To foobar2000, a record of deep gratitude

2021-12-04 20:38:52

What follows is the result of a strong need to express the feelings that beg me to gain publicity.

Many years ago, more precisely in the early 90's, I used to live near a CD rental store. At that time, CD was entering the market with force and in the country where I live, many new products were imported and were very expensive, hence the usefulness of renting CDs, which for a few years was my hobby.

The result of this is that I ended up getting fond of almost all the CDs and, because they were used, their value was much cheaper to acquire. I was buying entire discs, one by one, until after approximately a decade, the aforementioned store became obsolete and closed - a result of the very high popularity of the CD, whose market value made it definitely an easily accessible product.

Already established in life with a reasonably profitable job, my passion for discography didn't stop and I built up this habit more and more, until I got to the point where, fearful that something might get lost, I started ripping CDs onto hard drives. from the computer. As it was a lot, I had to buy several external hard drives with a large capacity to store the entire collection. It's too much.

When I registered on this forum I already knew about foobar2000. For a short period of my life, I was part of a music production team, and in some audio mastering and remastering jobs, foobar2000 was the official playback that was present in specific stages of critical listening in the studio. No matter how much it's been said that playback software sounds the same these days (https://www.foobar2000.org/FAQ#other_questions), that claim needs to be debated - foobar2000 clashes.

foobar2000 was an acquaintance of mine, but not in depth, so I registered on this forum. My ripped disc collection was not properly organized. Hundreds (thousands) of CDs were ripped in a hurry. Many didn't have tags, many had incorrect tags, many were incorrectly named, anyway there was a messy monstrosity in my collection and so I fixed it.

Initially I just wanted to create a more efficient workflow on the theme I used in foobar2000, so I gradually bombarded my doubts here and it was from that moment on that I could have the happiness of discovering how the community here is so passionate about audio and at foobar2000 like me. In addition to being passionate, the community is one of the friendliest, most helpful, and most patient people I could ever deal with. These qualities made the solutions to my problems much easier to achieve.

Before joining here, I was already 2 uninterrupted years dedicating myself to organizing my digital audio collection, but after I learned how to tame foobar2000 with the fundamental help of many passionate members of this forum, my collection's organization gained an unbelievable speed. I managed to put together a theme that suited me exactly how I needed it and the way I liked it. I made foobar2000 a mirror of my working style, something that with no other software I've even been able to come close to. The shortcut icons, the syntaxes built into Facets and Playlist View, the wonderful Masstagger, among many other essential components (foo_cover_info, foo_cover_resizer, Tag Snitizer, etc, etc, etc...) together, represented the achievement of my goal and today I was able to finish organizing my last discography pending adjustments.

Looking back, I don't know how I found the courage to start this task, which for a LONG time took up all my free time (now retired). I don't know how I didn't get sick.

Certainly other tools could also give me the result I was looking for, but foobar2000 was the only one that allowed me to do EVERYTHING the way I wanted it, and not the software developer's way. The practical result is the speed with which I arrived at a reliable result. The foobar2000's extremely high configuration flexibility and the passionate community present here are the number 1 responsible for my now having a decently organized digital audio collection.

As a feature request, I would just suggest an improvement in ripping and media burning skills. I miss the option to burn CDs with text entries ("Write CD-Text") and check the legitimacy of ripped files. The foobar2000 has what it takes to be a legitimate "All In One" in the audio player environment, but in my opinion these small details are still somewhat lacking - but nothing that serious.

To the brains behind foobar2000, all my respect and gratitude, equally extended to the passionate members of this forum. Anyone who downloads the software and is faced with its humble original interface, has no shy idea of the effective, intelligent, obedient, astronomical and monumental tool that foobar2000 keeps inside.

Thank you very much!

Re: To foobar2000, a record of deep gratitude

Reply #1 – 2021-12-04 23:49:15

Hear, hear!

Re: To foobar2000, a record of deep gratitude

Reply #2 – 2021-12-05 01:20:09

Well said

You need a bit of patience to discover all the good things that foobar can do.

Re: To foobar2000, a record of deep gratitude

Reply #3 – 2021-12-06 00:04:39

Quote from: Adil on 2021-12-04 20:38:52

...today I was able to finish organizing my last discography pending adjustments...

Congratulations. It's a task that I can assume you enjoyed doing, because if you hated it, the odds are you would've given up before finishing.

Before flacs were even invented, I said the same thing, my tagging and organization was complete. It was accurate, neat, well thought out, and I was content with the results, but quickly learned you're never really "finished" organizing your audio library. When flac / vorbis premiered, I started the whole rip and tag process anew. When I started, I realized the need for many tags that hadn't even crossed my mind in the id3 days, things like original release information, musician credits, et al.

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