Re: How to listen to wav/flac files in Windows XP or 7
Reply #18 – 2017-10-15 07:02:08
Foobar2000 ( http://www.foobar2000.org/ ) i just use simple drag and drop of audio files (FLAC/MP3/AAC etc) in Windows Explorer to Foobar2000 and then play them. that's hands down the all around best choice if you ask me for general playback of audio files on a computer along with general encoding of audio files from FLAC to MP3/AAC/Opus etc. once your FLAC files are ready it will generally take less than 1 min to encode a entire Audio CD (i got a i3-2120 CPU, which is only dual core(even though appears to Windows as a quad core due to it's hyper-threading technology), and it takes me 1min or less to encode a AUDIO CD in FLAC format to MP3/AAC/Opus etc). but if you want to encode audio files in Foobar2000 you need to install this... http://www.foobar2000.org/encoderpack as far as FLAC in general... i always use maximum compression (i.e. FLAC as i believe Foobar has a default of FLAC 5 which does not compress as well but is a bit quicker to encode but with modern PC's there is no real reason not to use FLAC 8 to my knowledge as, someone correct me if i am wrong, but i thought i read that decoding speed is pretty much the same so you might as well save maximum storage space by going with FLAC 8 as the only penalty there is it takes slightly longer to encode which is nothing considering the speed of modern PC's. the FLAC build with Foobar2000 with that encoder pack currently says... "reference libFLAC 1.3.2 20170101" so it's a recent FLAC build from Jan 1st 2017 and from playing around with it, it does compress every so slightly better than older FLAC versions. like if i recall correctly i think even with that from FLAC 5 vs FLAC 8 modes... you save roughly 5MB of disc space per full music CD. also, another thing i like about Foobar2000 is you can add huge music libraries and it won't crash the program as it will simply show it's scanning the disc and after a bit of time passes it will add them to your current Foobar2000's tab. p.s. if you want to encode Apple AAC files with Foobar2000 along with having that Encoder Pack installed you will need to download iTunes installer and then use 7-zip to extract the 'AppleApplicationSupport.msi' out of it and install that and then Foobar2000 won't have no problems encoding Apple AAC files and the user 'IgorC' said that Apple AAC is THE best encoder of AAC files @ 96kbps and higher (i think he mentioned that earlier this year in a post on these forums i read not long ago). so basically if your encoding AAC files on your computer you should be using the Apple AAC encoder in Foobar2000.