings to usb audio. You can also use the usb dac in mplayer by just changing the audio settings.

Wine and foobar don't see the DAC (meaning that it doesn't show up at all in the audio preferences in Wine or the Output preferences in foobar); all they see is my crappy Intel sound card. I'm trying to get Wine and foobar to use the DAC instead of the soundcard.

Audacious works with my DAC just fine. I'm just trying to get it to work with foobar.

 

[MetalGeek]

Well, I figured it out. While setting up a Windows XP virtual machine on my Ubuntu install I accidentally ran across the solution that fixed problems I was having with both Wine and VirtualBox. Glad that's solved.

Anyway, foobar sounds good...not that I expected otherwise.

Haven't compared it to Audacious, but I'm not really expecting there to be much, if any, difference. But at least now I can fiddle with it!

 

[kingbuzzo]

So what was the problem?

I seem to be able to setup foobar to work with OSS, but that seems to shutoff alsa devices as well as the alsawrapper for OSS. I can reenable them and things play, but the same thing will happen whenever I select a new song.

I've configured winecfg to use jack, and that works. But the playback is super scratchy! could be a group permissions thing. Amarok, audacious, and xmms play nice with jack

 

[dreamania]

My settingis:

Ubuntu: system->preference->sound, set device to "USB Audio"
Wine config: Sound, check "OSS Driver" only.
Foorbar 0.9.6.8: File->Preferences->Output->Output Device, Choose "DS: USB Mixer"

 

[netsky3]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dreamania /img/forum/go_quote.gif My settingis: Ubuntu: system->preference->sound, set device to "USB Audio" Wine config: Sound, check "OSS Driver" only. Foorbar 0.9.6.8: File->Preferences->Output->Output Device, Choose "DS: USB Mixer"

Do you use foobar on linux with wine?

 

[dwk]

It's a bit convoluted, but you may need to try WineASIO. This provides an ASIO driver inside WINE that connects to Jack in linux. You'll obviously have to set up Jack rather than just using ALSA, but I *think* it should work. I didn't try this in your exact config (no USB sound card for me) but I did get Thuneau Allocator running in Wine with WineASIO, so I can at least report that it works in a non-trivial setup.