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Topic: Foobar beginner - (Read 6561 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar beginner -

Reply #25 –
Quote from: Adam K on
Thank you.  There's not much I can say to any of this, other than that foobar2000 is definitely way over my head, and obviously not for me.

Again, thank you all for your patience.


Hahaha, that's not true, though. Every girlfriend I've had since I switched has been introduced to foobar2000, and every last one of them preferred it to what they had been using previously. Most of them continue to use it. This is why I use foobar2000, but then again, I started programming before my age had two digits in it.

Foobar beginner -

Reply #26 –
Over the years, the biggest demographic that "doesn't get" foobar2000 are the enthusiasts who know enough about technology to want to customize their computers, but who are not technical enough to appreciate foobar2000 on its inherent technical superiority. You appear to fall squarely into that category. Myself, I was sick of Winamp skins before foobar2000 was released, and it irritated me that every last player was adding the stupid anti-feature, which breaks UI guidelines and accessibility. For example, the noise-shaped dither foobar2000 employs in bit-depth reduction is barely audible, if at all, but it's there, and it was one of the first-to-market with the feature. foobar2000 supports gapless MP3 and was one of the first. Many players today still fail to work gaplessly with MP3.

If you want one clear reason to choose foobar2000 above MediaMonkey, and a way to ascertain its truth: Go run some benchmarks, whether tagging or searching, in a big library. I'm talking terabytes of storage and one with six figures in the number of files. foobar2000 will massacre MM. Alternately, try converting audio formats. Does MM even support that, especially with the extensive niche feature set foobar2000 provides? At worst, their feature sets will be different, which will provide you with yet more opportunity to differentiate the two. Talking about these niche features: I never cared about having an "audio CD burning" feature in foobar2000. Why? Because in a click I can convert a selection of tracks to a WAV/CUE image, then burn that in ImgBurn. I don't know of a single other audio player that permits that particular workflow, much less feel confident that the resulting CD will be gapless like foobar.

For technical folk, foobar2000 shows best its prowess on big libraries. Also, if you have to support an audio player, there's none that provides as few headaches.
 

Foobar beginner -

Reply #27 –
Quote
Thank you. There's not much I can say to any of this, other than that foobar2000 is definitely way over my head, and obviously not for me.

Again, thank you all for your patience.

Hahaha, that's not true, though


Yes it is - I'm not sure what leads you to say that it's not.  How do I know?  Because, while I'm grateful for the patience of everyone here and appreciate the knowledge and love of foobar that they obviously have, I have actually understood very, very little of what's been said in its support.  Even the link that led me to the discussion of why people had chosen Foobar left me none the wiser.

There's also:

Quote
The no-compromise approach was recapitulated by its approach to MP3-tagging. It was a very long time until Peter even began to contemplate supporting ID3v2 as a first-party tagging form, because ID3v2 is an over-specified, under-engineered crapshoot with dozens of half-broken implementations. Instead, he used a better tagging form: APEv2. APEv2 is close to Vorbis comments, which is to say that it is simple and effective.


No, I didn't understand any of that.  Was I supposed to?  I feel like I used to in classes, when I began to realise the subject being taught and my understanding of it had diverged, and suddenly everything seemed very far away and I was hot with embarrassment and shame.

We are talking different languages and, I think, at cross purposes. Since I started ripping my CDs onto a portable player, it's been a learning curve, but I settled on Ogg Vorbis as a format and  CDex to get me there (I can hear intakes of breath and the tutting even now).  It doesn't add artwork, but I do that myself and I don't mind.  I use Media Monkey because it was recommended, I believe, by some blog or forum or other for my Cowon X7.  I'm not wildly crazy about it, not entirely sure what it's supposed to do (which will give you a clue as to my limits) and probably use it for about a tenth of its potential.  I think the most I've ever managed to do is renumber the tracks of double albums so that they run as one album, rather than two separate discs.  I was quite proud of that, actually. Every now and then I burn a CD's worth of uncompressed music onto a CD for my girlfriend to listen to in the car.  I used to use Nero for this, which had a handy box you could tick that just said something along the lines "Normalise Volume of Tracks".  But my copy of Nero was old and didn't work with Windows 8, so I looked for something else.  The name Foobar came up. The rest appears to be history, and so am I.

Basically, I came here hoping for some clarification.  Instead, I leave here even more mystified.  That is why I say it's not for me.  It really isn't.