Well I tend to have a single "ALL" playlist with all of my music which is rather large. I keep that so that when I want to compose new playlists I just move the music from the ALL playlist instead of having to hunt it down on the server, since my collection is quite horrifically disorganised. Then I'll normally have 2-4 more playlists with a few albums each in them which I'm actively listening, or checking out gradually. Then I'll often also have a "go to" playlist of maybe the last 1-6 month's music which has been added to my collection. Finally I've got a rating system of 1-5 stars which I'm gradually applying to music (it's a never-ending process since I only rate maybe 20 songs per week) and so I generally have 2-5, 3-5, and 4-5 star playlists for when I want to listen to tracks of a certain quality/variation mix.
You're kinda right. I just use the file manager to play albums in VLC. TBH, I haven't even heard of foobar til yesterday.
foobar 1.1.11 and it's using only some 15 MB with a palylist of some 100 songs. Oh, and I don't actually have playlists and simply load folders. My hole music-libary is sorted A-F, G-M, N-T, U-Z, Ä-9, within this subfolders for every artist and then subfolders for every album/EP. All tracks (some 60GB) named after the same scheme. Yes I'm pedantic
Yeah, my collection is considerably too large to sort by alphabetising without just using a folder for each letter, and that would kind of suck, so I try to keep everything sorted into about 10 folders overall but of course as time goes by I get sloppy and now a considerable percentage of my music collection is partially or completely unsorted, with only maybe 50% fully sorted the way I like it to be.
Am I the only one using Winamp? Yes it is old, but it will rip my CD's to FLAC and play them just fine. And the search function is so nice.
I used the "Llama" for years and it had some of the best visualizations and skins but then I discovered MediaMonkey and it is much nicer to use with very good directory layout and the abilty to automatically lookup and intuitively tag album art and other metadata quickly is very cool
Another Winamp warrior! I have never found any faults with the tagging feature in winamp - Sonic extraction engine I think it is called. Even slightly obscure blues albums is found and tagged correctly. One thing I am missing is a skin with nice big buttons for a touch screen. Other than that, no complaints.
It seems I'm stuck to Winamp too. I quite like the interface, everything just works. The only downside is that I sometimes get weird problems out of nowhere for which there's no solution to be found on the entire internet. All support threads seem to date from 2003… I've tried MediaMonkey, but abandoned it after it decided to randomly reset itself and somehow it erased all of my ratings. I was angry that day. For a while now, I've been trying out Foobar, but I get frustrated by the lack of many simple features. Nowhere could I find a “selection viewer”-thingy so I could browse by artist, album, year or whatever. I found a script with which I could at least give ratings, but all my old rated music showed up with a rating of infinity. Pff. Somehow it sounds better though - though that's probably entirely subjective…
There's a media library, you can search by any variable you like, and if you've got your UI set up properly you can organise all of your playlists by Album, Artist, title, rating, length, and any other variable you like. Don't get me wrong, Foobar is hassle to get set up, but once you do, back up your config files and you've got a media player which will last you years. Also, at least in my ancient version of foobar, all ratings I apply are automatically written into a custom ID3 tag field, so they can't be lost, and they're independent of any particular piece of software.
Sorry to hijack the thread slightly, but does foobar do bitstream to a DAC? I've tried jRiver media player which seems to be the only player that handles WASAPI to my DAC properly
Not sure if this answers your question because I'm a bit of a nublet regarding a lot of tech, but personally I've got it outputting using my soundcard using ASIO. I would suspect that if it can't do it directly, there's a component out there which'll fix you up.
I'll add another vote for Foobar. I've long used iTunes, and while I personally find it to be a decent music player, I've heard goods thing about Foobar so decided to give it a try. As Spec noted, it was a bit of a hassle to get the initial setup going. It took me a few minutes to figure out how the playlists worked, and sorting through the UI can get confusing. However, I've also learned that if you just want to use it in its vanilla state then there is no real reason to go digging around in the UI options, and the vanilla install works just fine. I'm still wrapping my head around some of the customizations (I've almost given up trying to get it to work with Rainmeter), but as a music player it's my new go-to application. Now the only time I use iTunes is the rare occasion that I need to sync my phone (and that won't last much longer - but that's another thread).
Another one for foobar. It's very lightweight, loads fast and is very customizable which is good as I prefer a more minimal setup. It's been like this with occasional tweaks for four or five years. I use CD art display for the controls underneath.
