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Topic: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website) (Read 6061 times) previous topic - next topic
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foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Hi there.

I love foobar2000 and now that I am learning to "tame it" my admiration and pleasure in using it is only increasing.

Recently I was seeing how foobar2000 is mentioned on sites that claim to be specialized in audio and so I came across this one below, which, at various times, addresses the audio quality of foobar2000 as "broken" …

Code: [Select]
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/my-experience-with-different-music-players.923248/

I am putting the link above here because it was very sad to read all of this without any real experienced user of foobar2000 contesting some absurdities in a reasoned and knowledgeable way.

Perhaps, if an expert could collaborate with that debate, the truth about how good foobar2000 is, would be better registered. Unfortunately, I am not so qualified to participate in such a technical debate, otherwise I would do it myself.

A conscientious and lucid moderator, however, has balanced the debate, but reading the entire content of the topic (10 pages), he seemed to me to be a minority voice.

Apparently, the site has reasonable prestige.

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #1 –
How should you know if there is any audible difference in audio players? Simple, try it and hear it yourself.

Aside from that, here is statement from official foobar2000 site:

Quote
Does foobar2000 sound better than other players?

No. Most of “sound quality differences” people “hear” are placebo effect (at least with real music), as actual differences in produced sound data are below their noise floor (1 or 2 last bits in 16bit samples). foobar2000 has sound processing features such as software resampling or 24bit output on new high-end soundcards, but most of the other mainstream players are capable of doing the same by now.
Somewhere, there's someone dying in a foreign land
Meanwhile, the world is crying stupidity of man
Tell me why, tell me why

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #2 –
Thanks!

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #3 –
I feel like since foobar2000 claims to NOT sound better than any other player, in some people heads, that means that other players do sound better and so these nonsense discussions continue

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #4 –
F2K is good as other OS media players, but what the make a difference, F2K has a lot of plugins, that other media players don't have.

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #5 –
I have foobar2000 running as a video player thanks to the plugins :))
YouTube Music

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #6 –
Wouldn't it be likely that at least some of these other players take liberties with the soundstaging, or fiddle with crossfeed, to sound subjectively better? Can these things show up on spectrum measurements?

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #7 –
I'm not sure but, yes and no, respectively. Unless there is a better judgment, it seems to me that these tests depend a lot on the credibility of the person who takes them.

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #8 –
Head-Fi may also be downplaying foobar2000 because of its design of forcing all decoders to emit 32 bit floating point samples, regardless of the source format. This is a lossless process, though, so it's not like it should be causing any errors, as long as the float to int and int to float conversions done here and there are symmetrical in design, as in using the same scale factors and similar code.

Most, if not all, foobar2000 components should be using the audio_math functions in shared.dll, which use SSE on most supported machines. There is no round trip conversion anywhere, as every DSP and processor uses float 32 as well. It is only converted back to integer on output if using an output stream that requires it. Usually, it will be emitting 32 bit float directly to the system, which handles the down conversion for whatever sound device you are using.

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #9 –
I use foobar2000 instead of MusicBee (which I used before) because of its very low resource usage without having to sacrifice any of my favorite features. I could imagine better comparisons than "placebo audio quality".
audiophile // flac & wavpack, mostly // using too many audio players

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #10 –
Quote from: Adil on
Hi there.

I love foobar2000 and now that I am learning to "tame it" my admiration and pleasure in using it is only increasing.

Recently I was seeing how foobar2000 is mentioned on sites that claim to be specialized in audio and so I came across this one below, which, at various times, addresses the audio quality of foobar2000 as "broken" …

Code: [Select]
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/my-experience-with-different-music-players.923248/

I am putting the link above here because it was very sad to read all of this without any real experienced user of foobar2000 contesting some absurdities in a reasoned and knowledgeable way.

Perhaps, if an expert could collaborate with that debate, the truth about how good foobar2000 is, would be better registered. Unfortunately, I am not so qualified to participate in such a technical debate, otherwise I would do it myself.

A conscientious and lucid moderator, however, has balanced the debate, but reading the entire content of the topic (10 pages), he seemed to me to be a minority voice.

Apparently, the site has reasonable prestige.
I advised him to come discuss this on Hydrogen. First time almost a year ago. Last time was Monday on another thread but about the same stuff(maybe where you stumbled upon that soap opera about foobar sounding bad and degrading audio?).
By not coming to the one place that could understand and probably fix a problem with foobar(if it is real!!!!), I think we can make a guess about how confident he really is deep down about all this.

hello, I'm castleofargh and this post is bait. ^_^

Re: foobar2000 vs other players (Head-Fi website)

Reply #11 –
I did the bullshit of experimenting all the audio players that he godified and I gained two experiences with this:
  • I started to love my pet dog more;
  • The superiority of foobar2000, in my ears, has become a peaceful point.