Loading ...I usually blog about more technical things so I decided it was time for a less stuffy topic.
In my years on this earth I have used many, many MP3 players on my desktop, both Windows, Mac and Linux. My current favorite is Foobar which at first glance seems like the weakest of all the MP3 players (especially compared to Winamp or iTunes) but with a little bit of customization I think it stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Here is a list of reasons why I like Foobar more then any other MP3 player.
1.) Customization. You can customize the heck out of this thing, how titles show up, color, font, etc. If you want to make the play list resemble iTunes or Winamp its more then possible to do that.
2.) Player Window. The player window is totally resizeable. Unlike Winamp which doesn’t resize (except the playlist) or iTunes which generally eats up too much real estate for my taste the Foobar player can be resized in any direction as big or small as you like.
3.) Speed. I have a lot of MP3 files and Foobar is by far and away the fastest of the players I have used in terms of loading then entire library, searching and not stumbling or bumbling during playback. I have had complaints with performance with both iTunes and Winamp.
4.) Advanced Sorting. Foobar has a lot of sorting options, you can even build your own sorting format using If statements which I’ve done. Some of my MP3 files are missing tag data so I can build a sort that uses either the tag name or if its missing use the filename. Just about everything is properly sorted. Windows MCE does a similarly good job but is much to slow to be considered anywhere near my favorite player.
I can modify these settings to album and track number if I want to listen to complete albums, but for the purposes of finding specific songs I like to sort by title after artist.
5.) Codecs and Plugins. Foobar supports every codec I’ve ever wanted it too (like ogg, flac, aac, etc). It is plugable like Winamp so you can add components if one is missing and there are plenty of popular plugins available like Last.fm and audioscrobbler.
If you spend about ten minutes working at it you can setup Foobar to be your ideal desktop MP3 player. You can use the ideal sorting, look and feel, I’ve even programmed all my shortcut keys to resemble Winamp one’s so I wouldn’t have to learn new shortcuts. The performance, smaller footprint, better sorting are all benefits. There are a ton of other customization options for this program and while not perfect its definitely at this time my favorite. I would add that the first time I ran Foobar I really didn’t like it but after I spent a little time on customization it quickly became my favorite.