[pedxing]

foobar is great. Its small. Its configurable. It has a load of features I have no idea what they do or even why they exist. Kernel streaming is awesome.

 

[rincewind]

No worries about being harsh Asmo, I realise I'm getting GIGO at the moment.

Thanks for the welcome

I intend to replace my music with CDs or higher bitrate. Have already begun.
And yeah, I'm not replacing my headphones until I've got the new soundcard and my amp and speakers have burnt in and my credit card bill is repaid lol.

I had a play around with foobar using my SB live. I suspect I didn't notice any differences because I'm using what ppl say is a crummy soundcard, and because of the quality (or lack thereof) of my soruce music.

I'm currently leaning toward the E-Mu 0404 for a few reasons:
+ It recently got software support for the 192 hardware converters it always had in it.
+ higher SNR than the equivalent priced Creative cards.
+ Study-looking external loom (correct term? I mean the part where the jacks all plug into.. a friend told me it's called a loom). I will be doing a bit of home recording (just playing around) and I will be glad not to worry about breaking the jacks every time I plug my guitar fx pedal into the soundcard!
- but I've read some ppl have a hard time setting it up, or problems with drivers...

To cut to the chase, and assuming I get real CDs and/192+ Lame mp3s:

1) If I buy the E-Mu 0404, will I be able to take advantage of all the foobar options that winamp doesn't allow? EG Replaygain, kernel streaming, up sampling.. any other things I would *want* to use.

2) Should I be worried that My amp doesn't have a digital input? I just told a friend I bought it and he was shocked that it doesn't have it, saying I would want my signal to be digital until just before the speakers.. any merit in this?

 

[S_Dedalus]

Yes, all of the features foobar has can be used, you'll want to use the asio driver instead of kernel streaming.
The 0404 is going to have a better dac than most digital recievers, so unless you want to spend a couple grand on a really good one, you're better off the way you are.

 

[Kuja]

There isn't really any reason not to use foobar, other than if you want your music player to look pretty - foobar_skins (or whatever the plugin is) just doesn't compare to the skin/modding that can be achieved with winamp.

 

[Lynn]

Ok, I know what I about to say may be heresy, but I think FOOBAR has a fatal flaw. If you have a large collection of music, unless I have missed something, FOOBAR does not provide an easy way to organize and select music to play.

Yes, I have tried the 'columns' plugin, but was unable to get the simpliest of layouts set up. Could be my lack of knowledge of how to use it, but all I wanted to do was show on the left side a tree that lets you drill down different views like (Genre-->Artist-->Album), and then display the selected songs for that album in detail on the right side. After you select a single song on the right, add it to the active play list which would be shown somewhere on the screen in its own 'box'. I have also not liked any of the winamp playlist managers either.

For an example of what I mean, try Mediamonkey (free), or JRiver Mediacenter). Mediamonkey supports most Winamp plugins (including FLAC, ASIO, etc.). It is a pleasure to use. Simple, yet powerful. CPU usage is low. So gang, what am missing about FOOBAR? Could someone try Mediamonkey and tell me if FOOBAR can offer the elegant music management features I am seeking? I would be greatful, since I think FOOBAR has promise.

Thanks.

 

[sigma]

Playlist -> Sort -> Sort by:

%GENRE% %ARTIST% %ALBUM% %TRACKNUMBER%

Works well enough except for various artists and single digit tracknumbers

 

[Publius]

Also Lynn see the Album List component, which does pretty much exactly what you're asking.

 

[Lynn]

Hi Sigma and Publius,

Thanks for the suggestions. I will try the album list component.

If either of you have time to download and install MediaMonkey, I would like your comments on how it supports navigating thru a music collection and any other suggestions on customizing FOOBAR to be closer to that model would be appreciated.

Good listening to both of you,
Lynn

 

[sigma]

%GENRE% - $if(%VARIOUS%,Various Artists,%ARTIST%) - %ALBUM% - $num(%TRACKNUMBER%,2)

or

%GENRE% - $if2(%ALBUM ARTIST%,%ARTIST%) - %ALBUM% - $num(%TRACKNUMBER%,2)

This will solve the problems with the VA albums and 1 digit tracknumbers, depending on which tag(s) you use with the VA albums.

EDIT: get the Album List plugin for ui_columns if you haven't already.

 

[DaKi][er]

I've found one thing with foobar is that its random selection isn’t that good

I usually have a playlist of 300-500 long and have it on random and sometimes it will play one song twice within about 15 song gap or so, its random after every song leaving it theoretical to repeat a song over and over (with the probability of so, decreasing as the list increases in size)

What would be better is that when the playlist is loaded that it sets the random order of the whole list and not repeat any song in that run (and when it finished then create a new random order and go through again, but I’m not going to get through a playlist of 300+ in one sitting)

 

[sigma]

Foo_shuffle is better than the original fb2k random playback order (it has play history) and you can shuffle by tags and albums. http://foobar2000.blogsite.org/

 

[Jonny K]

I've been debating a switch to Foobar, but I don't know. Winamp has a lot of things I like lately. It's way more aesthetic, for one (transparency, yay!). And the media library is great. I've got all my songs sorted, easily searched, etc (just hit "J" and type the name to search instantly). And when I play a song, Winamp will load information about that song and artist off the internet and display it in the media library window. Lots of sweet little things. And I also enjoy watching Visualizations at times.

As for the apparent higher quality of Foobar...I'm not sure. I loaded up both Foobar and Winamp and played the same song with both players. Switching between them, I found no real difference that I could notice. For the test, I used my ATH-A900 headphones plugged into a Kenwood 1080VR receiver amplifying the signal from my Chaintech AV710 soundcard in high res mode. Both Winamp and Foobar were upsampling to 96khz.

On that note, I have access to a Direct Sound winamp plugin that includes upsampling support. I couldn't find one on the web, but a friend of mine had it from some old website that no longer exists. Let me know if there's interest in it, and I'll happily upload it somewhere for ya.

 

[Zurg]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Asmo ... Welcome to head-fi btw

rincewind,

Asmo had it half right.

The proper Head-fi greeting goes like this...

Welcome to Head-fi....sorry about your wallet!

-Z

 

[Publius]

foobar's own developers will tell you that there is no quality difference. According to "official" posts on HA, IIRC, neither the 64-bit DSP stack, nor the streamlined architecture, nor the lack of skins, nor kernel streaming, nor ASIO should yield any improvement in audible quality.

 

[patricklang]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Publius foobar's own developers will tell you that there is no quality difference. According to "official" posts on HA, IIRC, neither the 64-bit DSP stack, nor the streamlined architecture, nor the lack of skins, nor kernel streaming, nor ASIO should yield any improvement in audible quality.

I noticed a difference between winamp/directx and foobar/asio on a revolution. The directx/kmixer path's bit munging screws the highs the most noticably.