Foobar2000 vs Winamp: Sheer simplicity of use versus features of integration.



  • OK so I'm a big usability guy, hence why i absolutely love Fb2k. Why? because having a single list just rocks my boat. And I like the whole selection playlist thing. However, I've recently been experimenting with Samurize (a system monitoring tool) and have this wonderful addiction to album art. Fb2k does fine with folder.jpg album art, but chokes, hacks and coughs up something awful when I hand it one of my M4A's, FLACs or OGGs with IDv3 artwork attached to it. Winamp on the other hand is what I grew up using (that is, since version 1, when it was a single toolbar. Yes, I was 7 when my father got a brand new Windows 95 machine, and I found Winamp to play my music because we had ISDN and were the cool kids on the block. That, and we lived in the middle of nowhere where it was $5 more for another phone line.) So I'm torn: Winamp, which has never failed me since I started using it (and, for those who are like oh you've just stolen it i have bought a legitimate 5.00+ key. I support Nullsoft however I can, down to using their installer.)

    So, in the opinion of the small corner of the universe that TDWTF takes up, What is a guy like me to do? Kill Fb2k once again and go back to winamp? Is there any known way to make Winamp tolerable for the usability nerd in me? Someone, throw me a line here!



  • Write something that removes the IDv3 artwork and puts it into the folder.jpg file?



  • @Lingerance said:

    Write something that removes the IDv3 artwork and puts it into the folder.jpg file?
    I have a large "unsorted" folder I keep music I get from friends in (and stuff I may/may not like from Amazon), and I've considered keeping an "artist - album.jpg" format, but I'm not entirely sure I want that many random JPGs floating around. Normally I keep a very tight "/mnt/music/$ARTIST-$ALBUM/$ARTIST-$TITLE.mpg" structure with folder.jpg in the root, but I now that I think about it, I may have a folder with that stuff in it. Only downside? I like having album art on my PSP. Keeps me from accidentially deleting something.



  • @Indrora said:

    (and, for those who are like oh you've just stolen it i have bought a legitimate 5.00+ key. I support Nullsoft however I can, down to using their installer.)
    Winamp is free, so I don't think anyone would think that.



  • @tster said:

    @Indrora said:

    (and, for those who are like oh you've just stolen it i have bought a legitimate 5.00+ key. I support Nullsoft however I can, down to using their installer.)
    Winamp is free, so I don't think anyone would think that.

    Winamp for its base features is free. If you want CD ripping at anything other than 2x and burning that doesnt suck, you have to pay them $20. Oh, and if you dont have the pro version you cant rip to anything other than AAC, WMA or aacPlus (Whatever that is, I know my PSP doesnt accept them). I'll work it out here:

    Pro?featurePro Version"Full""Bundle"
    Pro!Rips CDs to MP3xNope!Nope!
    Pro!Rips CDs to aacPlus, AAC, WMAUnlimited!8x8x
    Pro!Rip to HE-AACOver 128k!Upto 128k!Upto 128k!
    Pro!Burn CDsUpto 48x!2x2x
    from http://www.winamp.com/help/Player_Features
    Now, two out of the three I use constantly. If you can guess correctly, I'll front you a couple platters of plastic and silver oxide.


  • Indrora, you are probably better served on the foobar forum on Hydrogenaudio.

     I'm a foobar fan as well, but I don't use album art at all*, so I can't help you.

    *) Many albums are fucking ugly and I'd hate to associate good music with ugly pictures, such as the schweet first !!! album and it's fucking awful cover (but tastes may vary).



  • While I will agree with you that most (but not all) album art is rather tacky. However I like most of it. Take for example any of the artwork on The Chemical Brothers' work, simple and to the point. However, I use album art to collate variations on songs (that is, remixes, studio versions, etc) and when I dont have the artwork, it makes me have to do more work.



  •  I see your point.

    Which makes me raise again my earlier one of heading off to hydrogenaudio, where you are bound to get proper help for your use case. :)

    Or they tell you to shut up; either way you quest will complete.



  • Uh, what's wrong with winamp? Or did they remove the classic mode in the recent versions?



  • @Daid said:

    Uh, what's wrong with winamp?
     

    For Drora? Fuck if I know.

    For me:

    I prefer multiple playlists + medialib on the side, rather than an only reasonably usable medialib forced on you + single playlist with limited interaction and view options.

    Bonus is customizable layout.



  • Here's my little set of pros/cons for Winamp versus Fb2k:

    Winamp:

    Pros:

    • Shittingly easy setup
    • Nice builtin organization
    • Builtin portables configuration (plus individual profiles)
    Cons:
    • Holy hell the bento theme sucks balls.
    • Good god the old 3.x theme is broken still
    • Classic skins work but they still suffer from 5.x's stupid "Play restarts" ideology
    • WTF 204MB of RAM? Are you fucking KIDDING me?
    • no, I dont want AOL listening to my music.
    • No, i dont want you to keep bugging me to upgrade, goddamnit
    • No, I dont want you to choke on my display manager's fucking stupid window additions.
    • NO I DONT WANT YOU TO SUGGEST THAT I LISTEN TO RICK ASTLEY EVERY FUCKING TIME I TURN ON MARIO FANGULIS YOU FUCKING PEICE OF FUCKING SHITE!
    • ^^^ The above is a true story. I turned on some mario fangulis a little while after a friend came on (I liked the person, was trying to make the impression I was smart) and never Gonna Give you Up was sugested by wa's suggester.^^^
    • I want you to rip MP3s at 512KBps VBR up to 1024. Stop bitching that it'll make big filesizes.
    Fb2k
    Pros:
    • Mmmm simple interface
    • Stupendously easy to get used to
    • Selection playlist
    • Multi-set channel support (that is, I can plug in SPDIF input or Fibrous input and it'll auto-adjust based on my preferences, normal sound still playing through my normal speakers)
    • Design is only as complex as it needs to be
    • Nothing ever really gets lost in the menus -- you can always keep it as tidy as you need
    • Expandable via components (such as the amazing unzipping and unraring plugins, for when you ZIP your MODs, speaking of MODs, there's a plugin for that)
    • 21M is a much more respectable amount of RAM usage.
    • Free.
    Cons
    • Album art can be a bit of a sore whore.
    • Doesnt always like being a nice player, can be somewhat of a whore when it feels like it
    • PanelsUI is a little slow...
    • Each version has its own Window GUID, even though the internal handles are the same. WTF.

    I've somewhat got an AA ripper/grabber (It page-scrapes from Albumart.org, sucks files down from Amazon) that can handle the structure I want (if I only have 1 of an album it uses %artist% - %album%.png and if it has multiples it uses %album% - %artist% (###).png) written in C# (There are a few WTFs I could post about HTML in .NET but I wont) so my next step is to make it work nice with Fb2k


  • Garbage Person

     I suppose I should evaluate Foobar again - back when my music collection numbered a paltry 400 tracks it was too much hassle, but micromanaging 99,000 in Winamp is getting to be a bit much.

    I've perennially considered just grabbing an MP3 decoder and building my own audio player. It's currently sitting in my queue right behind my custom Usenet client (which actually works, but handling the edge cases of broken-assed usenet is a bit on the annoying side)



  • @Weng said:

    It's currently sitting in my queue right behind my custom Usenet client (which actually works, but handling the edge cases of broken-assed usenet is a bit on the annoying side)

    Usenet still exists?



  • @Weng said:

    micromanaging 99,000
     

    OVER NINE THOU---

     I'd like to suggest the supple and subtle Facets as library viewer; Album List is a coarse piece of junk.


  • :belt_onion:

    @Weng said:

    I've perennially considered just grabbing an MP3 decoder and building my own audio player. It's currently sitting in my queue right behind my custom Usenet client (which actually works, but handling the edge cases of broken-assed usenet is a bit on the annoying side)
    If I had a penny for everytime I wanted to develop a custom app, I would have about ... 5 pennies.

    Anyone know a good manager application for my software library?



  •  I just use VLC. If I need eye candy while bored at work I'll use winamp but its VLC while gaming to keep it lightweight.



  • @Nyquist said:

     I just use VLC. If I need eye candy while bored at work I'll use winamp but its VLC while gaming to keep it lightweight.

     

    What's VLC's mem usage?



  • @dhromed said:

    @Nyquist said:

     I just use VLC. If I need eye candy while bored at work I'll use winamp but its VLC while gaming to keep it lightweight.

     

    What's VLC's mem usage?


    During usage? sizof(QT_Runtime)+sizeof(interface)+ ( foreach(plugin) { ++sizeof(plugin) }) + sizeof(buffer) + sizeof(os_overhead) -- this comes out to ~90MB depending on plugins and crap. MPC takes up a whopping 5MB last I checked. I still like Fb2k because I just finally get most of my album art all squared away. Now to go back and properly tag all that Music I've ripped from audio streams...


  • Garbage Person

    @bjolling said:

    If I had a penny for everytime I wanted to develop a custom app, I would have about ... 5 pennies.
     

    I get easily fed up by horrible inadequecies in the tools I use and use that as an excuse to get some "exercise" on various technologies and techniques that don't come up much in the rather boring, repetitive world of business programming.


  • @Nyquist said:

    VLC while gaming to keep it lightweight.
     

    @Indrora said:

    [VLC] comes out to ~90MB depending on plugins and crap
     

    There's a discrepancy here but it's kinda hard to spot.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Nyquist said:

    VLC while gaming to keep it lightweight.
     

    @Indrora said:

    [VLC] comes out to ~90MB depending on plugins and crap
     

    There's a discrepancy here but it's kinda hard to spot.

    I can't test Indrora's assertion because VLC is a piece of shit and won't run as root, but I recall it being fairly lightweight.  For comparison, mplayer uses 8.1MB on my machine, although that's without a GUI.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Nyquist said:

    VLC while gaming to keep it lightweight.
     

    @Indrora said:

    [VLC] comes out to ~90MB depending on plugins and crap
     

    There's a discrepancy here but it's kinda hard to spot.

    VLC Is a featherwheight in comparison to oh say Garry's Mod which eats a whopping 3.4GB on some servers. And I wont mention some other HL2 mods or gasp Crysis. I suspect it does a malloc(get_FreeMem()); just to fuck with us. Then again, anything looks like a spec of dust in comrparison to Crysis.



  • fb2k sits at ~ 30 MB for me. then again it only plays music...

    don't think anything is more lightweight than winamp 2.9x tho



  • @zipfruder said:

    fb2k sits at ~ 30 MB for me. then again it only plays music...

    don't think anything is more lightweight than winamp 2.9x tho
    I always preferred winamp1.2b4, which consisted of a window, a menu and a scrollbar. nothing more. nothing less. it had a kickass mpeg decoder, and even had playlist support. best thing about it? <1MB ram usage. seriously. No MFC, just a raw windows window, raw windows menu and a raw windows scrollbar :V



  • @Indrora said:

    best thing about it?

    It now has integration with Candleja-


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