Foobar is great. Used it for a decade at least possibly two. It and the discogs tagging plugin was my go-to for organizing my library of ripped or downloaded files. So much so that I even went to the trouble initially of getting it to run under Linux with wine.
The player however is a fork of Clementine called strawberry. It is available for Windows as well as Mac and Linux. It has plugins and configurability. But not quite on the scale of what Foobar 2000 can do. But if you are looking for a cross-platform software for Library management. It’s right up there with foobar. It comes with the music brains tagger built in. Though I still use their separate application picard. Because it exposes options a bit easier Etc. And best of all it can handle my whole library even over NFS.
At the moment I have let my OCD get the better of me and decided that I would prefer to have everything in largely one, more modern format and fix some of the old tagging and file naming. So I am re-ripping CDs into opus at 160 kbps. Which is well above what’s generally considered transparent. And converting flacs Etc.
Technically there was no soul seeking lol. Just a little nicotine+. Which is a python backed front end to slsk.
I use MusicBee for my files. I got tired of Foobar 2000 because I was always futzing with the settings and updating skins. Furthermore, I will give Strawberry a try. Out of curiosity, Why use nicotine+ over slsk?
Oh wait I do remember music Bee. I looked at it briefly back in 2014? When I was still using Windows. But I think I was too invested in my current workflow at the time to try to figure out if it could fill it. That and I remember some silliness when I added the full Tb worth of files from the NAS. Not sure if it was SMB or the hundreds of thousands of files. It could have been either honestly.
But definitely, foobar and creating your own layouts gets tricky fast. I created one about 15 years ago and saved it. That way I could just reapply it every time I had to reinstall over the years or upgraded to a new system. Because I didn’t want to have to mess with it again LOL
Seems like lately everyone’s been going Gaga about PewDiePie switching to Linux etc. But if you really want a reasonably unbiased and professional look at it. You can’t beat animator James Lee’s video. His love for fsck is justified. He goes over it warts and all from his perspective. And not that of a rabid Fanboy willing to ignore any flaws.
I’ve usually had at least one system running Linux since the mid-90s. In the late 90s when we got our first broadband I had an old Pentium system with 16 megabytes of RAM running a 24/7 stream. Damn that thing was a piece of work lol. I installed Gentoo Linux on it. Well well over 24 hours of operating system compilation with a stripped down kernel. All the music compressed down to 32 kbps mono mp3. Altered with a special noise shaping algorithm to help reduce compression artifacts. And not immediately saturate that sweet sweet 100 megabit connection. All this had to be done in advance. Because the 60 megahertz Pentium could never encode to MP3 in real time. The ice cast version 1 server would just serve it up raw from a semi random playlist.
The full switch back in 2014-2015 wasn’t coincidental. That was right around the year of the steam machines. When valve’s proton was getting pretty mature. That combined with the fact that as I’ve gotten older my gaming is generally limited to just a few specific games most of which aren’t multiplayer or compatibility issues. It really is just much nicer to not have to deal with your operating system telling you your five or six-year-old system is too old to run the latest and greatest. Or that you need one drive or co-pilot or any other of the BS Microsoft is pushing these days. And now in 2025 I will be switching my parents over as well finally. Their systems aren’t eligible for Windows 11. They could run it’s just fine. They’re just not eligible.
Recall is another Windows bloatware. I found an app called Winhance that allows you to remove the bloatware. Windows 11 didn’t like my processor, so I ended up giving that PC to my nephew. It has a lot of good hardware, Ripjaw ram, etc. I didn’t like Linux because of the commands, mind you this was 15 years back. I’ve read that Linux has come a long way.
Which player is that? I want to say Foobar 2000, but I don’t think so.
Did you seek your soul?
Foobar is great. Used it for a decade at least possibly two. It and the discogs tagging plugin was my go-to for organizing my library of ripped or downloaded files. So much so that I even went to the trouble initially of getting it to run under Linux with wine.
The player however is a fork of Clementine called strawberry. It is available for Windows as well as Mac and Linux. It has plugins and configurability. But not quite on the scale of what Foobar 2000 can do. But if you are looking for a cross-platform software for Library management. It’s right up there with foobar. It comes with the music brains tagger built in. Though I still use their separate application picard. Because it exposes options a bit easier Etc. And best of all it can handle my whole library even over NFS.
At the moment I have let my OCD get the better of me and decided that I would prefer to have everything in largely one, more modern format and fix some of the old tagging and file naming. So I am re-ripping CDs into opus at 160 kbps. Which is well above what’s generally considered transparent. And converting flacs Etc.
Technically there was no soul seeking lol. Just a little nicotine+. Which is a python backed front end to slsk.
I use MusicBee for my files. I got tired of Foobar 2000 because I was always futzing with the settings and updating skins. Furthermore, I will give Strawberry a try. Out of curiosity, Why use nicotine+ over slsk?
I’d not heard of musicbee. The qt version of slsk was lacking for some time. These days though it’s pretty on par, so it’s more a matter of habit.
It handles large libraries well, and is user-friendly compared to FB 2000.
Oh wait I do remember music Bee. I looked at it briefly back in 2014? When I was still using Windows. But I think I was too invested in my current workflow at the time to try to figure out if it could fill it. That and I remember some silliness when I added the full Tb worth of files from the NAS. Not sure if it was SMB or the hundreds of thousands of files. It could have been either honestly.
But definitely, foobar and creating your own layouts gets tricky fast. I created one about 15 years ago and saved it. That way I could just reapply it every time I had to reinstall over the years or upgraded to a new system. Because I didn’t want to have to mess with it again LOL
I tried Linux on an old laptop about 15 years ago but I didn’t like it. Why did you stop using Windows for Linux.
Seems like lately everyone’s been going Gaga about PewDiePie switching to Linux etc. But if you really want a reasonably unbiased and professional look at it. You can’t beat animator James Lee’s video. His love for fsck is justified. He goes over it warts and all from his perspective. And not that of a rabid Fanboy willing to ignore any flaws.
Thanks, I will take a look.
I’ve usually had at least one system running Linux since the mid-90s. In the late 90s when we got our first broadband I had an old Pentium system with 16 megabytes of RAM running a 24/7 stream. Damn that thing was a piece of work lol. I installed Gentoo Linux on it. Well well over 24 hours of operating system compilation with a stripped down kernel. All the music compressed down to 32 kbps mono mp3. Altered with a special noise shaping algorithm to help reduce compression artifacts. And not immediately saturate that sweet sweet 100 megabit connection. All this had to be done in advance. Because the 60 megahertz Pentium could never encode to MP3 in real time. The ice cast version 1 server would just serve it up raw from a semi random playlist.
The full switch back in 2014-2015 wasn’t coincidental. That was right around the year of the steam machines. When valve’s proton was getting pretty mature. That combined with the fact that as I’ve gotten older my gaming is generally limited to just a few specific games most of which aren’t multiplayer or compatibility issues. It really is just much nicer to not have to deal with your operating system telling you your five or six-year-old system is too old to run the latest and greatest. Or that you need one drive or co-pilot or any other of the BS Microsoft is pushing these days. And now in 2025 I will be switching my parents over as well finally. Their systems aren’t eligible for Windows 11. They could run it’s just fine. They’re just not eligible.
Recall is another Windows bloatware. I found an app called Winhance that allows you to remove the bloatware. Windows 11 didn’t like my processor, so I ended up giving that PC to my nephew. It has a lot of good hardware, Ripjaw ram, etc. I didn’t like Linux because of the commands, mind you this was 15 years back. I’ve read that Linux has come a long way.