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Topic: Foobar2000 alternative for Linux (Read 102379 times) previous topic - next topic
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Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #50 –
Quote from: Anas on
There's just nothing that compares to foobar on Linux. All player lack tagging and file operations. Most of them are either not customizable at all or only by disproportional means. And don't get me started on performance. It's a shame.
I doubt there is a player for Linux that I didn't try. It's too bad foobar is so awesome, if it'd suck, I'd never got used to this level of comfort.


I also find it impossible to find a music player on Linux that compares to foobar2000. I use Wine to run foobar2000 under Linux since I cannot find player on Linux that plays AAC gaplessly, but sadly Pulseaudio has broken the audio on Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12. Sadly over the past year am very quickly losing my interest in Linux, mainly due to that god awful peice of crap known as Pulseaudio being forced onto most major distros, by being intergrated with GNOME.
"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #51 –
There is a one player what may be alternative foobar2000 in Linux. It's named DEADBEEF, it's a young project so don't wait a full substance functionality of foobar, but I think this player have good future.
A screenshot:

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #52 –
From the screenshot, it clones fb2k's UI quite well, but because it's written in messy C, using shortsighted plugin architecture, non-reentrant decoders, etc., I cannot agree.
Full-quoting makes you scroll past the same junk over and over.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #53 –
Yeah, I did look into DEADBEEF, well at least I tried. Since there are no built packages for Ubuntu. I had to compile it myself and my Linux-compiling noobishness made me fail. There were dependencies I could not resolve.

/mnt, I haven't had such bad experiences with pulseaudio up to now. I'd rather see it as a step in the right direction. Away from the chaos that audio is on Linux.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #54 –
Quote from: Anas on
/mnt, I haven't had such bad experiences with pulseaudio up to now. I'd rather see it as a step in the right direction. Away from the chaos that audio is on Linux.


IMO Pulseaudio was adapted very early while dmix (ALSA's software mixer) got better. Hopefully next year Pulseaudio will finally be good enough for all users, but so far its still a huge regression issue.
"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #56 –
Quote from: /mnt on
I also find it impossible to find a music player on Linux that compares to foobar2000. I use Wine to run foobar2000 under Linux since I cannot find player on Linux that plays AAC gaplessly, but sadly Pulseaudio has broken the audio on Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12. Sadly over the past year am very quickly losing my interest in Linux, mainly due to that god awful peice of crap known as Pulseaudio being forced onto most major distros, by being intergrated with GNOME.

I have audio with wine under ubuntu 9.10.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #57 –
Quote from: mzso on
I have audio with wine under ubuntu 9.10.


Was it the 64bit version?
"I never thought I'd see this much candy in one mission!"

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #58 –
Quote from: /mnt on
but sadly Pulseaudio has broken the audio on Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12. Sadly over the past year am very quickly losing my interest in Linux, mainly due to that god awful peice of crap known as Pulseaudio being forced onto most major distros, by being intergrated with GNOME.


I have to echo your sentiments. I found PulseAudio to be nothing more than the spawn of Satan. The only way I can see myself using Linux again is if the audio situation improves. And the rate its going, its going nowhere fast. It would be nice if there is a stable API out there so that a FB2K alternative on Linux is completely feasible.

Having to do all sorts of things like kill out ALSA/PulseAudio to use something that is functional for gaming and has a nice API like OSSv4 is not my idea of fun. And its quite sad that a library like BASS, uses ALSA for its backend, since a FB2K like player based on its API would be very nice from a developer point of view (easy to maintain, loads of addons, nice developer support and *proper* documentation, etc).

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #59 –
Quote from: /mnt on
Quote from: mzso on
I have audio with wine under ubuntu 9.10.


Was it the 64bit version?

Yes Ubuntu 9.10 64 bit. Although in the previus version I could change the volume per channel for my xonar D1 and it appeared at the preferences as xonar D1 but now I have to choose "CMI8788 [Oxyben HD Audio] Analog Stereo". And although I don't use it I don't see any options to use the digital output.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #60 –
mzso, are you saying you're not getting audio stuttering in your fb2k+wine setup? If so, did you change any of the default settings in wine or foobar?
I tried every possible combination of audio interface setup and yet, every second I get a small pause in the audio stream. It can easily drive even a non-audio-conscious person crazy... Yet, if this did not happen, I'd gladly use foobar in Ubuntu.
Btw, I have an Audigy (1) eX soundcard.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #61 –
As a parenthesis in this discussion, and hoping a developer will come across, the features I miss the most from foobar2000 are:
- Title formatting in Columns UI (each column has a custom script).
  * So far, I've only found "true" custom display formatting support in the cmus command-line player.
  * quod libet allows custom-named columns, but you can't define complex scripts for them.
- The masstagger, to quickly fix all the mistakes made by friends, P2P and even myself.
  * Kid3 looks promising.
- Gapless playback. Anything without this nowadays... is not a decent music player.
- More specifically (and I do acknowledge it is rare and not simple to implement), support to LAME gapless information tags.
- ReplayGain playback support is a MUST! Applying ReplayGain is a nice bonus though. Fixing MP3 streams too.
- The Continuator plug-in. Who wants silence while working/studying?
- The VLevel plug-in. ReplayGain is cool but sometimes volume varies wildly in the same song, other times the song is just not well compressed/equalized.
- When not using VLevel, the Advanced Limiter plug-in. This prevents excessive noise from clipping (eg. from badly gained MP3s or after applying ReplayGain - I don't like using the peak volume setting).

I can "live" without all the other features (though not so happily).
 

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #62 –
Quote from: Shindou on
mzso, are you saying you're not getting audio stuttering in your fb2k+wine setup? If so, did you change any of the default settings in wine or foobar?
I tried every possible combination of audio interface setup and yet, every second I get a small pause in the audio stream. It can easily drive even a non-audio-conscious person crazy... Yet, if this did not happen, I'd gladly use foobar in Ubuntu.
Btw, I have an Audigy (1) eX soundcard.

No. I didn't experience anything like that. Rarely the playback hanged, but that seems to happen when using a native player.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #63 –
Quote from: /mnt on
Quote from: Anas on
There's just nothing that compares to foobar on Linux. All player lack tagging and file operations. Most of them are either not customizable at all or only by disproportional means. And don't get me started on performance. It's a shame.
I doubt there is a player for Linux that I didn't try. It's too bad foobar is so awesome, if it'd suck, I'd never got used to this level of comfort.


I also find it impossible to find a music player on Linux that compares to foobar2000. I use Wine to run foobar2000 under Linux since I cannot find player on Linux that plays AAC gaplessly, but sadly Pulseaudio has broken the audio on Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12. Sadly over the past year am very quickly losing my interest in Linux, mainly due to that god awful peice of crap known as Pulseaudio being forced onto most major distros, by being intergrated with GNOME.

There is no need to use pulseaudio. If you use Debian for example install xfce as desktop, then you have a nice small installation.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #64 –
Quote from: locutus on
Quote from: /mnt on
Quote from: Anas on
There's just nothing that compares to foobar on Linux. All player lack tagging and file operations. Most of them are either not customizable at all or only by disproportional means. And don't get me started on performance. It's a shame.
I doubt there is a player for Linux that I didn't try. It's too bad foobar is so awesome, if it'd suck, I'd never got used to this level of comfort.


I also find it impossible to find a music player on Linux that compares to foobar2000. I use Wine to run foobar2000 under Linux since I cannot find player on Linux that plays AAC gaplessly, but sadly Pulseaudio has broken the audio on Wine on Ubuntu 9.10 and Fedora 12. Sadly over the past year am very quickly losing my interest in Linux, mainly due to that god awful peice of crap known as Pulseaudio being forced onto most major distros, by being intergrated with GNOME.

There is no need to use pulseaudio. If you use Debian for example install xfce as desktop, then you have a nice small installation.


Yes Linux is frustrating for newcomers! But weren't all new things frustrating? Like windows Vista for example. How about your first try on a bicycle?
We all seem to forget an important thing here, everybody learned to use Windows for years. We cannot expect to use a different operating system without a learning curve or problems.

I agree that a Foobar clone is difficult to find on Linux, because it really is such a great program. However i believe that there are a lot of potential programs on Linux that could surpass Foobar in the future, mostly because Peter has such a stubborn attitude when it comes to open source. Too afraid that someone might alter/ruin his precious work. He can't maintain such a program on his own forever...

Back on topic
Right now I am closely watching Music Player Daemon. It has al the right ingredients to develop into a nice player. I really like the server functionality of MPD (which Foobar doesn't have).

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #65 –
current devel snapshot of DeaDBeeF
added tabs and covers

screenshot

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #66 –
I am going to favour Aqualung as the closest "foobar2000"-like player. It takes a hell of time to "learn" this player, but once you get it going, it does the job. It has a converter, it has LADSPA plugins which you can select multi-band equalizers... hey, these EQs are even superior to foobar2000's, there is the music store which sorta works like an album list. I use mostly with the "dark skin" which should be the default skin (the current default is quite ugly).

It has a few annoyances like adding music to the main playlist, it always presents a browsing method. Mass-adding albums, only through the music store. Some converter options are limited, but they're working on this to make it better.

It runs on Windows pretty fine and it's worth trying, specially if you plan to move to Linux.
I have tried every other player and every one of them had something I really disliked.

The second choice would be Songbird, which promises to be "the player" on both platforms. However, this one is more like iTunes.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #67 –
Have you ever considered Exaile?

It's a GTK+ porting of amarok, written in python. It's a plugin based player with many features. It supports mass tagging via ex falso, tabbed playlists and automatic playlists. New plugins can be easily written in python.

Here come some screenshots:





Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #68 –
I've been trying for years ALL the linux audio players I've found. I love Foobar2000, the best audio player for windows, and right now I only use DeadBeef for Linux. Replaygain, cuesheets, gapless, ape, flac, wavpack, mp3, mp4, etc.

By the way, for Ubuntu users, the PPA for Ubuntu is: ppa:alexey-smirnov/deadbeef
I've tried it in Ubuntu 10.04 64 bits and it works great.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #69 –
I'm still using a hybrid system to take care of my audio on Linux -- a few players are close, but not quite what I'm looking for. 

What I need:
+ handle a big library without barfing
+ tag and file management, including writing tags from files, and creating files and directories from tags
+ ratings support, preferably for writing the ratings to the file (the only way my ratings are portable across platforms or devices)
+ Last.fm support would be nice
+ custom columns for sorting my library would be great too

Quod Libet has good support for my huge library, nice sound, the search function is quite powerful, supports a listening queue, and has great tagging features, but I hate the GUI and the support for song ratings, custom tags, and custom columns is not what I want.  It's about two or three updates and/or plugins and a facelift of the interface away from being my player. 

DeadBeef is fast, minimalist, has a slick, but simple interface, allows custom columns, and sounds great, but it's still in its infancy and is missing some stuff I want, mainly a better tagging / file management feature set (just use Ex Falso -- which is what Quod Libet uses) and song ratings support is zero from what I can tell.  Still, the amount of thought that went into usability and functionality is great.  I feel like everything is where it should be and does what it's supposed to. 

I've toyed with the bigger players since they have lots of extensions and tended to evolve quickly, but Songbird is dead on Linux and Amarok 2.0 is just too slow for me to put up with. 

Clementine is getting a serious look, but I'm withholding my verdict for now. 

In the meantime, I can recommend, without reservations, Ex Falso (included in Quod Libet, if you want the player, too) and Kid3 for tag editing and file management.  I've been extremely happy with them both. 

Chris

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #70 –
PulseAudio is fine on Linux, at least in Fedora 13 since I've been using it there. Also, wine in F13 has been using a PulseAudio output driver for months now. Effortless sound mixing between multiple applications, effortless live switching between output devices in a system with multiple sound cards.

Although the last time I tried bsnes' PulseAudio drivers, they left the PA daemon in a bad state until it was restarted completely. Boo.

Yeah, the rare times I'm using Linux, I'm running foobar2000 with wine. Nothing else has the level of format support, which includes all the formats I support with my own components.

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #71 –
Regarding "foobar2000 with wine", would someone be able to rewrite/update the install guide to the current versions of things? I tried following the old instructions and got lost a few times (primarily because I have files with non-Roman characters in the tags/filenames, so I had to jump back and forth between a few links).

Foobar2000 alternative for Linux

Reply #73 –
Another alternative you might consider is.... running foobar2000. I run fb2k on win7 running in a VM on VirtualBox which is free. It works perfectly on my Linux system. I have also tried many native Linux alternatives and none of them are even remotely as good as fb2k so I have decided to stick with the real deal.

If you haven't yet tried a VM on your Linux box you should.